Tongatapu. When visiting Tonga, one most likely has to pass through the main island and its capital, Nuku’alofa. There’s not much to see and do, already the drive from the airport to town was rather boring. But of course, the main island was not the reason we were here! Because of the ferry schedule, we had about 1.5 days here before heading to Ha’apai. We had lots of organizational things to do – think food shopping, dinner plans for the next week ahead, buying ferry tickets, calculating the amount of cash needed (no ANZ ATM in Ha’apai) etc.
We also rented a scooter for a day and drove around the island to see the main sights. As mentioned before, nothing was really exciting, but it was still a nice way to spend a day. We had missed being on a scooter, one of the things we always loved to do during our travels in South East Asia! First we headed to Ha’atafu beach, one of the islands main ones. It was too cool and windy to stay long though, so after a short photo stop, we continued to the South coast.
There, we visited a couple of blowholes, whereas the Alofa’aga blowholes are of course the most well-known and cool ones. This was the one sight of Tongatapu that was awesome! We could have watched for hours…
Another nice stop was the land bridge further East. Basically it’s a broad rock bridge, so broad that you can even walk on it or drive your car across it. The South coast was interesting, and quite different than expected – wild, rough, dark lava rocks, waves smashing against them!
We drove around a bit more, but didn’t end up seeing anything really nice anymore. Also, we had to be back in town by mid-afternoon already to further organize some things and then head to the slow ferry. 12h overnight to Pangai, Ha’apai… But it turned out that this ferry was a luxurious one compared to our beloved MV Anjeanette in the Solomons! Spacious and not overloaded with working (almost too cool) aircon and all. Wow! In the morning hours we were able to watch some whales breaching nearby. Awesome!!
We then spent about 10 days in Ha’apai and Vava’u – before returning to Tongatapu for another day. Since it was Sunday and Tonga is a very religious country, there was not much we could do – so we opted for a day trip to the little island of Pangaimotu. Unfortunately, the weather was grey and cooler, so we didn’t really get the beach time we were hoping for. There is a nice wreck to snorkel though, fun for some free diving until we got too cold again. Overall, the day trip was nothing special and probably to expensive for what it was. However, they somehow forgot to charge us for it, so we ended up with a free trip including decent lunch! Not too bad.
The most exciting part of the day was witnessing our first earth quake! It felt really odd, as if someone was pushing against my chair from below and wanted to get out. While it was a strong earth quake at about 8.1 that happened between Fiji and Tonga, we did not feel it that strongly because it happened very deep down. Luckily because of the depth there was also no tsunami warning – else it might have been scary since the island is completely flat!
From then on, Mathijs and I went separate ways for about 2 weeks. While he was going to be back in Australia with his family, I was headed to Samoa – to explore yet another South Pacific nation.
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