|
2C Update #132 -
Vava'u, Tonga (September
15 - November 29, 2005)
We are smitten with
Vava’u, Tonga. (Pronounced Va-VAH-oo, Tong-Ah)
It is serious. After six years we have stumbled on a
small paradise where the hills are green, the water
bright blue, humpback whales frolic and a plethora of
anchorages are tucked throughout a maze of
curled-together islands, all an easy hour or two travel
from one to another. Town is yachtie-friendly and offers
a waterfront almost completely dedicated to those
services – bars, restaurants, Internet cafes, and
laundries – designed to make sailors smile.
If it sounds
reminiscent of the Virgin Islands, it is…and yet it
isn’t. At nearly the same latitude south as the Virgins
are north (18 degrees; 18*49S;179*W), the climate
seems comfortably familiar. Yet, there are no crowds
here – no cruise ships, few tourists and little shopping
beyond what some small stores, several bakeries, a great
produce market, and handicraft vendors can tempt you
with. The Moorings bareboat fleet – with just twenty
boats in season – is not much threat to privacy in most
anchorages, and even during the months – June through
November – that the cruising yachts swell enough in
number to fill the main harbor, the scattered anchorages
of the outlying islands remain practically empty.
|
 |
 |
Surely the biggest
difference between the two island groups is in the local
people. Tongans are very secure in who they are. They
are citizens of the Kingdom of Tonga, the last remaining
true monarchy in the world, and the only island nation
of the Pacific never to have been colonized by any of
the European powers. Community life is built on the
twin foundations of the monarchy and the Christian
church, and it seems to satisfy them wholly. However,
unlike the residents of Niuatoputapu, who with cruisers
act like shy children, the people of Vava’u are enough
accustomed to visitors that cruisers’ presence and
doings are taken for granted.
We were already in a
good mood when we arrived. Our 160-mile passage south
from Niuatoputapu had been sinfully smooth, thanks to
there being only enough wind to keep the mainsail full
as we motored over a glassy sea. We really hadn’t
thought there’d be NO wind; the forecast called for
light winds of 5-10 that we’d hoped might be a bit
stronger. But the fact is that truly favorable winds
coming from Niuatoputapu to Vava’u are hard to come by,
since the course puts the prevailing south-easterlies
right on your nose and winds from elsewhere are usually
either light or accompanied by bad weather. No sailor
likes to hear the engine run for 30 hours, but the
comfortable ride, especially during the night under the
nearly-full moon, was nothing to sneer at.
The north face of
the archipelago is a sheer cliff of many colors, topped
by green. All of Vava’u slopes away southward from here.
As we motored into the embrace of the archipelago, we
saw a seascape of green islands and islets layered one
behind the other, with compelling structures of eroded
rock and scattered golden beaches. Don and I are both
suckers for this color palette of green, gold, blue and
rock, and if possible the hues are painted even more
intensely here than in the Virgins.
This illusion of
homecoming created by the geography was enhanced by
already having friends who live here. At the end of
2001, Baker and Cindy of Lite ‘N Up, whom we’d
gotten to know in Ecuador, dropped anchor in Vava’u and
never left. Last year, the ever-energetic Ben and Lisa
of Waking Dream also stopped over. Both have
started businesses here, so it was no idle tarrying. We
were very much looking forward to seeing all these folks
and hearing their stories. Don was very much looking
forward to a cold beer.
 The main town of
Neiafu, home to about 4,000 Tongans and about 100
palangi (foreigners/ex-pats), sits atop a long bluff
above a near perfect anchorage about two miles long and
maybe ¾ mile across, shaped like one leg of an inverted
horseshoe. The other leg of the horseshoe, a long
channel with Paingamotu Island in between, ensures an
utterly protected harbor. Its one flaw is that it is
deep, 150’ through most of the middle. Several of the
yachtie businesses along the base of the bluff, however,
maintain strings of moorings along the shoreline for the
convenience of visiting boats.
Had we been arriving
into Tonga for the first time, we would have been
obliged to take Tackless to the wharf so that the
same retinue of officials could comb through her. As we
had made our official entry at Niuatoputapu, all that
was required was an easy stop at customs -- a desk in a
big warehouse -- and a check-in with immigration. The
officials here were, well, …more official, and yet at
the same time more welcoming than those of Niuatoputapu.
We had a small glitch come up at Immigration when we
discovered that our passports had been stamped in
Niuatoputapu with the wrong date, owing to the official
having spun the “date” wheel of her stamp from “31” to
“1” but having failed to spin the month, making it
appear we had been in the country a month an a half
instead of two weeks which would have put us overdue on
our visas. Fortunately, we had some other paperwork,
and after a few phone calls north, all was solved. What
was nice was no one got worked up about it.
|
 |
 |
It didn’t take us
long to catch up with old friends. Ben and Lisa of
Waking Dream have their new business – Aquarium
Adventures – in a bright blue and red building at the
south end of the yachtie strip. Aquarium Adventures is
most visibly an Internet Café, and as its big deck
seduces customers to hang around and gab over their
French Press coffees and pastries after Internet work is
done, it has become a regular hangout for cruisers.
Behind the computer services, Aquarium is a booking
office for all the islands’ activities and hotels,
including several of their own enterprises: The Flying
Coconuts (rental sailing dinghies) and TongaSphere, a
kind of eco-adventure park Ben is building out of town.
Just a few days after our arrival, Aquarium was hosting
a Full Moon Party on one of the islands and we’d arrived
in the nick of time to attend (and help set up!)
Next we caught up
with Tom Abend, crew of Bravo Charlie III, who we’d met
and dived with in Fakarava last year. Since we’d last
seem BCIII in Papeete, the boat had been to New Zealand
and back, but she and Tom had been sitting for several
months now in Neiafu since the boat’s owners, Greg &
Ruth, had had to go back to the States. You might think
being stuck in the harbor for so long would be boring,
but Tom had clearly made the best of it, doing his dive
master with a local dive shop and becoming a valued
friend and volunteer helper with several others. He’d
recently been out with a BBC photographer filming
Vava’u’s humpback whales, and he had some fantastic
shots of his own from the outing.
 By evening we had
finally caught up with Baker of Lite ‘N Up, the
first of our friends to get stuck in Vava’u. Baker and
Cindy arrived here in December 2001. Statistics claim
that Tonga only gets a bad hurricane once every ten
years. Lucky them. They arrived just in time for
Cyclone Waka that New Year’s Eve and from the hotel room
in which they’d hunkered down for the night watched
their boat (and pretty near everyone else’s) drag across
the harbor. As protected as it is, there’s not much you
can do to hide when a Category V comes to visit.
Fortunately, Lite ‘N Up stopped short of the
opposite shore! Baker and Cindy are split these days
with Cindy taking the shop they’d started and Baker the
boat. These things are always a little awkward for
friends, but Baker is recovering and was as good a
beer-drinking partner as we remembered. He is an avid
champion of Vava’u as a cruiser destination, and when I
undertook an article for Cruising World on cruisers who
have stopped here to start business, he was a great help
introducing me to all the entrepreneurs in town.
 We found Cindy in
her T-shirt shop Tropical Tease which turned out to be
just downstairs from Immigration. Sometimes people are
lucky enough to stumble onto the right thing for them,
and it sure looks to us like this is it for Cindy. We
hadn’t known quite what to expect, but it is a pretty
impressive operation with striking designs by local
artists that she and her staff silk-screen onto the
shirt of your choice. Her signature shirt is the Tongan
Dirt Shirt, a shirt dyed in local mud and set in
saltwater rinses before printing. A new feature is her
humorous ‘Weather Window” shirt for all those New
Zealand-bound sailors. What really impresses me about
her set-up is how organized she is to produce
individualized custom shirts for cruisers or bareboaters
on fairly short notice. Because she thinks like a
cruiser, she anticipates what they might want and has
screens ready to assemble. Clearly all this industry
has been a tonic for Cindy who looks great and seems
happy.
If you are thinking
this is starting to read like a series of advertisements
instead of a cruising log…Well, what can I say. Our
friends are mighty industrious, and it can’t help but
impress….maybe even inspire. As given over to
fantasizing about future alternatives as we are, it’s
inevitable that Don and I would fantasize about this
place. We started with thinking about chartering again,
but when we asked questions of one of the two crewed
charter yachts based here, the operator practically went
white with anxiety over the idea of competition. We’ve
met people with quaint little restaurants, and a couple
with a neat little bakery/lunch stop that looks fun from
the outside, but who’d want to be in town full time?
Later, as we saw some of the charming rustic resorts on
the outer islands, we thought to ourselves, hey, we
could do that, too. But we weren’t here long before
we realized how much work WORK is, especially in a place
like this where the season is short, the tourist flow
thin, and resources limited.
Our introduction to
the outlying anchorages of Vava’u came hand in hand with
helping Ben and Lisa set up for their Full Moon Party.
Two days after we arrived we quit the harbor again and
followed Waking Dream to the island of Vaka ‘Eitu, a
motorsail of about 7 miles. Both boats anchored behind
a reef-topped sand bar connecting Vaka ‘Eitu with the
small island of Langito’o, just off the party beach. We
were surprised at first at how small the intended party
beach was, until ashore with the stuff we’d helped ferry
down, we realized how a clearing opened up the slope
behind the beach and dipped down to another beach on the
other side. That night we made dinner for Ben and Lisa
and their handsome young Tongan helper Tipasa. I think
that evening, with just the two boats, the pink sky
behind the palm-lined ridge followed by a night so
bright and calm we sat out on the foredeck talking until
late, was the quintessence of what all our cruising has
been about!
 |
 |
The party itself was
fun. They had quite a turnout: twenty-five boats in
each of two main anchorages, another ten or so right off
the party beach, plus a slew of folks who came from town
aboard Whalesong, a sort of small landing craft
vessel that normally does whale watch tours. There were
probably 150 people altogether, most of them cruisers.
The party itself was a cooperative effort. The Mermaid
Bar, the most popular watering hole in town, ran the
bar, with young ladies wound up in provocative white
togas serving “moonjuice” – a chunky blend of local
fruits and vodka (Can we say Yeehaw!); Pete the Meat (a
meat importer) ran the barbecue (the land belongs to his
wife Hapi), and Ben and Lisa did all the set up and the
music. Set up included men’s and ladies potties (with
palm frond walls and proper seats), an inflatable jumpy
castle for the kids (of all ages), fairy lights through
the trees and a DJ powered by generator. The 2Cs made a
major contribution by developing a dinghy mooring field
for “valet dinghy parking” which earned us free entry.
We stayed up a lot later than we normally do, ate, drank
and danced like kids, and met a whole slew of new
people, some of whom we actually remembered the next
day!
Two days after the
party, we had the anchorage to ourselves again, and the
cove looked as pristine as it had before the event.
To be continued……. |
