Along the Merry Way....

The Torkington clan lives on a hill overlooking a tiny ocean bay, tucked away in the midst of little rolling hills that are sprinkled with (surprise!)....sheep :) I was very lucky to find these kind people to work with for a month. The grandfather, son and his wife form a bluegrass band together, and as a family of bluegrass musicians, they have musical instruments everywhere! The fiddles and guitars strewn about made me very happy) There is always great music playing or being played (see The Pipi Pickers and Hot Diggity ). From their ginormous library to their love of PG Wodehouse, and their ability to substitute popcorn for dinner, these people are great!! Also, their backyard features the best outhouse ever, the "Turdis":

My cousin Theresa says that one of the first questions she gets when people find out that she was raised on a boat is, "Did you experience any big storms?" followed by "How did you shower?" A small sailing ship has no shower, and this is fine! We'd shampoo down our hair and then dive into the sea in our bathing suits to rinse off. I didn't miss the normal showers at all. However, when I was back in an Auckland hostel, my first shower in two months was a beautiful, beautiful thing :)

The Kingdom of Tonga is full of shipwrecks. The country is such a reef-filled place that this is no surprise! It takes quite a bit of skill to safely navigate the reefs and approach many of these islands. When we were anchored at Ha'afeva, we saw marked on the charts that there was a shipwreck across the lagoon. About a mile away, the tip of an the old ship poked out of the water. The tip was visible at low tide, but completely disappeared at high tide. So choosing our time carefully, Uncle Kurt and I rowed over to explore. A giant Korean fishing vessel lay on an angle in the water. Its stern (rear) was lodged on the reef. Its giant metal body stretched out behind this, and the prow (nose) was lying on the sandy bottom between the jungle of coral heads. At low tide, most of the ship was only about a meter below the surface, so I was able to snorkel and explore. You could still see the letters faintly painted on the metal hull, and the giant structure was an imposing form below ...

After a slightly nerve-wracking entry between two poorly marked reefs, we found peaceful anchorage in a lagoon next to the island Ha'afeva. In comparison to the dirty, cyclone-devastated town of Pangai, which we had just left, we were struck by this island's beauty and happy vibe. Fruit trees and cows were everywhere, and people were out raking their front yards and collecting stray coconuts. We were able to visit the local school, and here we were greeted by a crowd of children, who ran back to the main building yelling, "Palangi! Palangi!" (white person! white person!). In Ha'afeva we went on the hunt for fresh fruit and vegetables because our supplies were depleted. The headmaster of the school introduced us to a local man named Peta, who took us on a merry chase through the jungle to find food. He shook the oranges out of the trees for us and hacked down the papaya and a giant clump of bananas with his machete. Afterwards, we went to pay him for the goods, b...

A new king was being crowned in Tonga when we got there, and all of Tongatapu was in a hubbub! There was a ritual drinking of kava on the fields near the royal palace. Kava comes from a root and paralyses you if you drink enough of it! It's very common to drink in Tonga, especially with the Tongan men. (Incidentally, I was once invited to a kava party at the little island of Uoleva, but Pim and Josje didn't want to go, and I didn't want to paralyse myself in a strange hut with a bunch of unknown people on a deserted island!). Other festivities included great crowds of schoolchildren dancing in bright colours. And, as I mentioned before, the shipwrecks near the city were towed away out of sight so that visitors flying in wouldn't see them. Lots of flags and excitement!

We anchored for three days at the tiny island of Uoleva - a restful place with sandy beaches, ten inhabitants, and crystal-clear blue water. Pim, Josje and I decided to walk around the island, and on our way back, we encountered an American woman who was running a small resort of beach huts. She told us a story about when she was building the resort, and her Tongan employees started showing up with big heavy rocks. She asked them where on this desert, coral island they were getting the boulders, and they took her to a mysterious, pyramid-shaped ruin in the jungle (where she told them "For the love of God, stop dismantling this!"). We were pretty excited by her story, so the next day, we followed the lady's specific, but curious directions to find the ruins: "past the three small coconut trees, by the stump, under the arched vines, through the jungle" :) It was easy enough to find: a small pyramid, overgrown with trees and leaves. We scrambled up the steep side o...

You encounter many strange things at sea. Once during my night watch, when we were hundreds of miles from anywhere, the sonar kept going off indicating that the "bottom" was only 13 meters below, then 15 meters, then 12, then 17. Very strange. I told Uncle Kurt, who just smiled and said, "Yep, something's probably swimming below us." It was probably a whale, but I liked to picture something hideous and tentacled and extremely hungry that had ventured up from the Tongan trench (which is a part of the ocean that at it's deepest is over 10,000 meters deep). Another strange thing was marked on the chart as a "magnetic anomaly". This was a largish patch of ocean we sailed through between Tonga and New Zealand where our compass got all confused and pointed in the wrong direction. Fortunately for us, the GPS, was working just fine. I'm not sure what caused this--an enormous metal deposit on the ocean floor?