SIX
TONGA
IT’S ELEVEN O’CLOCK at night and I’m waiting for a taxi outside Fua’amotu Airport in Tonga. I’m here to write a book about this, the only kingdom in the South Pacific, starting on the main island, Tongatapu. A sagging Toyota taxi emerges out of the warm, still darkness and I hail it. I don’t know anyone here, and one of the few pieces of information I have is the name of a Nuku’alofa guest-house, given to me by the Canadian engineer I sat next to on the plane.
All I can see of Tongatapu is that it’s flat, has many palm trees, and the roads are long, straight and potholed. The driver and I make desultory conversation, then his car radio begins to crackle. Voices come on, then are replaced by others. Many of the callers – it’s obviously some kind of talk-back programme – seem very excited. One word is repeated by every caller. Pa’anga.
‘What’s happening?’ I ask the driver.
‘The mini-games. These people, they call the radio, they say how much money they give for the mini-games.’
Mini-games? A contest for small people? Or possibly small games – table tennis, marbles, arm wrestling, petanque – for ordinary-sized people.
‘What are the mini-games?’
‘Games for people from all over the Pacific. Guam, Vanuatu, Cook Islands, Pup-oo New Guinea. Every four years they have South Pacific Games. Every two years we have mini-games.’
‘For all Pacific countries?’
‘Pretty much. But not for Australia and New Zealand.’ He chortles. ‘They too big for mini-games. Too much people.’
‘What sort of games will you be having?’
‘Tennis, golf, athol-letics, volleyball, netball. Lots of games, hundreds of people.’ Voices are still coming through the radio static. ‘That’s why people are ringing up. To give money. Mini-games costs a lot of money.’
The guest-house, located in a leafy street deep in Nuku’alofa, supplies me with a room with a concrete floor, many louvre windows, a large bed and a private bathroom. The room opens on to the courtyard of a large rambling house with numerous semi-detached units set among banana palms and hibiscus bushes. Weary from an excess of inflight food and drink, I go straight to bed. To bed, but not to sleep. All night dogs bark and bay, while in the unit next to mine a group of happy evangelical Christians from the United States sings songs praising the Lord until three in the morning. When at last the dogs and Christians have run out of steam, the roosters take over. One crows continuously for two hours, just outside my window. I get about thirty minutes’ sleep in all. At seven o’clock I get up, check out and call a taxi to take me to the Keleti Beach Resort.
The Canadian also mentioned Keleti Beach. ‘It’s outa town but it’s quiet, and the beach is kinda nice. American-run, too.’ Quietness is a priority right now. Writers immerse themselves in quietness, breathing it in and converting it into books. The photosynthesis of silence. The only book I could have written in that guest-house would have been entitled How to Murder a Cock/Dog/Christian.
I’m still in a splenetic mood as I’m driven out of Nuku’alofa and along other straight, flat roads lined with long grass and palm trees. Then we come to what is clearly an arterial road, and turn on to it. As we pass a large stadium, the driver, who so far has not spoken, says, ‘That is National Stadium. New. French gives us money for it. Mini-games start there tomorrow.’
It certainly looks impressive, the high grandstand, the big all-weather track, the line of flagpoles. If there is time, I might go and have a look at the athletics, I think idly. Then the taxi turns off this main road and along an unsealed one, then off the unsealed one and along a dirt track which runs between unfenced verges of rank grass. At the end I see a plywood sign, hand-painted in blue. Keleti Beach Resort.
Just inside the entrance to a one-level, breeze-block, louvre-windowed building is a reception desk and a small lounge containing a round plastic table and chairs. A series of shells on vertical strings makes a kind of curtain between reception and a large, concrete-floored courtyard. The wings of the buildings lining the courtyard have wide eaves sheltering rows of metal tables and chairs, and rows of coloured light-bulbs are strung across the yard. Through the far end of the courtyard I can see the horizon, a line of streaky cloud and the brilliant blue sea.
Behind the L-shaped reception desk is a woman of about fifty-five. She has brown hair tied back in a bun, skin the colour of putty and spectacles with very thick lenses. A fold of white skin under her chin, and a wide, tight mouth, give her a frog-like appearance. Her upper arms are broad, with bags of flesh hanging from them, and she has a paperback novel in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Looking up, she gives me a tight smile. She has light blue eyes. Very calculating light blue eyes.
‘Morning.’ Her accent is American.
‘Hello. Do you have a vacancy?’
‘We sure do.’
She sets the cigarette down on a clamshell ashtray. ‘We can do you a whole fally fer thirty puh-ungas a night, haff a fally fer twenny-five puh-ungas, or a dorm-it-tory room for ten.’ Dormitory has a boarding-school ring to it, but this is neutralised by the ten pa’anga aspect. I’m a budget traveller, so I ask to see the dormitory room. The woman leans back and calls imperiously at the shell curtain: ‘Ladu!’
A Tongan boy of about sixteen, curly-haired, handsome, well built, with a smooth, shapely face, appears. He is wearing a yellow T-shirt, blue lavalava and jandals. The woman passes him over a key.
I follow the boy down a descending concrete path lined with red and yellow crotons. At the bottom is a custard-coloured, two-storeyed building with a flat sloping roof and a concrete terrace along the front. Behind the building is a cluster of towering coconut palms, and in front of it a sweep of lawn from which sprout small palms and hibiscus shrubs. Latu unlocks the end door of the building and I walk in.
The room is narrow but contains two beds – one on either side of the room – made up with blue linen. The floor is bare concrete and there are louvre windows at the front and rear. Under the window by the door is a small table and a chair; behind the door is an open rail from which hang a few wire coat hangers. The room is cool, it has everything I need, and I can hear no dogs, roosters or evangelists. Through the front window there is an agreeable view over the garden and the sea beyond. And all for ten pa’anga.
‘Bathroom is along there,’ explains Latu, smiling.
‘It’ll be fine, thanks. I’ll come up and sign the register when I’ve unpacked.’
I walk out on to the concrete terrace. The sky has turned grey but it’s very warm. Below me the grass slopes away to an area planted thickly in banana palms and aloes. To my right a concrete path undulates up to several well-spaced oval fales with yellow walls and roofs of red-painted corrugated iron, like the helmets of conquistadors. The reception block and dining area up to my left are ramshackle, but the profusion of plants and palms softens their unsightliness. And, although I can see a harem of scratching, pecking chickens guarded by a ginger-plumed rooster down on the grass, there is no noise except the regular rising and falling of the nearby sea.
I set off down the lawn to investigate. A sandy track passes between boulders of black basalt. Tiny mercurial skinks dart left and right to get out of my way. The track opens out on to a small beach at the foot of a basalt escarpment about five metres high. The surface of the sand is still damp from dew, but underneath is soft and warm. Sinking down into it, I stare out at the sea.
The lagoon is narrow and carpeted with coral, twisted into myriad shapes. Clear, sandy-floored pools separate the ridges of coral, ascending in a series of steps to the reef itself. On the top the reef is level, but on the landward side it is terraced, resembling a line of little ziggurats. In front of these terraces is a pool of calm, clear water, and skeletons of dead coral, jagged and brown, portrude from the white sand.
My eyes are drawn to the terraced reef. The sea is surging and foaming over and through it, exploding upwards in a series of continuously performing blow-holes. It is like watching a long line of fountains programmed to play at slightly varying intervals. The water looks irresistible, but my bathing togs are not yet unpacked. Later, after I’ve set up my room, I’ll swim. But still I make no move, and it is another half hour before I tear myself away from the hypnotic sight of endlessly surging, erupting sea.
It’s Saturday today. Tomorrow, the South Pacific sabbath, the shops will be closed, so if I want to see Nuku’alofa properly I’d better do it today. There is a resort mini-bus that goes to the town but I’ve missed it, the woman at the desk tells me. Her name is Joyce, and when she sees that I’ve put ‘writer’ on my registration card she’s suddenly very friendly. ‘Did yuh bring yuh books with yuh? There’s just no damn books in this country. I read everything – always have – but here? Just fucking Bibles.’
I offer to lend her some novels, and ask how I can get into town. She suggests a taxi. Then I notice an old bike in the yard. Could I borrow that? Sure, sure …
With a decent bike, Tongatapu Island would be ideal terrain for a cyclist. There are few hills and not much motorised traffic. But this bike is way past its best. It has no brakes and has long been a stranger to an oil can. I don’t think it’s been ridden more than a few hundred metres since Queen Salote was on the throne. Still, it gets me along a lot faster than walking.
The greyness has gone from the sky, replaced by a deep blue and traces of high, feathery cloud. I follow Joyce’s instructions, and cycle along narrow, dusty white tracks between long grass and scruffy palm trees until I join the main road. There I’m overtaken by big crammed buses, whose passengers peer at me through the open windows. Beside the road, children stop and stare as if I’ve got two heads. Cycling cannot be a common form of transport in Tonga, I conclude.
Nuku’alofa is a dusty, old-fashioned town with narrow streets and crooked, two-storeyed buildings. Everything looks old and run-down: the wooden buildings, the vehicles, the merchandise in the shadowy shops. There are lots of people standing about, looking as if they have nothing much to do and all the time in the world in which to do it. Most of the men are smoking. But there is something so sleepy and unhurried about the town that it is instantly appealing. It would be the perfect location for a movie set in nineteenth-century Mexico. I prop the bike up against a fence, buy a Coke from a streetside food stall and sit at a rough wooden table to drink it.
Watching the people standing about or strolling past is an absorbing pastime, and as I’m doing so I realise there is an influx of visitors. Young men and women dressed in brightly coloured tracksuits are wandering about among the locals. They must be the mini-games athletes. Their tracksuits proclaim their nationalities and sports. There are netballers from the Cook Islands and athletes from Vanuatu; weightlifters from Nauru and tennis players from Tahiti; boxers from Papua New Guinea and golfers from Guam. They walk along the street with an easy, lithe gait, looking as if they just can’t wait to run, jump, hit a ball, press a weight or pin an opponent to a mat.
Watching these young athletes gives me a new appreciation of Pacific solidarity. They are here not just because they are athletes but because they are people who inhabit a special region and feel part of it. Some are Melanesian, some Polynesian, some Caucasian; others are of mixed race. What unifies them is the ocean which surrounds their island homes.
The bike has now become an encumbrance. I can’t leave it anywhere because it doesn’t have a lock and chain, and, lacking brakes, it can’t be ridden in traffic. So I walk and push it down Taufa’ahau Road, across the intersection of Wellington Road to the waterfront and along to the Royal Palace.
The traditional rulers of Tonga – the Tu’i Tonga – went back 1,000 years; the present monarchy goes back only to Tonga’s 1875 constitution. This was written by an ambitious Methodist missionary called Shirley Baker (a man), and enshrines absolute power in the monarch, his appointees and thirty-three ‘noble’ families. All land is owned by the monarch, and about 100,000 commoners vote for just nine of the thirty parliamentarians. So grateful was King George Tupou I of Tonga to his missionary friend for securing the throne for the house of Tupou that he made Shirley Baker minister of foreign affairs, comptroller of the revenue, and premier of the kingdom. This did not endear Shirley to all Tongans, and in 1887 he only just survived an assassination attempt.
Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Tonga retains its feudal system, and is ruled by the ailing Taufa’ahau Tupou IV, who succeeded his much-loved mother, Queen Salote, in 1965 and is now 86 years old. The monarchy, modelled firmly on the English system, is these days heavily criticised by educated expatriate Tongans, who decry the lack of democracy and absence of press freedom enshrined in the constitution. Although the king remains popular with commoners, the momentum for social and political change is slowly building, and will undoubtedly come to a head after his death.
The palace building, set on a velvet lawn, is not large as palaces go, but it is stylishly colonial, with white walls, red roof, fretwork around the verandahs, finials and ornate bargeboards. Palace guards in immaculate white jackets, red-striped trousers and smart hats eye me with more than a passing interest as I lean the bike on a concrete gatepost and peer at His Majesty’s pad. One guard has a bright fixed bayonet on his rifle. These chaps look as if they’re very keen to enforce the kingdom’s status quo, so I decide to push off.
Back at Keleti Beach I set up my laptop on the table under the front window of the dormitory and plug it into a power point. I’ve purloined a table of the right height from the dining room. The bottom of the window is level with my chest, so that I can see out over the lawn, palms and basalt boulders. There is a peep of the sea and a sweep of sky, the first ultramarine, the second powder blue. It’s serene and beautiful, and soon I’m typing conscientiously, glancing up periodically for refreshment, like a swimmer taking breath.
After I’ve filled my self-imposed 1500-word quota, I get up from the table and stretch. The palms are casting long shadows across the grass as the sun sinks in the sky. It’s been a gruelling day, what with biking and writing, and I decide to lie down on the bed for a late-afternoon nap. In a few minutes I’ve dozed off.
‘Aaah … aaah … aaah … aaah …’
Appalling sounds, unmistakably of human suffering, shatter my sleep. They are coming from the other side of the concrete-block wall to my right. As I sit upright, the choking is replaced by a dire groaning.
‘Uuuh … uuuh … uuuh … Jesus Christ …’
Good God, what is happening in there? Is someone being murdered, or is it suicide? I get up and put my ear to the wall. There’s a crash, followed by a snapping of wood – is furniture being broken? – then a groan. Then, a period of silence, followed by horrible snoring. The snoring gets louder, and my concern is replaced by resentment. That’s just what I need: a vomiting, snoring drunk for a neighbour. As I get ready to go and have my evening meal, I resolve to move further down the dormitory to get away from the swine who’s disturbing my peace. After locking my door, I pause and peer in through the louvres of Room Two. All I can see in the darkness is a broken bed on which is huddled a shadowy figure whom I guess to be male.
The Keleti Beach dining room is long and rectangular, lined with louvre windows and tapa-patterned curtains, and with real cloth stuck to the walls. Latu, now dressed in a white long-sleeved shirt, tupenu (a dark skirt) and jandals, is a very attentive waiter. As well he might be, for apart from me there are only two other diners, a couple.
The man is in his early fifties, big, with slicked-back hair and a large, slumped stomach. He smokes continuously, even as he eats. He looks to me like a Darryl. The woman is plump, with long brown hair, and wears a short-sleeved blue cotton frock. She can be no older than twenty. She looks down all the time, and barely utters a word when he speaks to her. She looks like an Angela. There is a melancholy air about the couple. Are they father and daughter? I don’t think so. Although there is a certain similarity about them, the way Darryl looks at her is not the way a father looks at his daughter. Lovers, then? Probably. The presence of the odd couple stirs my curiosity. Where did they meet? By the water dispenser? In the factory canteen? At the photocopier? What did he say to get her to come away to Tonga with him, a man three times her age?
After the meal I walk across the courtyard and into the lounge. It too is a long narrow room with louvre windows. It contains a few well-worn vinyl sofas and chairs, a TV set and DVD player, and french doors which open out to a broad verandah. On the verandah I can see a table-tennis table and some weightlifting equipment. At one end of the lounge is the bar. It has a small horseshoe-shaped counter, above which is a sheet of steel reinforcing mesh, painted cream, in which a head-sized hole has been cut. Behind the mesh is a man of about sixty, and in front of it, sitting on a stool, a much younger man. With the steel grid between them, they look as if they’re in a Central American prison on visiting day.
As I approach the bar, the older man looks up and says in a drawl, ‘How yer doin’?’ Joyce’s husband, I presume.
He is scrawny, slack-shouldered, balding, with folds of skin hanging from his turkey neck. A cigarette droops from a corner of his mouth. I order a Royal beer, posters for which I have noticed in the town, and he ambles off down a passage and opens a fridge. The man on the stool looks at me crookedly. He is about thirty, with cropped brown hair, a fleshy, flushed face, and brown eyes. He wears a tight white T-shirt and cheap-looking jeans. His eyes seem to be having trouble focusing. Blinking hard, he shakes his head as if trying to dislodge water from his ear, then peers at me.
‘Ow’s ut going’, thun?’
‘Not so bad, thanks.’
‘Jost arrived,’ ave yuh?’
‘Last night. From Auckland.’
‘Me too, jost arrived. I’m frum Brimming’im. Ing-lund.’
‘That’s a long way from Tonga.’
‘Bit of a boos ride, yus. Me name’s Rob.’
As we shake hands, the barman returns with beer and pours it into a plastic cup. I try it. It’s dry and well chilled, and has a pleasantly hoppy after-taste. I see from the label that it’s brewed in Tonga, ‘with Swedish assistance’. I say to the Englishman, ‘That’s good beer, don’t you think?’
‘It’s all right, yus. I’ve ’ad worse, like.’
‘Do you live here, Rob?’
‘Me? Shit no, oim jost vistin’. Oi luv in Feegee.’
‘What’s that like?’
‘VB Bitter. All VB Bitter.’ He belches and pushes his plastic glass under the grill. ‘Same again, thanks Bill.’
Not quite understanding, I ask him, ‘Have you seen much of the Pacific?’
‘Seen it awl, mate. Bin everywhere.’
‘I’m going to Samoa for my next trip. What’s that like?’
‘Vailima. Not a bud brew, neither. Gerries do thut wan.’ He puts one hand flat down on the bar for a moment, to steady himself. His face has gone a terracotta shade. Frowning now, he continues, ‘Least ut’s Vailima in Apia. In Pago ut’s Budweiser. American there, y’see.’ He rolls his eyes ceilingward, recites: ‘Niue, Steinlager; Tahiti, Hinano; Raro-tong-ga, Heineken.’ He belches again, interrupting the litany of lager. ‘Bot doan’t go ter fookin’ New Cally-doanya. Yer cun’t get a decent beer there. All woine. Too many Froggies, y’see.’ Looking perplexed now, he peers through the mesh at Bill, who’s pouring him another Royal. ‘Bot Tahiti’s Froggie too, und they’ve got beer there. Hinano. Foony, thut is. Why is thut, Bill? Why cun’t yer get a decent beer in New Cally-doanya?’
‘That is something,’ the barman drawls back wearily, ‘that I just can’t tell you. Only place I ever bin to in the Pacific is right here in Taang-ga.’ With extreme lethargy and much sighing, Bill tells me his background. He and Joyce had run what he calls a ‘sanitorial maintenance operation’ (could he mean cleaning business, I wonder) in Chicago, but the Illinois winters had got too cold for them. So they read books on the Pacific, decided on Tonga, wrote to the government, and were offered a two-year work and residence permit if they would run the Keleti Beach Resort. They sold up everything and came here six months ago.
‘So how do you like it?’
Bill sucks his gums, swallows, pulls at the crepey skin on his neck. ‘Wal, it is warmer than Chicago, no question ’bout that. I mean, the john hasn’t frozen over here yet … But as far as the tourist trade’s concerned …’ For the third time he leaves his sentence unfinished, and instead looks out over the lounge, leaving its emptiness to speak for itself. I feel sorry for him, and as an expression of sympathy order another two beers for Rob and myself. As Bill brings them, I say, ‘Are you staying in one of the fales, Rob?’
‘Fook no, oim in the dorm-it-tory block down the path.’
‘Oh? What number?’
‘Noomber Two.’
I pause, look at him intently. ‘Did you arrive late this afternoon?’
He grins inanely. ‘Thut’s right.’ He blinks with the effort of recalling even his recent past. ‘Uctually, I was a bit pissed. ’Ad a few too many beers on the plane, like. Thun I ’ad a ruff taxi ride ’ere, and chooked oop in me room.’ He brings the lager up to his lips and sips gratefully. ‘Oim all right now, though. Now oiv ’ad a few beers …’
I like the Keleti Beach Resort. It doesn’t bother me that it has Albanian architecture, or that it’s way out of town. It’s quiet working in my dormitory room (Rob hasn’t vomited or collapsed the furniture again), the food is tolerable, the beer cold, and when the words don’t flow I just get up and stroll down to the little cove and watch the sea making fountains through the blow-holes. What is strange about the place is that it has so few guests. They can now be counted on the toes of one and a half feet, because Darryl and Angela have folded their tent and stolen away in the night.
They’ve been replaced by a trio of beautiful young Italians – two men and a woman, all in their early twenties – who look as though they might be filming a Louis Vuitton advertisement. The Italians breakfast early, radiating a style and sophistication that looks out of place in the concrete and plastic dining room, then vanish in a taxi, returning, still radiant and voluble, as the sun is going down. Apart from this stunning ménage à trois, there is Rob, me and a sweet, darkly tanned Danish couple who are so ancient and wrinkled they look as if they’ve been dug out of a peat bog in Jutland. They totter to the beach in the morning, sleep in the afternoon and watch old films in a corner of the lounge each evening.
Rob is a drunk, a no-hoper and a layabout of the first order. I like him a lot. I like his dark sense of humour, his fecklessness, anarchy and total dedication to the booze. There’s something likeable about a thorough, amusing drunk, the way he lives for the day and so obviously relishes getting totally pissed at every opportunity. At any time from breakfast onwards, Rob is at the bar, swaying on the stool in front of the steel reinforcing mesh, waving his glass about as if he’s conducting the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. And as he drinks he expounds on his life in the Pacific.
‘Oi loov Feegee, y’gnaw? Oi live in a village, a little village, wiv the chief – the rut-too’s daughter. She … what the fook’s ’er name again? Hahahahahaha … She’s all roight, y’naw? I still cun’t think of ’er name, but it’ll coom it’ll coom … Anyway Graeme, oim a sparky by trade, an electrician, so oim a bit oova magic mun like, t’the Feeg-geeans, to the fuzzee-wuzzees. Oi fix their videos und their toasters and thut, und when oi do, they give me presents, like a case of VB Bitter. Hahahahaha …’
It isn’t hard to picture Rob in ‘his’ village, lurching about among the empty VB cans, mending the occasional fuse or broken iron to demonstrate his magic: reprehensible behaviour in one way, but in another just part of an old English colonial tradition involving the white man who is a failure at home but an outrageous success in the outermost reaches of the Empire. He will eventually drown in a lake of lager, and it will be the most pleasurable experience of a short, untidy life which has overflowed with self-indulgence and self-abuse.
But I get the impression that for Joyce and Bill life has been long and largely luckless, and that one of their unluckier decisions was the one to leave the United States and move to Tonga. For Joyce this realisation manifests itself in a rejection of all things ‘Taan-gun’ (even after a year in the country, she can’t pronounce its name properly). At every opportunity she rails against the people, the climate, the politics, the economy, the king, the church, even the food: ‘Do you know that last year the Taan-guns had to import coconuts from the Cook Islands? Coconuts!’
Bill, in contrast, is afflicted with a tiredness which is exhausting to watch. Everything he does is done slowly and to the accompaniment of sighs and groans. Even when he sits at reception, glumly reading a novel I’ve lent him, he groans every time he turns the page, not over the progress of the plot (it is a Maurice Gee novel), but with the extreme effort it requires to move on to the next page. I don’t think Tonga has done this to him. Bill looks the sort of guy who was born exhausted.
Then, on my fourth morning at the resort, as I walk past reception on my way to breakfast, I am startled to see that Joyce is transformed. She is vivacious, goggle-eyed with joy.
‘Guess what, Graeme? Guess what?’
‘You’ve found a Tongan you like?’ I feel like replying, but instead I say lamely, ‘I’ve no idea, Joyce.’
She makes little clapping movements with her hands. ‘The whole fucking Pap-oo Noo Gin-yin mini-games team is comin’ here tonight fer a party! A hunert and twenny of the mother-fuckers!’
She pours out the details. The Papua New Guinea team has booked in for dinner at seven o’clock. After the meal there will be a dance. But why the Keleti Beach Resort? I can’t resist asking. Unoffended, Joyce explains that no other place on the island would take such a large group at short notice.
‘Wow,’ I reply, impressed but still doubtful. ‘Can you cope with as many as that?’
Joyce’s eyes retract, her lids half close. ‘At forty puh-ungga a head, we’ll fucking well cope, all right.’ She leans across the desk and calls out to where Bill is readying the van for a trip into Nuku’alofa for supplies. ‘Bill! Bill! Soy sauce! Don’t ferget the soy sauce! Twenny bottles!’
Later, as I sit at the bar after a long day at my laptop, Rob raises his glass. ‘Bula vinaka, my son.’
‘And malo ei lelei to you, Rob. Had a good day?’
‘Aw yeah, not so bud. Few beers after breakfast, bit oova kip after loonch, game o’ table tennis wiv Latu, few more beers after thut. Now oim all ready for the party.’ Av you seen what’s ’appening outside?’
Rob leads me to the windows of the lounge. At the far end of the concrete quadrangle, above the cliff that faces the sea, a number of men are busying themselves with microphones, amplifiers, drums and a big switchboard. Flex entrails cover the floor, and big speakers have been set up on either side of the thatched shelter.
‘Who are they?’
‘Pup-oo New Gin-yins. Boogers uv brought their own bund.’
Three coaches pull up, and the partygoers – groups of young men and women dressed in vivid red and yellow tracksuit tops, black pants with red patterned stripes up the sides, and dark-coloured sneakers – enter the resort tentatively, self-consciously. Their faces are coal-black, their hair frizzy, their teeth almost luminously white. Many of the men are shorter than the women, but they’re perfectly proportioned, muscular and neat, while the female team members are lithe and slender. Latu, in bright white T-shirt bearing a Keleti Beach logo, tracksuit pants and white sneakers, ushers the guests to the metal tables around the quadrangle. He is assisted by a small European boy, a Palagi, in a tupenu and Roman sandals. Both of them carry woven pandanus trays.
Soon the tables are full, men on one side of the quadrangle, women on the other. It’s dark now, and the coloured lights are switched on. There are no festivities yet; the team members just sit, sipping Coca-Cola or cream soda from the can, occasionally standing up to photograph one another. Each flash of the camera is followed by a burst of mirth and the exposure of teeth as dazzling as the flash.
Rob and I take a seat at a table near the reception area. Rob is growing very agitated. He nudges me excitedly as the women continue to crowd into the courtyard. ‘Hey, look ut thut wun over there, look at the boom on ’er! I never seen so mooch bluk velvet together in wun place …’
A tall Melanesian man in a green blazer steps up to the microphone, and the team quietens in a moment. Speaking first in pidgin, then in English, he calls for ‘impeccable behaviour, self-discipline, good sportsmanship and total commitment’. Then he steps back. ‘I now have much pleasure in calling upon our minister for sport, culture and youthful affairs, the Right Honourable George Banuba!’
Sustained applause greets the movement to the microphone of a tall, heavily built man in white dinner jacket, grey needlecord trousers and open-necked, floral-patterned shirt. He wears tinted glasses and has a bushy black moustache. On behalf of his government he welcomes the team to the games and also calls sternly for impeccable behaviour, self-discipline, good sportsmanship and total commitment.
‘Any team member not behaving in accordance with these rules –’ he pauses, and his audience exchange nervous glances or stare at the floor – ‘will, I assure you, be … finished.’ Allowing another long pause, he glowers at the crowd, then his big fleshy face breaks into a broad grin. ‘But for now, we can eat, drink our soft drinks, and dance. A good games to you all!’
Joyce and her kitchenhands have worked some sort of miracle. The dining-room tables sag under platters of taro, breadfruit, marinated fish, chop suey, cold chicken, cold pork, fresh vegetables, rice, baked beans and a variety of salads. Latu moves proudly among the guests, helping with plates, glasses and chairs as the team members line up for their buffet meal. Joyce, standing by the kitchen door, scrutinises the table through her thick-lensed spectacles. She wears a long black halter-necked dress, and is smoking feverishly. Bill is nowhere to be seen.
Joyce beckons me over, and speaks from the side of her mouth. ‘They’re quite little, you notice that? They probably won’t eat that much. And their manners, I really like their manners. Not like Taan-guns. You ever seen Taan-guns eat?’ She spreads her bare arms wide and makes huge sweeping gestures towards her mouth, from which her cigarette dangles. ‘Taan-guns eat like this.’ She makes the sweeping movement again, removes the cigarette, works her mandibles as far as they will go, then shuts them. ‘That’s how Taan-guns eat.’
After queuing up too, I take my plate out to where Rob is sitting and casting giddy looks over the women in the crowd. The food is mostly heavy, but tasty enough. Certainly the Papua New Guineans are showing total commitment to the meal. And in one respect Joyce is right: they are an extraordinarily polite and well-behaved group. They laugh and chat, but there is no rowdiness of any kind. Usually when I’ve heard mention of Papua New Guinea it’s been in association with the ‘rascals’, and their brutal raping and bashing activities around Port Moresby. But these people constitute the most respectful and self-disciplined sports team I’ve ever seen. They’re also very happy; it shows in their beaming faces and their open laughter. The PNG mini-games team are having the time of their lives.
At the far end of the courtyard the band launches into a reggae number, and several of the Papua New Guineans leap up and begin to boogie. In some cases the men cross the yard and choose a partner; in others women get up and dance in a line without male assistance. The dancing snowballs and in minutes the joint is jumping.
The Right Honourable George Banuba is sitting at a table beside mine and Rob’s. With him are three strapping, unsmiling young men in pale brown safari suits. The minister seems in semi-jocular mood, tapping one foot to the beat, but from time to time he frowns and sweeps the dance floor with his gaze, searching for any breach of good conduct. Rob returns from the bar with four bottles of Royal lager and lines them up carefully on our table. Slopping some into his glass, he asks me: ‘Well,’ av you enjoyed the Keleti Beach Resort thun, me old Kiwi mate?’
‘I have, Rob, I have. I mean, it’s not the Sheraton, but it’s been good enough for me.’
Then he holds an imaginary microphone in front of my face. ‘And what do you think of Tong-ga, Sir?’
I clear my throat. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Tonga that a decent revolution wouldn’t fix.’
‘Hahahahahaha … thank you sir, end of interview. You uv bin shot, decup-i-tated und yer ’ead stook on the front of ’is Majesty’s suff-fari wuggun.’
Crimson-faced, Rob rocks back on his chair, attempting at the same time to focus on the people on the now-crowded dance floor. He tips his seat back too far, rocks forward, regains his balance and his glass, but in the process slops beer over his hand and on to the designer trousers of the Right Honourable Minister at the next table.
As Rob’s chair legs crash back to the floor, the minister rises very slowly, very deliberately, making broad sweeping strokes with one hand to remove the lager from his thigh. He then stands over the Englishman, glowers down on him from what seems an enormous height and says in a tone of unmistakable menace, ‘I think … that you … have had … too much to drink.’
Rob swivels in his chair and looks up. He stares at the burly politician for a few moments, getting him into full focus, then says in a tone of total nonchalance, ‘Und I think … that you … ought to go and get fooked.’
As one, the three minders rise from their seats and advance. At the same time the minister’s right hand reaches for the back of Rob’s shirt. Jumping up, I slip between the Papua New Guineans and Rob, who has calmly turned back to attend to the balance of his drink. I hold both my hands up to the minister, who looms as large and menacing as a grizzly bear.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay, he didn’t mean it, really …’
The hostility in the minister’s eyes diminishes, and his hand drops to his side. As it does so, the other three men halt their advance.
I go on. ‘I’m sorry about your trousers, but let’s not let it spoil a great party, okay …’
The minister stands glaring at Rob for a little longer. His big chest rises and falls steadily. Suddenly his face breaks into a gap-toothed grin, although his brown eyes remain unamused. ‘And they always say,’ he says, ‘that it is we natives who can’t hold our liquor.’
The band gets louder, the dancing more joyful. The whole courtyard is a seething mass of grinning, jigging, twisting tracksuited figures. Cameras flash as the team members put the party on record. Rob grins, digs me in the ribs.
‘Not a bud mob, are they? Hey, look ut her …’ He points admiringly to a petite, shapely girl of about eighteen, dancing at the end of a line of swaying female athletes. She is dark, lissom, surpassingly pretty. Rob’s eyes bulge. ‘Cor, oi wouldn’t mind playin’ hide-the-sausage with ’er.’ He waves at the girl, who turns away in embarrassment. Rob subsides into deep thought.
‘Do you know, oi’ve never fooked a white woman. Never.’ Suddenly the band stops. The players step back a little, making room for their jovial, rotund leader, who bends his head to the microphone.
‘Ladies, gentlemen, team members, it gives me very great pleasure to invite a special guest to sing for us tonight. This person is already a star in his own right, and as such is known to many of you. To others he will be strange. But he has agreed to sing for us, and it is my honour, not to mention my privilege, to welcome him to the microphone. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you’ – there is a drum roll from behind him – ‘our minister for sport, culture and youthful affairs, the Right Honourable George Banuba!’
Together, Rob and I spin around. Sure enough, the minister is on his feet and beaming. He walks down through the applauding crowd and up to the microphone. Detaching it deftly from its stand, he comes forward. ‘Fellow countrymen and women, I would like to sing a bracket of songs for you, starting with a personal favourite.’ He turns to the guitarist, makes counting-down movements with his head, swings back to the audience. ‘Aha la Bamba la Bamba …’
The audience explode like fireworks, jumping, squealing, grabbing partners, clapping, singing, dancing, snapping their fingers. Rob is yelling and clapping, even Joyce is jumping. The audience won’t let the minister go. He sings Elvis, Stevie Wonder, Abba, the Beatles, Harry Belafonte – nothing seems beyond his repertoire – while his team rocks and rolls and boogies and sings. I decide that if the Papua New Guineans show this amount of commitment on the sports field, they will be unbeatable.
Having saved money by staying in the Keleti Beach dormitory, I decide to treat myself to a proper hotel in town for a couple of nights. Bill runs me into Nuku’alofa in the resort van. ‘Do you think you’ll stay long in Tonga?’ I ask him as we trundle along. He pauses for some time before replying.
‘Maybe. I don’t mind it myself, but Joyce … She’s not that keen on the place, y’know?’
As Bill drops me off in Vuna Road, his shoulders sag low, a cigarette still clings to his lower lip. I thank him, shake his hand, tell him how much I’ve enjoyed my stay at Keleti Beach. He smiles, wearily and a little sceptically.
‘Good luck with your book,’ he says.
‘Thanks. Oh, the fare for bringing me here? How much?’
He waves his hand dismissively, then stops, frowns. ‘Joyce didn’t ask you fer the fare when you checked out?’
‘No.’
He exhales sadly. ‘She’ll be expecting me to bring it, then.’ His body seems to deflate even more as he looks up at me apologetically. ‘That’ll be … ten puh-ung-ga.’
The next day I watch 35,000 people take to the streets of Nuku’alofa. Officially the walk is to celebrate Emancipation Day, but it doubles as a walk for Jesus because, in the words of King Tupou IV, ‘King Tupou I was a born-again Christian in 1862 and that was the reason he granted freedom to the people at the time.’ Tupou I, the present king’s great-grandfather, was the founder of modern Tonga. Uniquely among South Pacific Island nations, Tonga does not celebrate an independence day, because it alone was never colonised, never ruled by a European power. This is a source of great pride to the nation of 100,000.
Nevertheless, the missionaries did a grand job of colonising Tonga. As in neighbouring Samoa, there are churches everywhere, not just those built by the original proselytisers, the Methodists and the Roman Catholics, but also those built later by the Church of the Latter Day Saints, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Judging by the newness and number of their churches, it’s the well-heeled Mormons who are winning the race for Tongan souls.
I book into the town’s best-known hotel, the International Dateline. It’s a world away from Keleti Beach: big, sprawling and sleepy, located right on the waterfront and a five-minute walk from the town’s main street. The hotel’s logo is a sketch of the building with a vertical line – the international dateline – kinking around it to the right. In the lobby I find myself staring at the floor, because built into the marble is a large bas-relief of Tongatapu, and that kinked line again, in brass. The line is the reason Tonga subtitles itself ‘The Land Where Time Begins’.
Back in the 1870s, when the European colonisers were trying to sort out a way of regulating an increasingly mobile world into time zones, an American academic came up with a system whereby the 360 degrees of the globe could be divided into twenty-four zones, each about 15 degrees of longitude apart, and each one hour behind the other, with Greenwich, London, being the prime meridian. In 1884 this sensible suggestion was accepted universally. There was only one snag: some small Pacific Island groups close to Greenwich’s antemeridian of 180 degrees – Fiji, Samoa and Tonga – were bisected by lines of longitude and would therefore suffer the inconvenience of having two different days of the week on some of their islands. Something pragmatic had to happen, and the logical solution was to make the 180-degree of longitude kink around these islands. But which way to kink? East or west?
In 1879 the colonial governor of Fiji decreed that the dateline should take a big kink east, incorporating all the islands of Fiji and Tonga west of the line, and giving them for all time the same day as New Zealand and Australia. The King of Samoa, however, went along with United States’ demands that his islands be a day behind. And so it is possible, for those titillated by such matters, to stand on Tonga’s easternmost island, Tafahi, on, say, a Monday, and look across to not very distant Savai’i, in Samoa, where it is the same time, except that it is Sunday. Luxury cruise ships clustered in this stretch of the Pacific Ocean celebrated the advent of the new millennium in Tongan waters on 31 December 1999, then sailed east the next day for an hour or so into Samoan seas and partied all over again, thus getting two millennium knees-ups for the price of one.
Tonga may be The Land Where Time Begins, but it is also The Land Where Time Appears to Stand Still. Nothing, but nothing, is done in a hurry. Although this maddens Palagis like Joyce, as I cycle around Nuku’alofa I think it’s rather nice. Even rush hour is a relative term, with hundreds of well-used Japanese cars, some held together with rope and duct tape, creeping through the dusty, pitted streets. The road toll in Tonga must be very low. All transactions, from buying a banana in the market to reconfirming an onward flight, are done in slow motion. And just to make sure that nothing speeds up too dangerously, most dockets are still written by hand and carbon-copied.
Next day I leave for a day tour of Tongatapu with Lani, a very pleasant young woman from the Tonga Visitors’ Bureau. The island is almost level, tilted a little to the north, and shaped like the slipper of a medieval knave. Nuku’alofa is located where the knave’s laces would be tied. Although it appears at first inspection rather featureless, Tongatapu holds subtle secrets. At the eastern end of the island there are marvellous Maya-like tombs of Tonga’s feudal kings, and the Trilithon, a prehistoric monument on a scale with Stonehenge and of equal significance. It is thought that the alignment of its massive menhirs was connected with the seasonal solstices, a knowledge vital for planting food crops such as taro.
In the evening, Lani takes me to the Tongan National Centre, a line of large fales built in traditional style and housing exhibition centres, a museum, handicraft workshops and display halls. Tonight there’s Tongan dancing, a feast and a kava ceremony. The ceremony is carried out according to strict etiquette: the pepper tree root is beaten, mixed with water in a large carved bowl, strained through coconut fibre, then served to guests from a half coconut shell by a Tongan maiden. An honorary ‘noble’ is sought from the audience to take part in the performance, and a young Swedish man with long flaxen hair jumps up to volunteer. Afterwards he is presented with a certificate acknowledging this role, and I imagine him later trying to explain the significance of the kava ceremony to puzzled friends back in Göteborg.
‘What does kava taste like?’ I ask Lani.
She shrugs. ‘I don’t know, I’ve never tasted it. In Tonga, women can’t drink kava, they just serve it to the men.’
The women get stuck with making tapa cloth, surely one of the most tedious and mind-numbing pastimes in the world, involving beating hibiscus bark with mallets, soaking it, beating it some more, and so on, for day after day after day, even before the painting of the patterns begins. By having exclusive rights to the kava drinking, men have got by far the best part of the cultural deal.
And they drink a lot of kava. There are ‘kava clubs’ everywhere. The churches don’t disapprove of this, on the theory that if the men are filling themselves up with kava, which has a mellowing effect, they won’t drink excessive amounts of alcohol and do damage to themselves and others. When later I taste some myself, I’m puzzled as to the liquid’s appeal. It tastes like dishwater with some mud mixed in, and turns the lips numb. But drunk ceremoniously, with a group of other men, it’s undeniably sociable.
‘Don’t Worry, Be Ha’apai’, enjoin T-shirts all over Pangai, on Lifuka island. Pangai is the only town in the Ha’apai Group, a cluster of sixty-two beautiful atolls and volcanic islands, half an hour’s flight from Tongatapu. And the timing of my arrival here is fortuitous because it’s festival week, when most of Ha’apai’s population of 10,000 celebrate with sport, dancing, singing, parading, crafting and tug-of-warring. Ha’apai’s festival is the foreplay that leads up to the big festival of Helaila, held on Tongatapu in the first week of July. This also celebrates the birthday of King Taufa’ahau.
I’ve arrived just in time for the tail-end of the festivities – the announcement of the winner of the Miss Ha’apai contest. First, though, there’s the Crown Prince’s cocktail party, to which someone has wangled me an invitation. The party is held inside a military compound on the Pangai waterfront. The venue itself is enclosed by barbed wire, but inside it’s all very jolly as we stand under the stars and drink our Royal beer. Like all crown princes, His Royal Highness – the title’s apt, since he also owns the brewery – attracts a great deal of gossip and notoriety. Educated at King’s College, Auckland, and Sandhurst, the heir to the throne of Tupou is still unmarried. Known to have a predilection for girls from commoner ranks, he can nevertheless marry only into Tonga’s nobility. Furthermore, affairs of state seem to very much bore HRH, as he is commonly known, and he spends much time flitting off to other lands. He even has that middleclass English affectation, a lisp. However, tonight on Ha’apai the Crown Prince appears to be on his best behaviour. His princely duties include dancing with all six finalists at the ball that follows the beauty contest.
Beauty pageants may now be de trop in many countries, but in the South Pacific they are still big-time. The Miss Ha’apai contest final is being held in the Toluafe Hall, just outside Pangai town, and I hitch a ride there with a young American Peace Corps worker, John from Philadephia, on the back of a battered utility truck. The two of us are waved inside and immediately shown to the line of VIP seats at the front, just behind the Prince’s throne, the governor’s chair and the seats of the sponsors. This is embarrassing. Why should I be sitting up here? John from Philadephia explains, ‘You’re a visitor and a Palagi. The Tongans would consider it grossly ill-mannered for you to sit with the commoners.’ So, to avoid offending my hosts, I remain at the front on my white plastic chair.
While we wait for HRH to make his appearance, some middle-aged women get up and do tau’olunga – solo dances – which are well received by the audience, then we wait some more. The hall is crammed with spectators. Above the stage are the banners of the festival sponsors, local businesses and Royal Tongan Airlines. The biggest and brightest banner is that of Benson and Hedges, its slogan, ‘Turn to Gold’, a message of unconscious irony, given that is the colour most users’ lungs will turn if they continue to smoke at the rate they do. The international tobacco companies push their product shamelessly in Tonga, and with no restrictions on advertising and a cheap packet price, it’s unsurprising that most men (but not many women) smoke.
The prince enters, using a walking stick for assistance (he suffers from gout), and wearing the faintly disdainful expression of a man who for a very long time has had everything he ever wanted. He takes his throne, there are many speeches, then the contestants come on. They wear elaborate ball gowns and most look petrified. They bow low to HRH, crimp their way down the catwalk and back, then exit. Only one looks relaxed, the very pretty and pert Miss Ha’apai Hardware, who prances, waves, and even gives HRH a cheeky grin. At this stage I decide to excuse myself. I can’t take any more and, besides, I’m awash with Royal beer. As I walk out into the darkness, I stop and gape. Outside a wire fence, trying to peer in the windows, jostling each other for a better view, are several thousand people.
Later I hear that the winner of the beauty contest is Miss New Zealand-Ha’apai. I’m disappointed: I had hoped it would be bold little Miss Hardware.
Walking back through the town is like being blindfolded. There are no street lights, no house lights, no vehicle lights and no moon. I literally grope my way along the street, heading in what I hope is the direction of my hotel. Suddenly, from out of the darkness to my right, two massive figures loom over me. I think they are young men. Very large young men.
‘Where you goin’?’ The tone is challenging, aggressive. ‘Yeah, man, where you goin’?’
I’m terrified. It’s the first time I’ve ever been threatened on a Pacific island, and there’s no one, absolutely no one, to help me. They’re all back at the hall watching the beauty contest.
‘You hear me, man? I said, where you goin’?’ The tone is menacing now.
The two enormous figures come closer. I can see what I fear are bunched fists, and can hear their thick breathing. Swallowing with fright, I think as quickly as I can, then call out airily and in what I hope passes for a Utah accent, ‘I’m on my way to church. The night service. I’m a Mormon missionary.’
A pause, then, ‘Yeah? Where’s your bro? Youse always goes in twos.’
‘He’s … ah … meeting the bishop.’
‘The bishop?’
‘Yes.’
There is silence for a few seconds. Then the two figures move aside, melting into the blackness of the night.
The Niu’akalo Beach Hotel is a kilometre up the coast from Pangai town, just past a statue of Shirley Baker and right beside the lagoon. Eight two-bedroom fales are set in a large well-tended garden which runs down to a sandy shore and the lagoon. Meals are taken in a small dining room on the covered patio facing the sea. There’s a bar in the lounge and the whole place is small enough for the guests to get to know one another easily. Such intimate circumstances can be disastrous – one bore in the house could wreck an entire stay – but luckily this is not the case during my visit. I find myself in the company of a Danish couple, Henrik and Pia from Elsinore; Godfred, a Tanzanian engineer who designs harbours; and Irene, a Tongan-born woman who’s returning to Ha’apai, after thirty years away, to trace her family’s roots. Dining and drinking together, we’re soon a small, jolly team. Although hailing from Hamlet’s home town, Henrik is far from melancholic, and the lovely Pia shows no signs of dementia. Godfred is witty and articulate, and Irene has the natural dignity and courtesy of many Polynesian matriarchs.
Now that Ha’apai’s festival is over, Pangai has subsided into a dusty torpor, so we spend most of our time sitting on the hotel patio with other visitors – the Niu’akalo is a popular gathering place for locals – talking about what we’ve found in Tonga, or just staring across the lawn, past the palms and at the skyline. There are several reasons why this is not an entirely idle pastime, for precisely where we are, and in the immediate proximity, are some of the most significant sites not merely in the Pacific but on Earth.
Just a few kilometres behind us is the Tonga Trench, a submarine chasm where the ocean plunges to unimaginable depths as the Pacific tectonic plate slides under its neighbouring Indo-Australia plate. This slow, inexorable collision has tossed up a line of live volcanoes, two of which, Tofua and Kao, we can look straight out at. And it explains why at least once a month these islands are heaved from side to side by seismic convulsions.
Kao – the highest peak in all of Tonga – is a perfectly symmetrical cone over 1,000 metres high. Neighbouring Tofua has decapitated itself through successive eruptions and now presents a low, smouldering profile on the horizon. Within the crater of Tofua is a large freshwater lake. It was while standing off this island, in April 1789, that Fletcher Christian seized the Bounty and cast William Bligh and eighteen others adrift in an open boat. Bligh sought food and water on Tofua, but did not scale its slopes and find the lake. The locals attacked the Englishmen, one of Bligh’s men was killed and the party scrambled away to their boat. Later, while sailing between Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, they narrowly escaped being captured and eaten by a Fijian war party. They made no other landfall until they reached Timor, six weeks and 5,800 kilometres later. Today you can fly out to Tofua from Ha’apai in a float plane, land on the crater lake and eat a picnic lunch on its shore.
There is plenty of other human history in the vicinity. James Cook anchored Resolution and Discovery here in 1777, and the locals put on such a party for him and his crews that he named Tonga ‘The Friendly Isles’. What he didn’t know was that his host, a Machiavellian chief called Finau, was softening the Englishmen up in order to murder them and seize their ships. The plot was lost after a disagreement among the Tongans over the timing of the attack, and the English ships sailed away, forever impressed by Ha’apaian hospitality.
Thirty years later, in 1807, Finau did manage to seize an English privateer, the Port-au-Prince, kill most of its crew and successfully employ its armaments against the defenders of Tongatapu. One of the English crew who was spared, Will Mariner, lived among the Tongans for several years before returning to England and writing a classic chronicle of his adventures, An Account Of The Natives Of The Tonga Islands (1817). The Port-au-Prince was beached just a bike-ride along from where we sit and watch the sun go down over Tofua and Kao, turning the sky the colour of marmalade.
On my second-to-last day on Ha’apai, a Sunday, I walk the three kilometres up the road to where the Port-au-Prince came ashore, and try to imagine the scenes that happened that day. It’s difficult, as it’s a place of utter serenity. Trudging back along the road in the early afternoon sun, I hear the soft parp of a car horn. A battered red Mazda draws up alongside me, and a youngish Tongan woman leans out the driver’s window.
‘You like a ride?’ she asks, smiling in a slightly lopsided way. Alongside her is a grinning man in shorts, jandals and a blue singlet with the familiar ‘Don’t Worry, Be Ha’apai’ slogan.
‘Thank you,’ I reply. It’s thirty degrees on the road, and I flop gratefully on to the worn back seat.
‘Like a trink?’ The man in the front turns and passes over a 1125ml bottle of dark rum. It’s half empty.
‘Ah, no thanks. It’s a bit early for me.’
‘Cake?’ He holds up a fat sponge cake on a cardboard plate. Several wedges are missing.
I take a piece. It’s sweet, thick and gooey.
‘Sure you doan wan a trink?’
‘Quite sure, thanks.’
The man swigs happily from the bottle, then passes it over to the driver. She takes the bottle in one hand, takes a swig, hands it back and takes a wedge of cake. The man starts crooning an island song and she joins in. We drive contentedly on, along the hot, empty road.
‘Where are you going?’ I ask. ‘To a party?’
The man burps. ‘No. We already got a party. Here. Haha-ha!’
‘Dah-dah-dah-dah,’ croons the woman. ‘We drive round the island, having a party,’ she giggles. ‘Just him and me.’ The car veers to the left and she corrects it hurriedly. ‘Better than bloody church.’
Then I understand. It’s Sunday, when nothing at all is sanctioned by the authorities except worship, and more worship. Eating between services is the only permissible pleasure. And now that the carnival is over, there’s nothing to do on Ha’apai. Nothing. You’re not even allowed to go fishing on the sabbath, let alone drink. No planes can take off or land, no shops are open, no secular activities are permitted. As one Tongan wag told me, ‘If we were allowed to skydive on Sunday, even the parachutes wouldn’t open.’ My new friends’ solution is a mobile, secret party for two, in the front seat of a Mazda. I applaud their initiative, and courage. The hotel approaches.
‘Just let me out here, please.’
‘By the hotel?’
‘Yes please.’
The car skids to a halt, and the woman turns and grins. She seems deliriously happy. ‘More cake?’
‘No thanks. And thanks very much for the lift. It was a big help.’
‘No worries, mate,’ says the man, raising the rum bottle. It’s now only a third full. I get out and bend down to the driver’s window. The woman gives me a dopey grin. ‘Bye,’ she drawls, rippling her fingers.
‘Bye. Drive carefully.’
She giggles, puts the Mazda into gear, and they drive off slowly, both singing. The car weaves, but there’s little danger of her hitting anything, because it’s the only vehicle in sight.
By happy coincidence Henrik, Pia, Godfred, Irene and I are all on the same flight north to Vava’u. Before we leave, the Royal Tongan Airlines people weigh not only our bags but us. One by one we step on to the scales and our body weights are carefully noted. The flight itself takes about forty minutes. Half an hour into the air and we’re all exclaiming at the beauty of the islands of Vava’u, scattered across the ocean below us.
Vava’u is like a big piece of geological jigsaw puzzle, tilted south so that the sea has flooded its coast, turning valleys into sounds and mountains to hills. The result is a labyrinth of waterways, and ridges covered with rain forests and palm trees. And in the centre of these sounds, enclosed by hills, is the South Pacific islands’ finest harbour, Port of Refuge.
It was the Spaniard Antonio Mourelle who, in 1781, came across Vava’u and the harbour at its core, joyfully naming it Puerto de Refugio. But the Tongans had been using it for about 3,000 years before that, calling it Lolo ’a Halaevalu, meaning Oil of the Princess Halaevalu, because of the sheen of the harbour’s waters on a still day. Mourelle claimed the islands for Spain but nothing came of that, and today the harbour is treasured as a haven by hundreds of yachties from all over the world, who sail into it gratefully and moor right on the front step of the island’s town, Neiafu. Yacht charters are big in Neiafu, too. As a result, the attractive hillside town contains an odd mix of people: Tongans in traditional tupeni (skirts), ta’ovalu (waist mats) and sandals wander about the streets, along with chic Californian couples in designer nautical gear, stocking up on their vegies, canned drinks, Chinese sneakers and handicrafts.
In Neiafu I’m staying at a newish hotel right above the harbour. It’s a heavy concrete-block building with a supermarket on the floor above and a restaurant below the guestrooms. Remembering the seismic hyperactivity throughout these islands, I scrutinise the block walls for possible fissures and wonder about local building codes, until I’m distracted by the panoramic view of yachts, harbour, hills and forest from the balcony. My travelling companions have dispersed to other parts of the town, but we’re reuniting for dinner tomorrow night. After watching the twilight turn the coconut palms on the hills to mop-topped silhouettes, I go downstairs to watch television.
Back in Nuku’alofa the television stations serve up a mixture of cartoons, rabid evangelists from the American South, CNN news, and sport, mainly boxing and wrestling. Here in the far north, however, they haven’t yet got live TV, although they’re working on it. There is a satellite dish on the front lawn of the hotel. A big flex runs from it across the grass and through the bar window to the TV set, which is sitting on the bar. That this is a temporary arrangement can be deduced from the ditch that has been dug across the lawn, in readiness for the cable. Keen to see what has been happening in the world outside the kingdom, I watch a tall, pale, skinny American missionary who is fiddling with the TV’s remote. He is getting jumpier by the minute and resorting to some very un-missionary language. Jamming his thumb on the remote button, he produces a picture of a very black, frizzy-haired woman extolling a brand of washing powder called, oddly, Omo. The missionary starts yelling. ‘What the fuck is going on here? Where the fuck has CNN gone? Jesus …’
It seems that the dish outside has been aimed at the wrong satellite, so that all we can get is a broadcast from Papua New Guinea. This consists mostly of Melanesians advertising cigarettes, deodorants and Omo, interspersed with old American comedy shows. This rapidly palls, so I go upstairs and get into bed.
Some time in the night I’m woken by a strange sensation. The room is swaying. Nothing sudden, nothing violent, it’s just as if the building is swinging gently to a silent subterranean tune. The ceiling light swings back and forth, as if it’s conducting the Earth’s movement. Unmistakably, it is an earthquake. I lie paralysed, my mind convulsing in time to the movement of the tectonic plate. I think of the supermarket above, and the crammed shelves of canned beef and mackerel, jandals, Coke and Pepsi, Royal beer, cheeseballs and Chinese sneakers, under which I will be entombed, until my remains are dug out and displayed around the world on CNN news. But nothing happens. The swaying eventually stops and the building remains intact.
Next day, when I mention the incident excitedly to some locals, they shrug. Earthquake? Don’t worry about it, they happen all the time. Later, back in Auckland, I see on The New Zealand Herald’s back page a dramatic aerial colour photograph of a newly born volcano which exploded out of the sea in western Vava’u the night I experienced the earthquake. The Tongans have to think up a name for the new island, but before they’ve settled on one there’s another earthquake which takes the island back under the sea again.
As elsewhere in the South Pacific, on Vava’u the Church of the Latter Day Saints seems to be winning the competition for local souls. But judging by one of the Mormon churches I see in Neiafu, the other faiths may be fighting back. Someone – an enraged Methodist, perhaps? – has torn some of the lettering from a cream-painted wall so that it reads CHURCH OF THE LATTER DAY A NTS. Watching a group of identically clad Mormons slowly making their way up the street in the distance, it seems to me a particularly inventive piece of vandalism.
It is, I find, an illusion that time stands still in Tonga. As elsewhere, it flees. Godfred, Henrik, Pia, Irene and I have a farewell dinner in Neiafu – a Madras curry cooked by a Cockney. We exchange email addresses and hope we’ll meet again. Henrik and Pia have met other Danes and are off to Suva to crew on their yacht, before returning to Denmark to breed. Irene is still finding family and Godfred has another wharf to design. We have had one of those travelling friendships, fleeting, fraternal, memorable. And as for Vava’u, well it’s undeniably the loveliest part of Tonga. Yet recently young men in a rugby team from these islands went on a tour of New Zealand and, on the day they were due to fly home, vanished into the suburbs of south Auckland. It appears the rugby was just a pretext for the players to emigrate illegally. When it came to a choice of whether to spend the rest of their lives on beautiful tropical islands or take their chances on the mean streets of south Auckland, they made a dash for the latter.
A while ago, too, I had a fax from a schoolteacher at one of the secondary colleges on Vava’u. Her seventh form English class had been studying my South Pacific novel Temptation Island as their set text, and had prepared some questions for me to answer. While flattered in the way authors always are by such requests, I was also surprised: the novel is about a South Pacific island whose government is corrupt, malfeasance is rampant, aid money squandered, the civil service bloated and press freedom severely curtailed. There is violence and more than a little sex in the story. It could be seen as subversive to place such a book in the hands of young Tongans, but bravely, in my opinion, the teacher had decided that it was important to do so. I faxed my replies back to the students but never heard from them or the teacher again. Then, just a few months later, a tropical cyclone struck Vava’u. The college had its roof blown off, causing, according to news reports, ‘serious loss of school textbooks and other equipment’. To date I have not received any re-orders.