Heading to Tonga!

Said a (very temporary, this time--yay!) goodbye to my fantastic siblings...

...and the sweet munchkins...

...and embarked upon a couple days of just pure travel, as the way I've planned this trip is not exactly the most efficient air travel path ever taken. Oh well. Back to Christchurch via Sydney, a night in NZ, and then I got on a domestic flight to Auckland that doubled as an amazing flight-seeing tour of the South Island, as it was a brilliant day. What views!

That little spit of land you can see in the upper right of this photo--pretty sure that's Kaikoura, the city most profoundly affected by the earthquake that hit NZ earlier this month. No evidence of the destruction visible from our distance, though.

And the Queen Charlotte Islands, a favorite stop of mine on the Great New Zealand Tour of 2015, splayed out into the sea between the north and south islands...wow.

After that, the skies were cloudier, so no good views of the North Island till we were actually landing in Auckland, from where I got on another plane to the Polynesian island nation of Tonga. Officially: The Kingdom of Tonga.

It's been a long, long time--since Africa, I think--since I went somewhere completely new, by myself, just because. So this is a treat and I've really been looking forward to it. The adventure really started on the plane, which was a 180-seat jet and mostly full, but with only about 4 other Westerners on board and everyone else looking Tongan. (Though when we disembarked, many more than just us 5 obviously foreign folks went into the immigration line for non-citizens, so many of them probably were expatriate Tongans, maybe several generations removed, and perhaps identifying as Kiwi or Aussie or whatever.)

I had a window seat, the middle seat was empty, and then a Tongan woman, maybe 65-ish, was sitting on the aisle and cracking me up the whole trip. She got on the plane completely late--they had to hold the flight for her--and had in tow one of the largest winter jackets I've seen, which was apparently necessary for her summertime visit to NZ. Through the whole flight, she was sprawling farther and farther across the empty seat between us, her hand eventually just flat-out resting on my knee, until she got up to use the bathroom when the fasten-seatbelt sign was on and she got scolded by the flight attendants and came back to our row giggling like a teenager. Then later, when she got up to try again after the sign went off and I went too, we were both trapped at length in the social gathering that was the aisle of the airplane--everyone seemingly knowing each other, or just coming from a culture where you treat everyone else like you know them, and swapping seats and standing mid-aisle for chats. When there was finally a break in the chaos that would allow us to get back, my row-partner gave me a forceful shove toward our seats and ran playfully behind me up the aisle, laughing the whole way, as if we were co-conspirators who had just played a prank on someone. So even though the setting of the airplane was very developed/Western-feeling, the atmosphere was already hilariously non-Western and a great reminder of Peace Corps days and third-world travel and a great primer for the upcoming adventure. Made me happy.

The plane skirted the southern, cliffed coast of Tongatapu (the main and largest island of Tonga) before landing at an airport that reminded me of Madagascar: coming down off the plane into a humid heat that sticks around even at night, walking on the tarmac to the concrete airport, dozens of people leaning against a fence to watch the spectacle, a skinny cat skittering across the corrugated metal roof of the immigration office.

So here I am in Tonga! I will be back later with another post, but for now, here's the view from the porch of the guesthouse on the outskirts of Nuku'alofa where I'm spending my first couple nights, trying to adjust to the heat and getting to know the local family that runs this place.

More soon!