TONGA

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HELLO, hello bloggies, sorry for the delay, nothing I could do, cut off from the outside world !! Well almost !! So going back to when we arrived at Tonga, we flew from AUCKLAND to the island, (can't remember the date now). The islanders on the plane seem to bring an awful lot of hand lugguage, lots of 'mats' These are what the women wear, no kidding, they wear these woven mats around their waist's and because funerals are a very big thing out there, they seem to bring over lots of cloths, purple colour and these are hung up outside the houses. So the first night we went to the buffet, traditional dancing evening, (Stu wearing the flowers) we had been up for 38 hours as we had to wait at the airport all night for the flight out to the island. Sooooo tired. Oh yes, forgot to say, was looking a bit worse for wear at the airport, the hair was looking like a birds nest on me head, cut off denims, flip flops, ruck sack hand luggage, not a scrape of make up on, go through security only to be taken out of the crowd, yes only me and asked if I had any illegal drugs on me !! oh yes, no joke, so with their whissey, washey wand, waving it all over me, my arms lifted up, then taking swobs from my bag, putting it through a machine and announcing I was fine and could go through. Well, what I wanted to say was 'excuse me, I'm a ladeeeeee, I work for a professional organisation (no names mentioned of course!!), so off I go to meet Stu and I say 'do I look like a drug mule ?' he looked at me, said it could be the wild hair, I agreed, first on my list when I get back to Melbourne, a little snippet to be done. You know I watched other people and no one else got pulled over, what do make of that then. Anyhow back on Tonga, the following day after the buffet night, we just lazed around, Stu decide's he's off to the village to get some supplies and did I want to walk up the couple of dirt tracks with him, Ehh, no thanks, were in the middle of nowhere, 30 km from the main town and we didn't even know where the village was and it was the hottest time during the day, NO THANK YOU, so off he goes. An hour and a half later, back he comes with beer, a couple of tins of mixed veg and some crisps, I said 'that's not much', he said 'they haven't got a lot' and you can't go into the shops, you have to point to things through a cage and it turns out all the shop keepers seem to be Chinese and don't speak English. He said all the little kids were following him, it is really poor on the island, they have a Royal Family there, (it is known as The Kingdom of Tonga) and they have a palace in town, the churches look pretty rich and we saw a huge Mormon campus, gated, which was clean and white and again looked rich, but for the general islanders with huge un-employment, they still seemed happy people. We saw prisoners working in the fields, including people that are in their for murder, apparently they are made to work, not lounge about in cells with their x boxes !!!

Tonga is made up of 176 islands, 40 of those are inhabited, population of about 70,000 people. Polynesians are thought to have arrived in Tonga more than 3,000 years ago. The small Kingdom as it is known, was mentioned during the Rugby World Cup in 2011 in New Zealand by the national team, 'Ikale Tahi'. It was the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman who became the first european to set foot on Tonga in 1643. Thought I would put a few facts up for you all.

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Comments

[Sandy]

Airport facetime
Not surprised you got pulled aside, a bit of info for you followers out there, karol and stu face timed us from the airport before they got on the flight, and we commented on Karol's attire, at the end of the conversation, Kev pointed out that Karol looked like a druggie.

[Stu muir]

Hi
Excuse me, I'm a lady !!