Tonga
The Kingdom of Tonga is a group of about 180 islands stretching some 600km from north to south. It is situated south of Samoa and East of Fiji. About 140 islands are uninhabited, with the 102.000 Tongans living on the remaining 40 islands. Tonga’s main island, Tongatapu (”the sacred south”) is about 3 hours flying from Auckland. (see Google Maps).
Tonga is also the kingdom we visited recently. We travelled through all island groups but “the niuas”, a small group of extremely remote islands to the north of Tonga.
It was one of the best trips ever. We’ve seen some very interesting things and we met so many very friendly and amazing people. Nothing went according to plan, but patience, a smile and lots of improvisation made everything much more interesting than we could have ever planned.
On ‘Eua the electricity was cut off because a power pole had fallen down (but you don’t really need electricity anyway); the ferry that would take us from ‘Eua to the main island was cancelled because it never showed up and the daily flight was cancelled as well; Willemijn got sick for a couple of days and just when she recovered I got the same bug; a flight from Ha’apai to Vava’u was rescheduled to 6 hours earlier (which we discovered 6 hours late because we were camping on an island without running water, electricity or phone); we called to ask for a room somewhere, but when we arrived there was no staff (they had all left for the night to go to a party), so we just slept on the beach; etcetera etcetera.
Anyway, there’s so much to tell about Tonga but it’s very difficult to write it all down. We’ll tell some of you all about it next time we see you on the phone or iChat. Meanwhile, check out the photos.
