Thursday, 1 November 2018

Letter Home - Tonga - Part 1 of 5.

Here is the first in a series of Liz's recent letter home describing our time in Tonga.
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Hello!  

We spent almost three months enjoying the Ha'apai and Vava'u Groups in the Kingdom of Tonga, where celebration of the Royal Family neatly bookended our season: there was a holiday when we arrived for the King's birthday, and a holiday at the end for the birthday of the Crown Prince :)

While we were in Tonga, we had a bit of a summer holiday feeling on the boat, with less maintenance and chores, and more emphasis on exploring, kiting, swimming with whales, and meeting other kid boats.  For once, we did the things that *we* assume that *you* assume we do all the time!  

Given that it's now Hallowe'en, I feel a bit like I'm late with my stereotypical "what we did on our summer vacation" project ... but after daily notes while we were on passage, I thought it was high time for an update.  You'll want a big cuppa for this one, as it's admittedly long, but I thought you might like to know some of the stories behind the photos.

If you followed Max's updates on Yachts in Transit you would have noticed us travelling from the Ha'apai Group up to Vava'u, back again to the Ha'apai, then back to Vava'u before heading to Fiji.  When we cleared into Tongatapu, we were told that we could extend our 30-day visa in the Ha'apai.  Of course, you know what comes next: we arrived there and found that we could *not* extend our visa, and that we would need to go to Vava'u within 31 days.  The fines for overstaying made sure that we headed north with time in hand!  As it turned out, this was fortunate, as it meant that our return to the Ha'apai was during the height of the whale season; had we simply stayed longer at the beginning, we would have missed the majority of our whale experiences.  



One of the things we loved about the Ha'apai Group was the lack of other boats, so we were pretty happy that two of the first boats that we met had kids aboard: SV Forever had a 13-year-old boy with many of the same interests as Johnathan, while SV Kitenga had a seven-year-old boy, so there was lots of running around on the beach and playing with sticks !  

Five years after our last significant use of our First Aid kit, we were especially grateful that the 'Kitenga mum' was a nurse!  As I was finishing a sunset yoga practice ashore, a quiet but firm voice said, "Mom, it's time to go.  Benjamin has hurt his head."  Johnathan was just off the beach in the dinghy, and Victoria had come to fetch me.  When we arrived at Fluenta, I was surprised that the first thing I heard was laughter, but Max had Benjamin watching a cartoon and playing a video game while "applying pressure" to the place on his forehead where his "blood was leaking out". He had tripped while crossing the cockpit to greet the kids who were returning to Fluenta in Trickle, and he had hit his head on one of our main winches. He hit the top edge of the self-tailer track with enough force to make a 3/4" slice in his forehead and for the bottom edge to make a parallel groove on his skin 1/2" below.    Yikes. The moment he saw me, the tears began again with gusto.  



The kids and Max had already started him on every-10-minutes homeopathic Arnica, so I scooped him up to apply the other universal remedy of motherhood (i.e. nursing), and endeavoured to calm him back down.  Our friends from Kitenga were already planning to come over for the evening, but Max went and asked them to come over straight away, as this was the first time that we had needed to use our Steri-Strips, and I figured that we should solicit any help available!  The combination of the Steri-Strips and Johnathan being Benjamin's own personal comedian soon had Benjamin back in stitches, and once he was 'taped up' that was the last we saw of tears over his forehead.  

[An interesting side note is that he seemed to have a lower pain threshold for any minor bumps and scratches for a few weeks, but this now seems to have returned to normal.]  


The Steri-Strips took exactly two weeks to fall off, and Benjamin was quite fascinated to look at his forehead in the mirror several times a day to judge the progress of his skin at "knitting itself back together".  The number of times we have had to open our big medical kit has actually been quite small, but this is why we carry it!  Thankfully, the rest of our many evenings together with Kitenga were much more uneventful!

One of the things that I love about Victoria and Johnathan is that regardless of how much or how little time they have with new kids, they will find something in common and make the most of their time together.  Whenever possible, this will involve camping ashore, or at the very least building a structure out of palm fronds and a camp fire.  Time for s'mores is an added bonus.  They didn't end up camping with the kid boats in Ha'apai, but when we got to Vava'u, even though the overall pace of socializing moved a little faster, and we often only had a couple of nights together, they managed to fit in several camping expeditions.


One morning in Vava'u, while on our way to pick up fruits and vegetables at the market before going out to anchor, we stopped to say hello to a rare Canadian boat, and discovered that they had 15-year-old daughter.  Since they were also heading out overnight before leaving for the Ha'apai, and we wanted to visit their preferred anchorage eventually, we decided to change plans and join them.  We packed an entire season of visiting into one evening and one day with SV Element, with an impromptu potluck (somehow I knew that if we didn't include meal preparations in the grownups' plans, we might never feed our kids ...), beach day (complete with thatch hut and bonfire with sausages and s'mores), and moms' tea break; it was kind of fun to think that we might all meet up in Canada sometime after our return :)  Victoria was especially happy to meet a girl her own age, as we had only met boys for Johnathan and Benjamin to play with at that point in the season.



On another occasion, a boat hailed us on VHF because they had heard that we had kids (SV Beach Flea).  Imagine our delight when we invited them to join us at our anchorage and found out that they had coincidentally pulled in a few boats away the previous evening!  We spent an enjoyable couple of days together: the kids camped on the beach in a combination of tents and palm structures, while the parents enjoyed a potluck meal and socializing.  It was especially fun for Victoria and me to do mother-daughter yoga with Lisa and Abby, as they had recently been practicing with my dear friend Allison in Mexico!  It can certainly be a small, and well-connected cruising world :)


When we returned to Vava'u to clear out at the end of the season, one of the first things we heard was the sound of teenagers on the radio, and the very first morning we were at anchor in Neiafu, one of the moms excitedly stopped by in her dinghy because she had heard that we had a 14-year-old girl on board, to let us know that her daughter would stop by later.  Stop by, she did, with two kids from other boats in tow; we had gone from drought to flood with teenagers, and soon found ourselves swept up into the social scene of the fleet of kid-boats that had just come across the Pacific.  As usual, we didn't have long together, but the kids made the most of it with potlucks, dinghy raft-ups (our first in six years of cruising), and excursions ashore.  Unfortunately, by this time, we were gearing up to make the jump to Fiji, so as usual, we just had to enjoy our time with the other families while it lasted.  

These stories really give you the up-side and the down-side of cruising in a nutshell: we become quick at packing an intense friendship into a short period of time, but then we *have to* pack all our visiting into little bursts.  We are always saying Hello and Goodbye, and I have to say that even after over six years, it doesn't necessarily get any easier.  Thank goodness for email and online connectivity :)

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Stay tuned for the remaining parts over the next few days while we have internet.

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