Happiness (and Feeling Very Bothered) in the Ha´apai Islands

Lifting the anchor at 4am allowed a pre-sunset arrival in the very closest, southernmost of the middle island group of Tonga, the Ha´apai. This move left the intensity of the capital behind and took me into a realm of quieter people, living at an even slower pace, and quieter vistas, more minimalist and given over to nature, altogether more akin to paradise.

Some of the concerns I had felt in Tongatapu were definitely still making their presence known to me though: washed up litter was still everywhere, if less in quantity- commercial fishing gear and fridges seemed to be two-a-penny amongst the mineral water bottles, etc;

the windward side of some islands was showing extensive erosion and tree loss;

dead vehicles scattered the gardens of islands on whose roads one could not imagine getting out of second gear and where the coast to coast distance is a stone´s throw.

I also began to be very bothered about the ubiquitous black pigs that roam wild almost everywhere in some numbers, which were originally brought, not by white sailors as one might imagine, but from Asia by the first settlers whose descendants are today´s locals.

As non-natives, the pigs plainly cause a lot of trouble in their constant rooting and foraging and substantially alter the flora. Most of them belong to one family or other and are hailed by a gong of some sort each day to be fed on their staple diet of machete-split coconuts, but I saw others that had slipped the net and were clearly starving to death because there really is nothing much they can eat here without the aid of that human-weilded machete. Any Tongan feast will involve a pig on a spit, whose squealing one might hear earlier in the same afternoon. I decline these... On Nomuka iki, a middle-sized island that it would take a couple or more hours to walk around, even at a good lick, I also saw the devastating effects of a small herd of ten or so cows who stripped sapling tree lucerne (amongst other things) leaving massive swathes of the island looking like a recent war zone.

Even here, so removed from industrial meat production, the environmental impact of animal husbandry with these cattle and the ubiquitous pigs sent my opinion of all that surrounds meat eating to new depths, if that can be imagined, and the cultural and practical significance (as Tongans would have it) were difficult for me to hold in any esteem. All this aside, my days continued in their usual pattern of magical sunrise paddles and walks, through mini-adventure-filled days until the trade winds kindly pointed the back of the boat toward the sunset for delicious dinners in the cockpit each night, prepared largely from local veg.

In these remote, and often uninhabited islands I met gentle-natured fishermen and their families who welcomed us strange visitors always with trust and openness, shared a few yarns and allowed me to learn a little more about how they see and manage life.

A highlight of the cultural programme for everyone, including myself, was the annual agricultural fair in the capital, Pangai. This the opportunity for every village in the whole island group to show off its best crafts and food produce, so I expected much to wonder at. The craft goods were indeed very beautiful, and the seafood displays quite incredible,

but the veg seemed to be an even more enormous quantity of the same old brown root veg and green bananas that had been my lot throughout Ha´apai thus far.

However, the main motivator and source of excitement for the locals was that the king himself was coming to have a look!!! Streets were dressed and there was much to-do... Whilst the royal family flew in, they were closely followed by one third of the Tongan navy, the Voea Late, a small landing craft which brought the royal car, and, as it turned out, the royal tractor as well, just in case.

In a delightful display of ´one of the better things we could do with military vessels´, on the day before the fair the Voea Late threw off her dock lines to take local day-trippers out for a bit of fishing!

And the king did indeed bring a kingly ambience to the following day´s show. I marvelled at how (as with royals throughout the world no doubt) he must develop extreme patience to walk that slowly everywhere. My own closest encounter with him was over the dried fish display, to which he paid tender attention.

Equally gentle and welcoming as the Tongan people was Tongan nature itself... Ashore I shared the bounty of the coconut palms, mainly as a neatly packaged drink with dinner (whose package I feel totally fine about throwing overboard afterwards... bliss),

was left breathless by the fragrant frangipani trees,

admired the dusky-necked doves and the luminous kingfishers, was wooed by the mooing of melancholy birds whose breathy song was like discerning the soft tenor voice in a choral mass, carefully peered at sea snakes come ashore for sea snake-type reasons,

and laughed at the tricks of the shore crabs, who crowded the sandy beach in the distance but had always walked into the shallows and simply buried themselves before I got to them, leaving a deserted foreshore... apart from the odd tough guy.

A considerable amount of rain sometimes curtailed my shore ramblings, but did not necessarily keep me out of the water.

Beneath the surface, the biggest wow factor was, without question, the humpback whales. Up to ten per hour could be seen while we sailed amongst the Ha´apai, arrived from considerably colder places to bear and rear their young and frolic for a few months.

I had the surprisingly safe-feeling joy of swimming with mothers and calves a couple of times as well as watching them breech, spy-hop, slap their tail flukes or pectoral fins and generally act big, even when all they were doing was lying around nursing their young or lolling in the warm water. They do not eat during this time which, to me, explained why they seemed as plentiful as when I was last here six or seven years ago. Whilst I did find pockets of stunning coral and the odd larger fish (including, for instance, zebra sharks ( a first)), marine life was dramatically depleted. Largely dead coral reefs did not show strong signs of regeneration with shoals of small reef fish and nothing bigger, few top predators...

Every class of marine life that I remembered cramming the frame of my vision when I visited so recently (including sea birds) was seriously depleted. I felt a sense of disorientation, as though perhaps my previous visit six years ago had been a dream, but this sense began to settle into another aspect of my ´very bothered´-ness, despite being tinged with a constant recollection of my inexpert knowledge and the general smallness of me... Farther north ´very bothered´ started to become an understatement, but more of that in the next instalment...