Happy 2009!

To celebrate the start of 2009 our Christmas crew plus Grant’s brother, who is here visiting, decided to go to Uoleva, a small uninhabited island to the south of Lifuka. There are a few resorts on Uoleva, including one where you can camp on the beach very cheaply, Diana’s, which we chose to patron. The other cool thing about Uoleva, aside from the peace and quite uninhabited islands tend to exhibit, is that during low tide you can walk from Lifuka across the ocean to the island. It’s about a 30-45 minute trek that gets a bit tough in spots, but it a lot of fun, and really surreal. Once on Uoleva we hiked another 30 minutes or so, about ¾ of the way down the island and set up a mini camp on the beach at Diana’s Place. Some people were smart enough to bring tents to Tonga, something I may have to work on getting, so we pitched those, and immediately jumped in the water. It’s times like this I’m so glad I’m in Ha’apai; the beaches are indescribably beautiful. We also gathered up a fair number of green coconuts, opened up the tops, protected them from the fire ants, poured in some rum, and settled ourselves in the ocean with our beverages, and began to celebrate.

When midnight arrived, I finally went skinny dipping in the Pacific under the stars to celebrate. Grant and his brother were awesome enough to join me, and if any of you make it over hear, I promise this is something we can do again. Post swim, we walked down the beach to where Diana’s husband had built a fire, and stayed up for a few more hours while he told us some traditional Tongan legends, including one involving a shark, a pufferfish, and an island that has lifelong immunity from shark attacks.

After a short nap, we got up around 5am and walked back down the island until we could cross over to the other side just in time to watch the first sunrise of 2009. Since Tonga is the first country in the world to see the sun each morning, and I highly doubt many Tongans were hiking around to the liku side of islands to watch the sun, there is a pretty good chance that we were the first people in the world to see the sun rise on 2009…

Diana’s husband gave us a small tour of the island that included showing us one of the man-made pigeon hills: back in the day, nobles lived on Uoleva with their slaves, and had them construct giant hills out of rock and coral dragged from the sea just so they could shoot pigeons off of them for sport…sometimes the cultural similarities are eerily disturbing.

We had to wait for low tide, so we lounged around on the beach for a while and then hiked back up to the ocean. Crossing was fairly uneventful until a few of us missed the path by a few feet and were literally swept out to sea: the riptides off the reef were so strong. After an eventful half hour of struggling against the ocean (the ocean was totally winning, although I had figured out how to climb back on the coral underwater) two Tongan teenagers on horseback appeared. They were on their way across to feed the pigs on Uoleva but were kind enough to stop assist us. The horses were able to stand where I couldn’t and one of them threw me a rope that was attached to the horse’s saddle and I was able to pull myself the rest of the way in. I know it’s a common fantasy to be rescued by a mysterious person on a white horse: in my case, apparently, my “prince charming” is a 13 year old boy…go figure. Despite the more dramatic than desired finale, it was a wonderful New Year’s and a great way to welcome 2009. Let’s hope the rest of this year keeps up!