Geckos

There are no snakes, there are no alligators, there are no crocodiles, there are no snapping turtles, (thank God, because I’ve biked through many a mangrove swamp). There are no native mammals except the fruit bat, and it doesn’t count. But there are geckos, geckos, and geckos. And geckos. All sizes, all colours, united by the exact same little gecko turds they leave everywhere. They cling to the walls and ceiling like Spider-man, and you pray that two of them never find each because they’ll issue forth ear-piercing…just awful…war cries before they fight to the death (meaning until one of them lets go). They don’t bite, but they do leave their tail behind if you get too close.

One in particular lives near my food cupboard, eating every ant that tries to reach my honey pot. I wasn’t sure what to think of them when I got to Tonga, until I saw one eat a mosquito in an amazingly quick movement, huzzah!

The honey gecko admiring a bit of fancy Tongan electrical work. Despite his usefulness in keeping away ants, I often find him licking the side of the honey container, making him just as guilty.

A gecko hanging out on the screen of my window, completely oblivious to the fact that a simple flick of my finger would send him flying...not that I would do that...

This time...Lapaha

With the might of the Catholic School Board behind me, I ventured once again to Lapaha determined to see the langi with my form 6 (grade 12) history class. It was, especially for the kids, a trip to remember. That’s mostly because they rode in the back of an open truck and it rained. When it rains, it pours. But it Tonga, when it rain, it pours in a torrential onslaught. Luckily for me, it stopped when we got to Lapaha and I remained dry. Unluckily for them, we hit another storm on the way back.

One of our deputy principals had spoken several times to the Mu’a town officer, who had assured us that the site would be open. But it’s Tonga. So when we got there and found it locked, I was much less surprised than I would have been had I taken this trip when I was still new to the culture. This time, with a cell phone call, I got the key and unrestricted unsupervised access to the richest concentration of archeological remains in Tonga!

The history lesson that follows comes largely from Wikipedia, meaning it could just have easily been written by Leo as by someone who actually knows something about Tongan history. Still, I also found the key stuff in the only book on Pacific history I have, Howe’s Where the Waves Fall.

The Tu’i Tonga Empire was a powerful Pacific Empire, centred in Tonga with an influence that extended to Fiji and Samoa. The empire began around 950 AD. To put that in perspective, its around the same time the Eastern Roman Empire was at the height of its power, Vikings were raiding France, and the Chinese used gunpowder in battles without actually coming up with the idea of a gun. The first Tu’i Tonga, ‘Aho’eitu, was the son of Tangaloa ‘Eitumâtupu’a, the Tongan God who came down from the sky, and a mortal Tongan woman. That’s because they knew the empire would be doomed to fail without at least an endorsement from a god, or better yet a half-god emperor to kick it off.

From the twelfth to sixteenth century AD, Mu’a, the town we visited, was the capital of the Tu’i Tonga Empire. And although the empire eventually disintegrated, Mu’a stayed as a kind of spiritual centre. The Tu’i Tonga lost political power but gained spiritual power, becoming high priests. My Wikipedia source says “they were perhaps even more awesome than as kings.” Coincidently this was about the time I started looking through the textbook too.

When the Tu’i Tonga died, they were buried in the langi – big man made hills surrounded by huge slabs of coral rock, usually in three or more tiered layers. There are 28 around Mu’a, 15 being “monumental,” but we focused mainly on the Paepae’o Tele’a. That’s because it’s the biggest and best preserved. And when you've seen the best, why settle for the rest! The stones are enormous, and legend holds that, through magic, the slabs were moved from ‘Uvea (aka Wallis Island) to Tonga. I am sorry to say that this was probably not the case. The Tu’i Tonga were powerful, but their magic was best adapted to making slaves move the big rocks around after they were quarried from the coral around Tongatapu.

The Paepae’o Tele’a was long thought to hold the body of Tele’a (‘Ulukimata I), a Tu’i Tonga from the sixteenth century who was one of the mightiest. His actual body may not be inside, because legend holds that he drown at sea and his body was lost. That didn’t stop me from taking a quick look while I was there, throwing the archaeological knowledge I gained from dozens of Indiana Jones viewings into practice.

The Paepae’o Tele’a - it's like they started to build a pyramid, and then with a true Tongan attitude decided, "meh, this is high enough," and took a nap.

My class, minus two students who may have skipped the trip, making them lucky this teacher doesn't include beats in his discipline plan! Really though, I don't know if teaching is supposed to be this fun. I look forward to every class because this group is good for a laugh but ready to work, every day.

Waving goodbye to the site, momentarily considering keeping the key for future access, remembering that I got it from the house of one of the most powerful chiefs in Tonga, then heading to the truck, to return the key.

On the way to Lapaha

I was going to write about the Lapaha royal burial tombs after my visit on Saturday. But the "WELCOME TO PAKI MO E TO'I" sign appeared just before a locked gate. I'm taking my grade 12 class there on Thursday for a field trip. I guess I'll have extend my "expert" charade to Tongan History now too, which is no big stretch since I also teach a university course on Pacific Politics. In the meantime, here are some pictures I took along the way to Lapaha, and a couple I've been saving.

Rain rain rain. This is what it looked like one morning when I was thinking about going to class. It's the cyclone season, and though I have yet to experience one (I'm promised one or two a year), I did enjoy a full week of rain that ended (thankfully) Friday night. Although, with heavy rains, comes the Tongan equivalent of a snow day - rainy day programs at school!

God said he wouldn't destroy the world with a flood again. But with all the rain, I guess this guy chose to play it safe to save his family and his 2 cats, 2 dogs, 2 pigs, 2 chickens,...

On the way to Lapaha I found Captain Cook's landing point. Legend holds that, landing at this spot, he told a local boy to tell the King of his arrival. Then he took a nap under a great banyan tree this plaque claims stood here. My own experience with banyan trees suggests they're all infested with spiders, but then I've been in Tonga longer than the captain had. I thought this guy was offering to take my picture, but it turned out he was asking me to take HIS picture. After, when I offered him the camera, he instead shook my hand and said goodbye. And I shared my apples with him! He did offer me one of the many girlfriends he claimed to have in Lapaha, though. All in all, thanks to the language barrier, it was an interesting apple-eating session.

You can't say being Canadian doesn't count for something. In Tonga, it means good sardines!

Island Dogs

Good God, I hate them. Hate is a strong word, I know, but I’m just reciprocating their own feelings for me. I wrote that they all got together one day and decided they hate me. And there are only three kinds of dogs in Tonga:

First, there are wild dogs. These dogs don’t just wander the streets, they also hide in the bushes, and they are mangy, feral, ill tempered, and usually run in packs. You know in the bloopers at the end of Talladega Nights Will Ferrel says one of the problems facing America is packs of wild dogs that control most of the major cities? That is Tonga.

Second, there are guard dogs. Theft is high in Tonga, and with so many wild dogs around, a lot of people just throw some scraps of food at them until they start to guard their property. These are the kind I run into most when I’m biking – they always include the road as part of their territory. There is nothing I have found that will pump more adrenalin into your system then turning a corner and hearing three dogs on the other side of a fence growl and foam at the mouth as they begin running in what looks like the start of a race at the track. That’s because Tongan fences do not include working gates, and so seconds later you can bet those dogs will pop out of the yard at sixty miles an hour looking for you. When I ran into several such dogs on my way to the west coast, my bike chain had just jumped into the grove between second and first gear (as it sometimes does on the pothole filled roads). Trying to shift it up with dogs snapping at my ankles was…terrifying. I employed a theory I had been working on – cars in Tonga don’t slow down for dogs, and once a dog gets hurt he realizes that he should walk a little faster crossing the road. I gave the closest, meanest looking dog a solid kick in the nose, taking care not to lose my toes in the process. In that instant he looked right into my eyes and got ten times angrier. My chain finally hopped up to second gear, I immediately shifted it to third, and biked like never before.

The third kind of dog in Tonga is the dead dog. All three smell bad, but this is the only kind that poses no immediate danger to me.

Goofus and Doofus, along with Cat. Obviously I haven’t learned their real names, but these animals (and the dogs’ mother) patrol our apartment and are the only mammals in Tonga (bats included) that like me.

The West Coast or Bust

Although Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa, is the biggest “city” in the Tongan isles, there are upwards of sixty villages on Tongatapu, the island I live on. Those are just the ones they bothered to include on the Places of Interest map I bought when I got here. Every few days I circle another one or two on the map as “villages I’ve biked to,” but this Saturday I made plans to reach the west coast. I’ve been to the south coast already, but the west coast promises to deliver Tongatapu’s best beaches and resorts, the “flying fox sanctuary,” and, according to my map, “Christianity Landing Place,” which I hoped would be way cooler than “Captain Cook Landing Place” - a plaque. It’s more the trip than the destination anyways; I really just wanted to circle the twelve villages between me and the northwest tip of the island. It’s about 25 km from where I live (a village called Halaleva), meaning a 50 km round trip. That being said, once I’m on a road I am easily distracted by other roads and the thought, “I wonder where that one goes…”

I’d biked to the village of Fatai a few days earlier, which was on the main road leading to the west coast, so I headed there again. On the way, I saw a sign pointing to the “green waste recycling centre,” and my first distraction. I turned and followed a twisty road for about forty minutes, even after I passed the compost piles that made up the recycling centre (I don’t know what I expected…but a facility that only allowed green-coloured waste would be just crazy enough to work in Tonga). At first I was sure that I was heading West parallel to the main road, but eventually began to wonder if the roads would ever meet up. In typical Tongan fashion the many km long road ended as a driveway to a house in the middle of nowhere (though I’m sure Andre would point out that it’s somewhere in the owner’s lives). I biked back to where I had gotten sidetracked.

After a run in with a dog pack (dogs in Tonga got together at some point and all agreed they hated me), a surge of adrenalin and the discovery of the main (paved) road put me back on track. Awhile later I was as far as the village of Te’eliu. I would find that out later, having left the map at home – where’s the fun if I know exactly where I am! There, I saw another main-looking road headed “left,” and growing bored of the same straight road, I turned. For a “main” road, it was devoid of cars – I never saw any, but I did see plenty of bats. On a side note, almost every coconut tree in Tonga seems to be a “flying fox sanctuary.” There’s a massive gathering of them in a coconut grove near my apartment, and I don’t know where the idea that they’re night creatures comes from (science?), but Tongan bats don’t seem to know that. They fly around over my head with a never-ending screech-chatter whenever I pass.

The road ended at the south coast, officially turning my western trip into a plan for another day. I biked from Hā’utu to ‘Utulau (a village sponsored by the Japanese government, as every “this facility provided in friendship by Japan” sign suggested). Then, past the Princess’ residence and north towards home. And that’s when my rear tire blew. I heard it, and I felt it, but I tried to ignore until a few minutes later I was biking on the rim and got off. From there, I walked the 5 km left to my apartment, shaking my head at the many tire repair shops I passed who followed the Tongan custom of closing for the day at lunch on Saturdays.

Ready to roll, and, I’ll be the first to admit, looking pretty sharp

For the “off-road” experience in Tonga, you just have to stay on the roads


It was at this time that I began to wonder if the road I was on would ever meet up with the main road, and for kicks, took a picture

Cursing the Tongan tire god; though, now that I was home, knowing my tire repair kit would make short work of the problem

Oh, and when I passed the Princess’ residence, I was lucky beyond belief to see her white tigers outside. The picture is at a distance, but it was as close as I dared get for fear of being mauled!