'Eua

When I was planning this trip, realizing that I could only realistically visit a couple islands other than Tongatapu, I tried to find two destinations as different as possible. My choice to complement Uoleva was the hilly, rainforested island of ‘Eua, where all reports promised fantastic hiking and all kinds of daytrips into remote forests and beaches and caves, all of which sounded great to me. 'Eua is also geologically distinct from the rest of the country, as it is a volcanic island much older than the coral atolls that comprise the rest of Tonga.

So, a day later than planned due to my unscheduled night in Tongatapu I got on a plane to ‘Eua. I saw several pieces of literature claiming that the flight from Tongatapu to ‘Eua is the shortest commercial flight on the planet. I’m not sure how true that is, since I saw varying reports on how long it is (ten minutes? Or eight? I didn’t time it, myself) and I think there must be some stiff competition for that superlative. (For example, I was on a flight from Levuka to Suva in Fiji that was just 12 minutes long, and there must be many others similar around the world.)

But in any case: short flight, and I was on ‘Eua! At a sweet seaside, Tongan-motel-style lodging.

After I got settled in and started on my first of many cups of "Tongan green tea" (lemongrass and lemon leaves)... 

...I started asking the employees about tour options and ran smack into my own expectations like a brick wall when reality didn’t exactly match up with them. To my surprise, as on Uoleva, I was the only person staying at the accommodations I’d booked. And while I’ve gotten a nice kick out of having all these places to myself so early in the off-season, that does unfortunately mean that there was no one around to help me meet the minimum number of participants in all the tours and hiking adventures. I even asked the manager of the place where I stayed to call around to some of the other accommodations to see if they have any guests who are going on a group tour I could tag along on, and she reported back that I was pretty much the only tourist on the island, apparently. Crazy!

So, my options were to pay a not-insignificant amount of money to meet the two- or three-person minimum in order to take a guided trip, to do one or more self-guided tours (which still involved some steep transport charges), or just cave in and let go of my expectations and just enjoy my time on ‘Eua for what it was and see what developed. I decided to go with a mix of the second and third options. But on my first day, I stuck with the going-with-the-flow option rather than the self-guided tour in hopes that a plan-B might present itself. The self-guided option made me nervous since on my first afternoon on ‘Eua, the manager pointed me down a path into the woods and said the beach was just five minutes’ walk, an adventure which resulted in me getting completely lost among the thick trees when the trail petered out into something totally indistinguishable and coming face-to-face with several enormous, evil-looking spiders who had spun yellow webs—so strong they made a frightening snapping sound when I would walk into and accidentally break one—across the path and the non-path areas I was bush-whacking through. 

When I gave up and tried to turn around and retrace my steps, I just got even more lost. So I was having serious doubts about my ability to safely navigate a self-guided route anywhere.

Thus, on the first of my two full days on ‘Eua, I taught a couple of the little girls (whose moms staff the place I was staying) to play Go Fish. We had fun doing that, plus I got to learn how to say “ace,” “king,” “queen,” “jack,” the numbers 2-10, and “do you have a…” and “Go fishing” in Tongan. Interestingly, the number 7 is identical in Tongan to what it is in Malagasy, and several of the other numbers are very similar between the two languages. I was not totally shocked by this, since I know that linguistic historians have shown the immigrants to Madagascar that ended up being the dominant settlers must have made the trek from Malaysian Borneo (check out a map; that part is truly amazing) since the language spoken on Malaysian Borneo is more closely related to Malagasy than any other. But it was still cool to be on the other side of Borneo and have the linguistic fabric still woven so tight. It was also really fun to realize that we were playing this game of Go Fish in Tonga with a deck of “the sights of Milan” cards I’d used frequently at South Pole over the past year, but which I’d purchased in Italy prior to that. 

Then I borrowed an umbrella and, harkening back to my days in Africa, used it as shade as I took a long walk on roads free of evil-looking spiders. Though there was no way to avoid the significant mud created from the past two days of downpour rain.

When asked, woman at the post/currency-exchange office recommended a particular road to follow that turned out to be really lovely, winding uphill till I had some nice views of the coast and Tongatapu in the distance. Mostly it was just really nice to watch Tongans doing their thing and getting to know what the most typical sights of life here tend to be.

On the way home, a man heading to a village past where I was staying offered me a ride and, when I told him I was American, told me there is a Peace Corps Volunteer living in his village. And thus, plan-B came into being. 

That afternoon, I walked down the road and only had to ask one person where the American/Peace Corps Volunteer lived, and two minutes later I was talking with newly minted volunteer J and her fellow ‘Eua PCV, N. And within a half-hour of chatting with them, we had plans to go hiking together the next day.

It was a really pretty (and really sweaty/uphill!) hike to the lookout point in ‘Eua National Park (the only NP in the country). Most of our walking was to get to (and from) the park, which stretches along the east coast of ‘Eua, whereas all of the villages of the island are on the west coast. As we approached the park, it was totally clear when we’d reached its edge, as there was a logging road with trees felled on the west (right, in this pic) side and the forest on that side clearly second growth, but the forest darker (and primary-looking) on the east (left) side. 

We kept hiking to the entrance to Rat’s Cave, which has no rats, but a comically small, tube-like passageway that dumps you out to a 7-foot drop onto a cave/ledge with a spectacular vista over the east coast and the trees of the park. WOW. (And good think J is really tall, as otherwise I'm not sure how N and I would have gotten up and down from that ledge!)

Then we hiked a bit farther up to the official look-out point over the forest. Birds were swooping and the view into the primary forest trees was spectacular.

I longed to take the trail down to the beach and get to walk through the forest and maybe get to see ‘Eua’s endemic red parrot. But since we’d walked all the way from the east coast of the island, our roundtrip was already 4+ hours and 10 miles, and the additional 4-5 hours that the hike down to the beach and back would have taken was a bit beyond us for the day. Next time….