Tonga Adventures...

Writing on New Year’s Eve, 2024

Where to start? We’ve been busily traveling through the South Pacific and have reached New Zealand. When you last heard from me, we were leaving the Society Islands, better known, perhaps, as French Polynesia. We went on to Tonga and then a lot of sea days before reaching New Zealand and our first three stops, Bay of Islands, Matiatia Bay, and Auckland. We are now sailing towards Wellington but will have to miss Kaikoura that we were supposed to visit the day after Wellington. It is not to be, thanks to the weather gods whom we have definitely not been pleasing lately! The good news is that we get to overnight in Wellington. Perhaps we’ll have dinner ashore?

Starting with Tonga. We had a long, ship-sponsored tour of the island. Not the best experience but it was an experience. Oh, boy, was it an experience. We knew the bus would be primitive (we were warned not to expect too much), but I at least thought it would have openable windows considering the temperatures were hovering in the low 90s---and the humidity was in the 90s as well. And the driver seemed to think that parking the bus in the sun was an admirable idea. We did not agree! They miscounted the number of visitors for the show and meal, and since we were in the very back of the bus and thus the last ones off the bus, they had to find seats for us to be able to eat and watch the show. As I said, it was an interesting adventure.

The lowlights highlights:

The women who served our lunch. They also danced for us later.

Same women dancing for us.

The men wore skirt as well.

An artistic use of old bicycle tires.

Flying foxes have a home on Tonga...

...and back we came to our home away from home, beautiful, airconditioned, Seabourn Quest!

We did a few other things on the tour, but none were memorable since I didn't take any photos of them!

Then we had three---or was it four?---sea days and on to beautiful New Zealand in my next post.