Time is a relative thing in Tonga. Though this is not bad at all if you are mainly here for relaxing.

The first six days we stayed in a little beach house, like Robinson Crusoe but with a fridge. Snorkeling and swimming, lying in the sun, for dinner barbecued Mahi Mahi or Red Snapper. Every now and then whales swim by our lagoon. We also had a good time with the other guests Sarah and Matt from Australia, Sally and Zane from New Zealand and also the local dog Chino.

We had our own kitchen and therefore had the pleasure of going shopping here, it is quite interesting: tomatoes, cucumbers, bananas, etc. can only be bought in bulk at the market. There is only one supermarket on the island of Tongatapu, in the main town Nuku’alofa, throughout the island you would go to one of the prison-like Chinese stores, sometimes they even have beer (“PSSST!!”). The Chinese on Tonga are getting more and more, not to everyone’s liking, though. In return the Kingdom receives questionable gifts from China like ill-reputed planes and ships. And on sundays, when life in Tonga stands still and everyone goes to church, the Chinese restaurants are the only places that are open.

A highlight of a different kind was definitely the flight to ‘Eua, a small island 40km south-east of the main island Tongatapu – a comedy in three acts:

The fact that we would be crossing the pacific with a propeller aircraft already made me a little tense, but when we arrived at the domestic airport as expected at 3pm – one hour ahead of the departure – and the guy at the “Check in” muttered something that sounded like “the plane is broken”, even Alex got a little worried. On the airport there also were two other Austrians and a Frenchman who were scheduled to fly with the same plane (“Islander”) to Ha’apai already at 1pm, but the pilot apparently had refused to continue flying the plane.

So at 3:30pm it seemed given that we wouldn’t fly, by 3:45pm the lady of the highly motivated ground crew told us that 15 minutes later she could officially advise that the flight was cancelled. At 4pm to our surprise the word was that we would be flying, with another aircraft, a Queen Air. Also the (longer) flight to Ha’apai would take place, using the (previously?) broken Islander (where they just before they had extracted a large part from it?!). Whatever, we would be taken with the working plane.

Then the 7 passengers had to be weighed, including the hand luggage. Funny experience. The departure time was delayed for another hour to 6pm. At 5:15pm 5-6 people gathered in front of a computer screen and then it took them 45 minutes (at least that is what we suspect) to figure out the load balance of the plane. Maybe we shouldn’t have finished our 2 litre water bottle because they then had to redo the whole calculation. (The solution apparently was to put a passenger in the co-pilot’s seat.) At 6:10pm we finally took off. 8 minutes later we landed on ‘Eua.

The island of ‘Eua has even less infrastructure than Tongatapu – no busses or taxis, no restaurants or supermarkets, just two places who offered accomodations to tourists. Here we were very active for 2.5 days, hiked, cycled and had nice evenings with other guests at Taina’s Place.

We made our way back to Tongatapu by ferry, departure time: vague.

After all, Tonga was something really special, we had a relaxing and at the same time interesting time, met very nice people and are in retrospect very glad that we settled on this pacific island.