Tonga!

Sorry for the delay in posting, but as you might guess internet access in Tonga is a bit hit and miss. It was actually faster out on a tiny island than in the largest city in the country, where I was reminded of the good old dial in modem days (actually it was slower than that). Anyhow, we are now in Auckland New Zealand and after a day of doing the wash and kicking back we had some time to update the blog.

About two weeks ago we flew to Tonga. The population of the entire country is around one hundred thousand, but their rugby team did pretty well in the World Cup (only missed making the quarter finals by a couple of points). They were all very excited and almost everyone had something red on. It was the only pacific island nation that was never colonized by a European power.

Tonga is made up of a large series of islands, I think I remember hearing that only 20 or so are inhabited, though that probably does not count the resort islands that have nothing else on them(two of which we stayed at). The water was amazing shades of blue and turquoise.

We got into the capitol island of Tongatapu late at night and were taken to Winnie's guest house, where apparently they only had gotten four single reservations, instead of three couples and a single. This led to some room sharing, but people were nice enough to let us have our own room (since it was our honeymoon). Of course we wound up in a room with two single beds, but it was still nice to have our own room. The next day we went on the "Island Tour" with Edward who had picked us up the night before.

The tour was pretty quick, we spent about an hour and a half, but it took half an hour to get to the airport, so we got the condensed version. Still, I'm guessing we saw a pretty good sized chunk of the island, and we got out to the coast where there were some cool blowholes.

Most visitors don't seem to spend much time on the most inhabited islands, instead fanning out to the resorts on tiny islands. The first one we stayed at had an interesting method of getting us to and from the boat. It was a bit trickier the first day with all of our luggage, but here is a picture by the second day when we had the hang of it a bit more...

Here is Lisa looking off of the dock at sunset. We did not see the sun much if at all in the first week we were on the island. It just kept being cloudy and windy with long periods of light (and occasionally heavy) rain.

Here we have fresh fish being delivered for lunch and dinner. There were 3-4 people in the cabin so this boat was riding pretty low. It seemed to be being used as a taxi, as it was off the edge of our island later in the day fishing with just two people on it. We had some great fish while we were out on the islands, most of it nothing that I had ever heard of.

This is the view from the area where we had dinner at the resort every night. The first resort we stayed at was called Treasure Island, they had a new young chef who had just finished school and did a nice job overall.

The view from our fale, which means hut, although with a bathroom and lights (powered by solar) it was pretty upscale for a hut. Everything was damp within a day or so, next time we will bring only microfiber clothing.

Lisa out on the boat. We were in Tonga with a company called Whaleswim. Tonga is one of three places in the world where you can swim with whales, (South Africa and The Dominican Republic seem to be the other two). Unfortunately the first day we saw no whales at all, but they did take us to some nice snorkeling spots.

The number of fish was amazing. We both thought it was nicer than the section of the Great Barrier Reef that we had been out to, but maybe we just hit it on a slow day. Actually someone we ran into a couple of days ago said that the best Great Barrier Reef spots are farther out now and you really need to do a live aboard trip to go see them. Some of the shots below are just yards off of the beach at Treasure Island. It was incredible to be on the beach then just slip below the surface and see this kind of variety of fish.

We even found "Nemo" although this picture was from one of the dive sites from the boat.

Somehow I don't look as graceful as the fish, I'll have to work on that.
This is the Lionfish, we saw him just off the beach at Treasure Island. We were very careful to give him a wide berth, as the spines are very poisonous. Beautiful to see close up though.

There was a huge school of sardines at the pier at Treasure Island. There must have been at least 10,000 of them and you could swim right in the middle of all of them, which was amazing. Here you can see a predator fish (a trumpet fish) jumping out of the water into the middle of the school to catch some lunch. You can't really make out individual fish in the picture below, but the brown/black mass is thousands and thousands of sardines.

Here you can see me in my favorite evening activity, swimming in the middle of the school. If you stayed really still they would come quite close. Here I must have been moving more recently as you can see the empty circle of a couple of feet in each direction before the fish start.

Underwater there were so many of them they would form a solid wall and often you could not see anything but fish in all directions. When you moved they would react and the school would eventually part as you continued to move in one direction.

On the beach there were some impressively well camouflaged crabs.

We saw quite a few starfish while we were in Tonga, all of them blue.
Matt taking a walk on the beach in the evening. Still cloudy and raining.

The clouds did make for some nice reflections and sky though. In the first picture below you can also see some of the sea slugs that we saw (sounds like a tongue twister). There were sandy colored ones and black ones, the ones near the beach were only a couple of inches long, but some that were in 15-20 foot water were at least two feet long.

Here Lisa is enjoying one of the few moments of blue sky that we had in the first week.

The second boat day (out of seven) was even more of a wash than the first. After being out an hour or so we found out that we were really only kind of looking for whales, mostly we were going out to tow back into town another boat owned by the same company. We were not such happy campers at that point, because although there were definitely some slow times while we were looking for whales, sitting on a boat towing another boat for three hours is impressively dull. I did get in a nap or two, as did a young Tongan girl that knew the owner of Whaleswim. She has been out four times now and has not managed so see a whale underwater yet. By day two neither had we.
After towing the boat back to the city of Neiafu (which is the main port up North in Tonga) we squeezed 10 people into the boat owned by the Treasure Island folks. He initially said we could only fit 6, but then decided to try all of us in one trip, and still decided to go fast enough to hydroplane. It was definitely like an amusement park ride but not really in a good way, there were a couple of times I thought we were going to lose someone. To top it all off, after about 3 minutes of the trip it started pouring, which was pretty much the perfect way to end what had not been a good day. Here's a picture of Sue and Tracy "enjoying" the ride.

Day 3 was a scheduled "leisure" day although since we had not seen any whales yet it did not really feel like we needed a break. Thank goodness we had a great group of people on our tour and we could keep ourselves entertained with team bonding sessions. That day we decided to take a walk around the island that the resort was built on. It took about an hour to walk all the way around in no particular hurry. Here Lisa is next to a rock formation that is a smaller version of lots of the islands, they erode right at the water line and eventually you get a landslide of rock falling into the water. When it is a cliff hundreds of feet high the rocks piling up under water give a great place for coral to eventually start.
Before we walked around the island we talked to one of the people who worked there who told us there was nothing to worry about, no dangerous spiders or snakes. The snake bit was technically correct, but this is a sea snake that has incredibly posionous venom. Apparently they can only inject it into humans if they hit a really thin part of your body, like the skin between your thumb and index finger, as their jaws don't open very widly. Our group leader on the Whaleswim tour told us later that she has done a scuba dive in a place where they breed and has had hundreds of them all around her... We stayed well back in any case.
Our original plan was to snorkel around a good bit of the island, unfortunately the tide was such that we would have had to walk over a large section of reef to do that, so everyone just held (or stashed) their fins as we walked the whole perimeter.

By our third day on the boat the good news was the we were seeing whales. We even got in the water with them, but just saw outlines of whales for a few seconds as they swam by. It was still cool to see them underneath, but over the next four days on the boat we probably saw them underwater a total of 3 times for perhaps 5-15 seconds each time. And the rest of the time we were on the boat looking for whales or holding on to the back of the boat with our masks on as the boat captain tried to have us slide in where the whales would be in 20 seconds. By the last day of this Lisa and I had resigned ourselves to just having had a really expensive, long, and rainy whale watching trip.

We did wind up getting quite close at times, which lead to some fluke and body close ups.

This was a mother, calf, and escort (can be either sex) where you can see the flukes of the mother and escort.

Here is a pic of one of the groups from our boat trying to get a view of a whale (only 4 people in the water at once and there were 10 of us) and even though it looks like the whale is right on top of them it was still probably just an outline at this point. This was one of the best sightings anyone in our group had though (longer and the whales got closer), and unfortunately Lisa and I missed out.
The second island we stayed at was called Blue Lagoon. It did not have as nice of a reef nearby for snorkeling, and our fale was out of the wind which was probably nice when it was sunny, but when it was damp just led to everything smelling bad (if you go, ask for the one that is built out over the water, that fale was very cool). Our host was a German whose first comment on the weather was "it has been shit". He was nothing if not direct, and he continually teased the vegans that were on the trip "I would not have let you on the island if I knew you did not eat real food" but he cooked very nice dinners for all of us, and he was more entertaining than the average host by far.

The crabs on this island, instead of trying to blend in with the sand, just dug themselves deep holes about the width of a tennis ball that curved away after the first foot so we never did figure out how deep or long they were. They moved out impressive mounds of sand two clawfulls at a time.
The last two days of our trip it cleared up a bit (still windy, but clearer) and we had some amazing skies. You could clearly see the milky way and by sticking the camera on a beach chair I managed to get a picture of part of it (need to work on my night photography though).

The very last day we had pretty much given up. We tried seeing a mother and calf, but had just done what we called drive-bys (the 5 second glimpses) once when we had to call off the swimming due to our skipper seeing a hammerhead shark (not very common in that area, don't worry :P). So, once again we had been on the boat for 5 hours or so, seen one or two whales in the distance and a couple fairly close up from the boat. Our group leader was planning to take us snorkeling to salvage something from the day and we were on our way there when our captain spotted another mother and calf. Lisa and I were part of the second group of 4 into the water, but before we even got in we could tell this was different. The mother was sleeping 10-15 feet under the water, coming up every 10 minutes or so for air. The calf was going to the surface every two minutes or so, then tucking itself under the mother. We swam directly up to the pair of them, at times we were directly over the mother other times we were within 10 feet of the calf as it went to the surface. We swam a total of three times as each group rotated every 6-7 minutes. Seeing them underwater close up and watching the calf watching us as it moved around its mother is something that neither of us will ever forget. We could not believe that it happened in the last couple hours of the last day, but it was exactly the kind of experience that we were imagining when we planned the trip, and turned what would have been a very disapointing trip into a very long trip with an amazing payoff. One of our guides snapped these pictures of the whales underwater. Keep in mind that the mother is probably 40+ feet long, and the calf probably weighs in at over a ton.

This picture of us smiling would not have looked the same earlier in the trip :-> It was incredible being there with them, and we are already joking about heading to South Africa (I've always wanted to do a wildlife safari there).

We are in Auckland, New Zealand now and even though it is raining here it is great to be able to sleep in dry sheets again. We are heading out tomorrow to the north end of the north island for a couple of days, to an area known as the bay of islands. Then we will be heading down to the central part of the north island to an area known for its volcanic activity. Now that we are back to more reliable internet we will be posting every few days again.

Our love to all,

Lisa and Matt