So I had a roommate my freshman year in college who was obsessed with the Kingdom of Tonga. As a fairly worldly fellow, I was rather impressed with this guy who knew so much about a random South Pacific island I had only ever heard the name of. I too resolved to one day go to Tonga.Well it just so happens that the Kingdom of Tonga (yes, they still have a king) is right around the corner (in middle-of-nowhere Pacific island terms). A friend and I had some vacation time and decided to go make a trip to this nearby (400 miles SSW) island chain. That's New Zealand in the bottom corner for those of you that are geographically challenged.
Turns out Tonga is very similar to American Samoa. Lots of the same hassles and daily efforts to cause insanity to Palangis (white people). A major difference which is apparent the moment you step off the plane is the absence of trash! While this may not sound like much, our island has significant apathy on this issue and so travel to a “nearby” island that is trash-free just flies in the face of the typical “oh, it's a cultural difference” excuse. Yup, a clean tropical island... good first impression. So we were on the main island of Tongatapu for all of about 3 hours before we boarded our flight to Vava’u (an island group back north, and closer to where we started...grrrr). Vava’u was to be our main destination in Tonga as this is where the diving is supposed to be quite good.
We checked into our hostel (5 people shared accommodation) and we quickly realized that we are too old to be “backpacking” with the other 20 year-olds (though I passed for younger than my buddy). Nothing too exciting, it was just a place to keep the rain off our heads after all. The next day we went out whale watching and saw a few humpbacks off in the distance, but nothing that really wanted to come and say hi to us. Quite frankly it was just a long day out on the boat. Vava'u is the yachtie capital of the world. Port of Refuge, the main harbor, is naturally protected from the elements and so lots of boaters come in to weather the storm season. Lots of dock space and surprisingly little life, given that most yachts dump their "wastes" over the side.
We found out that the market with handicrafts, souvenirs, etc. closed at 4pm each day. We then realized the only way to get some cool stuff for ourselves and families was to make a quick blitzkrieg-type visit in the morning. We ran through quickly and got a few things (a small tapa, a basket, and a drum- more on the markets later...) before having to run (literally) to the other side of town to catch our dive boat. We made it to the boat, got our questionably maintained dive gear (we rented gear because we wanted to travel light), and we off to the first dive site. It was a place called Split Rock. The divemaster gave an excellent briefing and familiarized us with the map of the site, which ended up being a good thing because he got tied up with a new diver and so we were left to wander around on our own. The dive was wonderful, clear water and lots of cool fish. I even found a live triton's trumpet [snail] (below). We found several large swim-thrus, caves, caverns, and canyons, even finding the “split rock” towards the end.
So the Split rock is huge! It is about 90 feet tall and 150 long with a 2-3 foot wide crack running all the way to the base just a few feet off the bottom. So I get about halfway through this crack when the biggest lionfish I had ever seen starts swimming towards me. Lionfish have extremely venomous spines so an accidental brush with one is...um... not good. So what happens next? The stupid fish stops about 2 feet from me. I am wedged against the wall of a crack 70 feet below the surface which is to narrow to back up or turn around. After what seemed an eternity I decide to use my camera housing to gently nudge it out of my way so I can continue swimming through.
Our next dive was China Town, so named because of the pagoda-like coral heads which were common to the dive site. The highlight here is a patch of anemones and clownfish. The anemones are just are standard everyday bulb-tipped anemones we see across the entire South Pacific. What was special was that these all lived virtually on top of each other making it appear to be one 30 foot wide anemone. The really amazing part was that these were bright red, having incorporated a bacteria into their bodies instead of the normal algae. Hundreds of clownfish of three different varieties swarmed all around making for quite a spectacle.The next day with our dives done, and flying out the next afternoon, we decided to head for a hike to the National Park. We hiked up to the top of Mt. Talau, which from a distance looks sort of like a New Mexico mesa (covered in rainforest of course).
Wonderful views of Nieafu (above), the main town of Vava’u. Having just been to the “mesa”, my buddy really wanted “Mexican food”. It just so happened that we had passed by a “Mexican restaurant” several times in the previous days. I hate Mexican food, but I conceded to go to...get this.... “Tonga Bob’s”. Apparently, Tonga Bob, his staff, or likely anyone who had ever met any of his staff had never seen or heard of Mexican food. Unimaginably bad. Even my friend (who has been known to eat frozen chicken fat) could not stomach it! Tongan cuisine is not likely to take the world by storm anytime soon.We did not have to fly out until 5pm that evening and being a Sunday there was lots to do but very few places you could do it. Tongans take their “Christian” day of rest seriously. Church is very strictly attended and tardiness, absence, or small donations (worst offense) are severely looked down upon.
Fortunately Tongans understand not all tourists have the same beliefs, so if you go to one of the many beach resorts you can take part in most of your tourist activities. (That's Mt. Talau in the background).
We really wanted to get into the water once more and since we could not dive because we were flying out, we went snorkeling instead. I usually look down on snorkeling to be quite honest. This snorkel was quite nice though. We found many different starfish, clownfish and anemones and one anemone that even had a pair of shrimp living in the center (bottom picture).
The highlight for me though was when my friend found a banded sea snake. We don’t have sea snakes in Samoa and this is one animal I have wanted to see in the wild since I was a kid. It seemed oblivious to our presence and just went about its business of hunting for food.
More to come...
What is surprising about this journey of several thousand miles is that it is done by the same animals each year. Similar to a fingerprint in its distinctiveness, individual whales can be identified by the unique patterns on the underside of their flukes (tails). This actually gets easier with age as new scars, and scrapes aid in the differentiation. So even though they may look similar from a distance, a trained observer can easily recognize each particular whale. This is how we know that we have around 70 whales that make this arduous trip each year.
During the southern hemisphere summer, the waters of the Antarctic are lush with krill and small fish, perfect for a baleen whale like the humpback. They gorge themselves all summer long putting on bulk for their long migration, because once the whales get here, there is no food for them. They fast the entire time they are here, which for the females can sometimes be several months. 
Once they are here then the shows really begin, humpbacks are one of the best known whales because these are the whales which fling their gigantic bodies (around 40 tons) almost entirely out of the water, called breaching. They also roll on their sides at the surface and slap the water with their huge pectoral fins, called... yup, fin-slapping. While there are many theories out there as to why the whales do this (some a little sillier than others), the honest answer is we don’t know (but we have a few pretty good guesses). It is easy to imagine that these massive 40-50 foot long animals are bulky and clumsy (especially after you see one breach). Surprisingly, underwater they are actually quite acrobatic and graceful. I suppose a few million years in the ocean will do that.
What humpbacks are best known for is their singing. An unimaginably loud sound, these songs can carry for many miles underwater. They tend to last 10-20 minutes “per song” and the singing can on rare occasions go on for over 24 hours nearly nonstop. We actually hear it quite a bit this time of year while we are diving. Many times we have surfaced with thoughts of the whales being “very close”, only to find that the person on the boat saw their spouts (when they come up to breath) several hundred yards or further away. The songs are “regional dialects” and groups in different parts of the world have very different song patterns.
The reason the whales make the journey to our barren and foodless water is for the good of their calves. Though they are almost 15 feet long and weigh 1 ton (2,000 lbs) at birth, these newborn whales have very little blubber to keep them warm. If they were born in the frigid waters of Antarctica, they would quickly chill. So they are born in the warm tropical waters around American Samoa where they quickly bulk up by drinking their mother’s milk which is roughly 50% fat! (whole cow milk is about 4%). Another reason is that most of the ocean is around 12,000 feet deep, while the shores immediately around our islands are about 300-800 feet deep. We are the shallow “kiddie pool” of the ocean. Once the calves have put on enough blubber, they start the long journey back south with their mothers. If all goes well, they could be back to have their own calves in as little as five years (assuming of course that they are not taken by Japanese fishermen for “scientific purposes”).
One final note, all these photos were taken during a federal research trip to study the whales in American Samoa (NOAA research permit #NMFS774-1714). I was given the rare opportunity to get in the water with the whales. This is normally illegal, as these are an internationally protected endangered species. Also, I try hard to take good photos. Please do no steal these (or any other) images from our blog. If you want friends or family to see the whales that you get to see here (and I encourage this), please just make a link to this site.
