We visited Tonga for a couple of weeks in August 2019 – here is our log from that time.
When we made the decision to continue on from French Polynesia we had a few options and one of the reasons we continued sailing, rather than trying to sell in Tahiti, was so that we would get to visit Tonga. We’re not sure why, but Tonga has always been high on Mia’s bucket list of places to visit on Itchy Foot. Unfortunately, it failed to live up to our expectations and on the whole, was a bit of a letdown – but not all the blame can be laid on Tonga’s shores.
Tonga is one of those place you can divide into three groups of islands and in fairness we only managed to make it to the northernmost group: the Vava’u group. These islands, and especially the main town, felt just like the Caribbean with everyone wanting to make a buck and sadly the worst offenders were mostly ex-cruisers. Going out for lunch is a rare treat for us and the first three places we tried was all served with a snarl and very much priced for charter boat holidaymakers; too rich for our blood.
In general, where we found an extensive charter business we noticed higher prices and worse service. And Vava’u was all about that. It’s not just the restaurants and other shore-based services but also the attitude of trying to get as much money out of the charter boat people as quickly as possible. With the bays being deep and often full of coral, so there were many mooring balls to help out yachties. We don’t mind paying for a good mooring to protect the coral. But being charged to go ashore to the beach is not so cool.
We weren’t in the best frame of mind when we arrived in Tonga. The reality of selling Itchy Foot and returning to land was plaguing our thoughts. The most painful part of the process is saying goodbye to old friends. We were all still heartbroken after leaving Panacea and decided to spend a week by ourselves and regrouping as a family. After a bit of searching we did manage to find a few nice quiet anchorages.
Even though the water was cold we snorkelled a bit and we did find Nemo: we spotted our first clown fish! We also took the dinghy to Swallows cave and enjoyed swimming in the sapphire water with hundreds of shimmering fish. We enjoyed beach bonfire BBQs a few hundred meters from the pounding Pacific. We had a glorious anchorage to ourselves (I think it was number 30, anchorages shouldn’t be numbered in my opinion) and loved walks along sheer cliffs with mesmerising views of the pounding surf and blowholes. Teo even had a close encounter with the one of the most venomous snake on earth – it’s venom is 10x stronger than a Cobra. Thankfully they aren’t dangerous to humans as they have small mouths so can’t really bite anything as big as a Teo. The Vava’u islands are undeniably beautiful and quite different in topology to others we’ve visited in the Pacific.
We were stressed about preparing the boat to shine for her viewing in Fiji so we probably didn’t give the place a fair shake. The weather wasn’t good for us to get the Haapai group so we missed that, missed meeting with good friends who were down there and also missed swimming to whales, and can not claim to have gotten to know the country well.
We were left feeling that something was missing from Tonga and I’m pretty sure it was our dear friends. We were bad company even to ourselves. We did get a lot of stuff sorted and off the boat and we got lots of school done and we played lots of board games.
Next stop was Fiji, and our final ocean crossing between the two.