Trip report: Tonga
Date of visit: January 2020
There are only a few more miserable situations than arriving at the airport and finding out that your plane has already left.
It happened on January 4 2020. The travel year 2019 had already caused me some unfortunate incidents and it seemed as if the curse would remain in the new year.
Our flight from Auckland to Tonga was supposed to leave at 11.50 AM. But when we arrived at the airport at 9 we couldn’t find our flight on the screen. A quick look at Flightradar24 confirmed my first guess: Flight NZ 1336 left already two hours ago. Unfortunately without us.
How could this happen? We did not book directly through Air New Zealand but through an travel agency. Something you should actually always avoid. These third parties often have cheaper prices than the airline itself, but their service can be either catastrophic or simply non-existent. In our case our agency failed to inform us about the changed flight times.
Air New Zealand had a different view. At their counter, they told us that they the agency sent them a message saying that we had been informed. This was simply not true. Contacting the agency was not an option either. These companies are doing everything they can to make it as difficult as possible for customers to reach them. Apart from that it was Saturday night in Europe and their call center was already closed anyway.
My first reaction? Panic! It looked like I wasn’t gonna make it to my 98th country. No flights are landing in Tonga on Sundays. And our next flight to Samoa was supposed to leave on Monday morning. In other words: if we didn’t make it to Tonga that day, our whole itinerary would collapse.
Fortunately, there was still good news: at 5 PM another Air New Zealand flight was going to fly to Tonga. The bad news? We had to buy new flight tickets at a price of about 900 Euro for two people. The second bad news: we lost even more time in Tonga, where we would have had less than 48 hours anyway. Instead, we spent about eight hours at the airport in Auckland.
Oh, in case you are wondering if we will get the money back from this agency: I’m trying to do so right now, but I see our chances at most 5-10%.
The fattest country in the world
Also affected by our flight cancellation was the lady who was supposed to pick us up from the airport. She came to the airport twice, because our hotel obviously failed to inform her in time. Needless to say, her mood was not the best. However, she already had the ultimate plan how to compensate for the lost time.
When we informed her that we wanted to do a trip to one of the nearby islands the next day, she had a better idea. Why wouldn’t we spend the whole day exploring Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga where we just arrived? She added that the island we intended to visit was boring after all and it would be much better to see the sights in Tongatapu. And as chance would have it, she even offered us to be our tour guide.
Lonely Planet describes Tongatapu as “unpolished, gritty and unfailingly authentic”, which sounds like a nice paraphrase of a shithole. That’s why we preferred to leave Tongatapu on the only day we had left in Tonga. But to be polite, we told the lady that we would contact her if necessary. She obviously didn’t like that answer and continued badmouthing the island we wanted to visit.
With about 40 km/h we drove to the hotel. A speed that seems to be rather standard in Polynesia. “He’s drunk,” said the lady and pointed to the car in front of us. In fact, the car zigzagged along the road in front of us. “Most people here die because of accidents caused by drunk drivers,” she explained.
My first impressions of Tonga made me doubt this statement, because I would have rather guessed that obesity was the leading cause of death. Nowhere else in the world have I seen so many overweight people as in Tonga. Most of the people we saw looked like they weighted more than 100 kilos.
According to the World Health Organization, Tonga is the second fattest country in the world. Only the people in the USA are fatter. But if you look at the measuring method, you have to question this order, because it is calculated by BMI (body mass index).
The BMI only shows the relationship between weight and height. This means that even very athletic people, of whom there are quite a few in the USA, are declared to be obese. I haven’t seen a single person with an athletic body in Tonga, though. As a side note: third place on the WHO ranking was taken by the country we visited after Tonga: Samoa.
But even bigger than the bellies of the locals were their hearts. The Tongans were among the nicest people I have ever encountered. For example John, one of the first Tongans we had met. He was born in Tonga but now living in the USA.
“We Tongans love to eat,” said John. “Sometimes we sit together for hours and hours eating and chatting.” John himself was also heavily overweight. Just like the other guests sitting in front of our hotel. John bent over and whispered, “People here even eat dogs!” – “Dogs?” we asked, somewhat incredulously. “Yes. Recently I was at a party where three roasted dogs were served.” He took his cell phone and showed us a picture. Indeed. Roasted dog as a festive dish.
The subject of eating dogs comes up again later. A lady who works for the hotel tells us about the preacher who recently said during the sermon that people should be ashamed of eating man’s best friend. To me, it sounded like a bigger issue in society, if such a topic is even addressed during a sermon with many people present.
I don’t know if we would have eaten dog at that time, but we were extremely hungry. The problem was that it was already 10:30 pm. Most restaurants were not open until next Monday. Because Tonga is somehow a special country…
If people had to name the most religious country in the world, the choice would probably be Saudi Arabia or Vatican City. But after my visit to Tonga I think that this small Pacific state would be a strong candidate for this title. Christianity plays an important role in the life of the Tongans and reaches its peak on Sunday, when the whole country stands still.
I have already mentioned that no flights land on Sunday. However, everything else is also closed. Shops, restaurants, simply everything. Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga, resembles a ghost town like I have never seen before. Not even in Ashgabat.
We were able to buy a pack of potato chips, cookies and water just before closing time, but it seemed as if we would go to bed without any real dinner. Whether we would come for a warm meal on Sunday was still uncertain. John recommended a restaurant called Mr. Chicken only about two minutes away from the hotel. In the end, the 2.5* rating on Google prevented us from visiting.
Pangaimotu – a paradise in Tonga
Although everything is closed on Sunday, there is one exception. Next to Tongatapu there are some islands that you can reach by boat in only about 15 minutes. We chose Pangaimotu, an island that looked incredibly beautiful on pictures. As a little bonus there is even a resort where you can eat.
The guests of our hotel said that it would take about 10-15 minutes to walk to the ferry terminal. Depending on how fast we would walk. John was sure that we would make it in 10 minutes as according to him I had the body of a marathon runner. I assumed that pretty much everyone who wasn’t quite as corpulent as the locals would fall into the marathon runner category for them.
In fact, it took us about half an hour to get there, which made me wonder how the hell someone weighing over 100 kilos would make this distance in 10-15 minutes. Nevertheless, the march was quite interesting, because Nuku’alofa was, as already mentioned, a ghost town. There were practically no people on the road and also cars we only saw 1-2.
Apart from that, Nuku’alofa didn’t look very spectacular, but it was neither as bad as I had interpreted it after reading the Lonely Planet. The capital of the country is rather a village consisting of a few streets, a few (closed) shops and a few houses in colonial architecture.
But it remains clear that Tonga’s main island, after what we have seen there, has nothing to do with a tropical paradise, as some might expect. However, it is mostly the case with the island nations in the South Pacific that the main island, where the capital is located, is actually the least interesting part of the country.
After a 15-minute boat ride, we arrived on the island Pangaimotu, which on the other hand definitely looked like an island paradise. The beach was beautiful and the water turquoise just like you would imagine a South Pacific island. It wasn’t really busy either. Besides us there were about 20 to 30 other guests on the island.
The other people on the island were locals, US-Americans, New Zealanders and Australians. I hardly saw any Europeans during the whole trip through the island nations of the South Pacific. One elderly Tongan even shook my hand because he “had never seen a Swiss person before”. In the end, for most Europeans, Tonga or Samoa remain countries that are simply too far away to visit.
We spent the whole afternoon on Pangaimotu. But to be honest, there was not much to do there. Most visitors enjoy a few drinks and eat the burger that they include in the boat price. The burger is prepared in the “resort”, which is located directly at the ferry terminal (and is rather a simple beach bar).
But doing nothing was more than okay. Tonga is anyway a country where the clocks seem to run much slower than in the rest of the world. And so we joined this “Tongan way of life” and enjoyed the day at the beach and in the sea. Besides, after two days in Singapore and two weeks in New Zealand it was our first real beach day during this trip.
A clearly too short visit to Tonga
We left Tonga already the next morning for Samoa. That was a pity, because we would have liked to see more of this country. Tonga offers much more than Tongatapu. For example Vava’u, a group of islands that looks absolutely stunning. And even Tongatapu has some nice places such as Ha’atafu Beach that we missed.
But as I mentioned in the Fiji report, the flight connections in the South Pacific are a challenge if you want to visit different island nations in this region. So we had to base our route on the availability of flights. That meant two nights in Tonga and seven in Samoa. In retrospect, that was too long for Samoa and definitely too short for Tonga.
Nevertheless, we made the most of our short time. With Tonga we saw a country that is anything but touristy (it is actually one of the least visited countries), but whose inhabitants are among the friendliest in the world. Besides, we have experienced a country that is completely at rest on Sunday, something I have never experienced anywhere else.
Did we miss anything in Tonga? Definitely.
Eating dog, however, is not one of them.
