Schlagwort-Archive: Tonga

Tonga, World Trip 2018-19

Tonga – Summary & Pictures

Ein Kommentar

People: It was easy to travel in Tonga, because literally everyone speaks English very well. Tongans were most of the time friendly and helpful to us, in a rather professional way. We met a mix of other backpackers, many Czech people for some odd reason. Most of them were on work&travel visas in NZ and escaping the cold winter for a bit.

Food: We cooked a lot for ourselves in Tonga which was cheaper than eating out. There were shared kitchens everywhere we stayed, even though they weren’t always very well-equipped. Tongan food, when we ate out, was usually big portions of fatty unhealthy dishes. I’m not surprised the people here are all quite fat or at least chubby.

Weather: We had a lot of great sunny days in Tonga and were finally enjoying some typical beach days, soaking up the sun. However, we also had some cooler, grey and rainy days in between. Still waiting for some continuous hot and sunny weather on this trip!

Costs: Tonga was more expensive than expected which was mainly due to high transport costs (flight, ferry, taxis, rentals) as well as activities (whale watching, snorkelling tour). On average we spent 57€/day per person, which was above our 50€ target.

Accommodation: We stayed in double rooms usually for 60 Pa’anga/night and also camped for 5 nights on Uoleva for just 25 Pa’anga/night. While it’s not possible to camp in the bigger towns of course, it does save you some money on the islands!

Infrastructure: Not great. The national airline Real Tonga is the only option and flights are often fully booked. Even if you get a flight, make sure to call them or pass by an office beforehand to check on the status of your flight. Flights often get cancelled and departure times seem to be more rough ideas than set in stone. There’s two ferries going between Tongatapu – Ha’apai – Vava’u, one being a fast ferry (catamaran) and one a slow ferry. Both are comfortable, but schedules are only made up the Friday before each new week, so you have to be reasonably flexible to use them. Also, they break down now and then.

Illnesses: Both healthy and happy! Finally 🙂

Safety: Always felt very safe.

Itinerary: We visited all main islands, except for E’ua but I don’t think I would return for that. It would have been interesting to explore some of the smaller islands in the Ha’apai group a bit more, but there’s not a lot of tourist infrastructure, so we sticked to exploring Lifuka, Foa and Uoleva.

Highlight: Snorkelling with the whales in Uoleva.

Lowlight: The beaches of Vava’u.

Click on the photo below to see our full photo album of Tonga:

Tonga, World Trip 2018-19

Tongatapu – Nuku’alofa & Pangaimotu

Hinterlasse einen Kommentar

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…

s

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.

CAMERA
CAMERA
CAMERA
CAMERA

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.

Tonga, World Trip 2018-19

Vava’u – snorkelling and road trip

Hinterlasse einen Kommentar

When we researched flights and ferry connections about 2 weeks ago in Fiji, we had a bit of a shock moment, discovering that flights were fully booked and ferry schedules unreliable/not available. It looked as if we had to spend all our time on just Ha’apai OR Vava’u whereas I had always wanted to see both island groups. In the end, we decided to chance it and assume we could make it somehow from Ha’apai to Vava’u, booked our flight out of Vava’u and took the ferry to Ha’apai. If anything went wrong, we would have been stuck in Ha’apai…but well. Sometimes you gotta risk things like this and it did work out, although it almost went wrong when one of the ferries broke down! To our surprise, they efficiently (not very South Pacifican of them…Haha) replaced the broken slow ferry with two fast ferries – and off we were to Neiafu, the main town of Vava’u.

We only had two full days for Vava’u, so decided to stay in Neiafu. One day, we rented a car and drove around the main island. It’s not too big, so by the end of the day we had driven into pretty much every corner that our 2WD car would take us. Unfortunately, the weather was not that great and sometimes rainy, but we tried to make the best of it. In all honesty, there are not too many wow-ing sights on the island. One of the best ones was Mt Talau, a short, steep climb up the highest point awarded us with amazing views in all directions! In fact, we liked it so much that we came back a 2nd time in the late afternoon when the clouds had cleared a little more.

Another really nice spot was a viewpoint on the North coast, close to the airport. We just followed some signs and in the end walked for 1km when the road got too bad. And were surprised to land ourselves at this awesome viewpoint! We were even lucky to be able to watch some whales swimming around in the bay below us.

The rest of the main island was not that interesting and after Ha’apai, we were quite disappointed by the beaches Vava’u had to offer. Maybe there are better ones on the outer islands, but from what we’ve seen during our road trip (and the boat trip next day), I’m not sure.

The snorkelling trip next day brought us through the little bays and between many smaller islands of Vava’u. Unfortunately the weather was still mostly grey and cool, so that we really appreciated the brief moments of sunshine in between, in which the waters glittered in a beautiful turquoise. The maze of islands and bays is definitely beautiful, but Marovo Lagoon is similar – and better, we thought.

During the tour, we first visited Port Mourelle, a pretty bay with turquoise water, but the snorkelling was boring. Dead coral.

The next spot was Swallow’s Cave which was a cool experience to snorkel in: the water deep blue and very clear and thousands of small fish which you could free dive through! There were also some divers at the bottom of the cave which we watched for a bit. Just nearby, there was another little cave with a small swim through, to make up for Mariner’s Cave I suppose (we couldn’t find a tour going there unfortunately).

CAMERA
CAMERA
CAMERA

By the time we reached the last snorkelling spot, Japanese Gardens, we were freezing like crazy which was too bad since it was quite pretty. But the sun was hiding behind the clouds, the wind had picked up and the water temperatures are not very high in Tonga anyways. So we kept the snorkelling short and were looking forward to our hot shower at our guesthouse!

All in all, we were glad that we spent much more time in Ha’apai than Vava’u since it was so much nicer there. If we had had any more time in Vava’u, we probably would have gone to Ofu Island or so for a day or two, but again, it didn’t look spectacular to me. The snorkelling tour was expensive for what it was, and so was the car rental. It’s sometimes difficult to find out beforehand in the South Pacific, if places are really worth it and what there is to see and do… So I guess it was good we went to Vava’u to see for ourselves, but if we’d have to recommend one of the two island groups, our vote would clearly go to Ha’apai!