'Island time' began to kick in. We dived on some wrecks. We drank cocktails in the bar. We snorkelled on the reef and in some underwater caves. After a while we just had a load of spare scuba tanks delivered to the island and went diving from our room. All around the island were coral-heads several metres across, each a blaze of colourful life, and each apparently the nursery for one or another species of coral fish.

Divers tend make a lot of fuss about the visibility, or 'vis', the distance that you can see underwater on a particular day or at a particular location. This has never made much sense to me, because you spend most of the time looking at things that are right in front of your nose, so I ignored it when they started to go on about 'sixty metres of vis'. Who wants to see things that are sixty metres away?

I changed my mind on a night dive. Usually at night you only go down a few metres and stay within hand contact with your buddy because it is very, very easy to get disoriented and lost. Not so in Vava'u. The moon shone down to twenty metres almost like daylight and Bronwyn and I could not only see each other five metres apart, but could even recognise one another amongst the other divers.

Niufea

Eventually, however, we had to rejoin the real world. Early one morning we boarded the little boat and chugged across to meet Dave the driver in his taxi, who took us back through the dawn light to the airport.

We presented our pre-booked, pre-confirmed tickets to check-in, who told us that we could not fly because we were not on the manifest. This was our first introduction to Tongan politics. The King, a generally benevolent and much-liked character, actually spends a lot of his time in hospital in the US, leaving his realm to the Crown Prince, a playboy who is in it for the money. Whenever a Tongan business is successful, the Crown Prince appropriates it, and it seemed that this is what had happened to our airline. Apparently he needed our seats for some friends of his, and that was just the way it was.

Niufea is hardly a metropolis, but we found a nice cafe and, while Bronwyn tried to get onto the internet (four PCs sharing a single dial-up modem), I went in search of the post office. The building, when I found it, was reminiscent of a prison in a spaghetti western. The public was separated from the staff by floor-to-ceiling iron bars, threaded amongst which were dozens of letters which had been addressed 'post restante'.

I bought some postcards and stamps to while away the time. Since the post office didn't have any coins, they gave me my change in still more stamps, and I took the resultant pile of paperwork back to the cafe, where I managed to get hold of a bottle of the elusive Royal Tongan Ikale beer. It's elusive because most quality establishments refuse to stock it, gleefully quoting stories of all sorts of foreign objects found in bottles. These stories, of course, post-date the takeover of the brewery by the Crown Prince. Certainly, I must have got an old bottle, because it was tasty and refreshing.

Tongatapu

The next day we were first in line at the checkin and actually got a seat on the plane for an uneventful ride to the capital, Tongatapu. On arrival, we stopped at a cafe for another (perfectly fine) bottle of Ikale and then headed in the increasingly oppressive heat for the Dateline Hotel, supposedly the quality hotel of the islands, and advertising itself as 'The First Bar That Opens in the World, Every Day'. We figured that they might have air conditioning, and since we'd only recently drunk in 'The Last Bar to be Open in the World, Every Day' across the dateline in Samoa, it seemed like the reasonable thing to do.

We were greeted by a uniformed bellhop and escorted to our table, which was promising, but the place looked a little run down; it was with little surprise that we discovered that this establishment, too, was now owned by the Crown Prince. We ordered Ikale, and it must have come straight from the new-style brewery, because it was completely undrinkable. I took a couple of sips, and then felt a compelling urge to go to the toilet.

I scuttled in the indicated direction and entered a marble-tiled, gold-tapped facility that hadn't been cleaned for months, if not longer. The first cubicle that I opened (and by this time I would have accepted pretty much anything) was... well... you've seen Trainspotting, right?

Back in the bar, Bronwyn, who had opted for the more sensible water option, realised that the proffered glass bore enough grease to fry an English breakfast, so we headed back out into the heat.

This was not the last surprise that the Crown Prince had in store for us. Bronwyn had used my mobile to leave a five-second message on her sister's Canadian answering machine. A month later, when I received my mobile bill, I found that those few words had cost us just under sixty Australian dollars. The mind boggles at what the charge might have been if Michelle hadn't been away from home that day.

Our final Tongan legacy cannot, however, be laid at the feet of the Royal Family. Somehow or other I had scratched my elbow, perhaps on coral while diving, and the resultant sore was very slow to heal. As we moved on from country to country, it didn't seem to be getting any better; in fact, if anything, the wound seemed to be getting deeper and wider. After a week or so of this, a doctor in Brussels had a poke around and pronounced that I had a staph infection.
'Is that bad?' I asked.
'Well,' she said, 'if these antibiotics don't work, then you will lose your arm...'

The Virtual Reinhard Archive

Pseudemys

21.12.06 Front Page

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