Suva

We arrived in We, a delightfully named village in the Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia, yesterday. That puts the blog two countries out of date, further behind then we've ever been. I'll pick up the action as we're sailing from Tonga to Fiji. More in a week or so when we reach Noumea.

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On the last day of our passage from Tonga to Fiji the butane bottle that we had been using since Tahiti finally gave out. We had been amazed at how long it had lasted – two months, twice as long as bottles normally last. We still had a nearly full bottle in reserve that, at the rate we seemed to be going through the butane, would last us all the way to Australia. “I guess that butane must just last longer than propane,” I said to Alisa.

Well, guess again: if something seems to be to good to be true… When the never-ending bottle finally ran out I went back to the gas locker in the lazarette to switch over to the second bottle and found that both bottles had been open, so we’d been drawing them down simultaneously. It was four in the afternoon, we couldn’t expect to reach Suva until the next morning, and we had no gas for cooking. Oops.

Alisa made Elias a fine repast of crackers, canned olives, canned corn and uncooked tofu. We luckily still had half a mahi mahi in the fridge, and so Alisa and I got the impetus that we have been needing to try sashimi. Luckily we have lots of wasabi and soy sauce and pickled ginger on board. Not bad at all.

We each stayed up half the night as we coasted in towards Suva, keeping our speed as low as possible with heavily reefed sails. We still arrived outside the harbor in the wee hours, and Alisa tacked us back and forth in the company of freighters and fishing boats that were also waiting for dawn to enter the harbor while I enjoyed a coma-like three hours’ sleep.

At dawn I ran the Fijian courtesy flag up to the starboard spreader and ran Pelagic in through the opening of the reef that guards Suva harbor. First light showed a thick layer of smoke hovering low over the waterfront. Suva has enough big buildings at its center to make it look like more of a city than anything we have seen since San Diego. Shipping dominated the waterfront. Modern foreign-flagged freighters unloaded at the king’s wharf downtown and a line of smaller ferries and local trading boats crowded the shipyard docks that stretched north. The hammering of steel hulls undergoing repairs was constant. The harbor water was covered with a rainbow, the thick scum of spilled petrochemicals.

We checked in with port control on the radio and proceeded to the quarantine anchorage. We raised the yellow quarantine flag and waited for our visit from the health inspector. I collapsed into a nap and woke to find the morning mists replaced by a blinding tropical day. Elias was antsy in the way that a two year old who is trapped on a 37 foot boat with two parents who can barely keep their eyes open is antsy. Lunchtime came and Alisa bravely produced another cold meal. Our stores were low, though, since we were planning on a big provisioning in Suva, and we were quickly running out of no-cook options. And we couldn’t make coffee or tea, a real blow to the person (me) who had been in the cockpit approximately twenty of the last twenty four hours, conning Pelagic in to shore, and to the person (Alisa) who had been conning Elias through the reefs and shoals of a two year old’s day during the same hours.

Since we had checked in with port control at seven in the morning we figured it would be no problem for us to clear into the country and still have time to get ashore and refill our butane tanks. But we had been waiting in the quarantine anchorage for five hours without any sign of official notice. I called port control on the radio and got the health inspectors’ phone number and began making a series of expensive sat phone calls, politely asking for clearance. The health and agriculture inspectors finally showed up on their big orange launch seven hours after we had arrived. We promised the agriculture inspector that we would not land our coconuts and limes from Tonga. For the health inspector, I filled out a wonderfully anachronistic form that appeared to be left over from the age of clipper ships. Among the questions I had to answer were: “Has there been on board during the voyage any case or suspected case of plague, cholera, yellow fever, smallpox?” and “Has plague occurred or been suspected among the rats or mice on board or has there been an unusual mortality among them?”. On the back of the form was a Declaration for the “particulars of every case of illness or death occurring on board”, including a space to note the Disposal for each case (“State whether still on board; landed at [give name of port]; buried at sea”).

More to the point, the health inspector, a smiling woman in her thirties, said, “I must tell you that there is an outbreak of dengue fever in Fiji.”

“Oh,” I said. “Where is that happening?”

She gave me a diffident look. “Mostly in the west and central regions.” Suva is in the east. No worries, I thought.

Our health clearance granted, we reanchored outside of the quarantine area and rowed in to the Royal Suva Yacht Club. Even though we reached the shore after four PM, I still managed to hop in a cab and get both butane bottles filled before Fiji Gas closed at four thirty. Any place where cooking gas is so quickly available wins very high marks from the cruising sailor, and this was an early plus for Suva to counter all the negative things we had heard.

Most east-bound yachts clear into Fiji in Savusavu, but we had to stop in Suva to collect some engine parts that had been shipped via DHL. It seems like everyone we met in our last weeks in Tonga was ready to tell us what a festering hole Suva was. Our cruising guides noted that thefts from anchored yachts were a real problem, and that the number of yachts visiting Suva was down markedly following the violence that attended coups in 2000 and 2006. And an online search for more information on dengue in Fiji revealed that the outbreak included Suva (something that will concern any parent traveling with a two year old) and that the Australian embassy had evacuated dependent personnel because of the continuing potential for political violence and a decline in law and order that had seen a rise in violent crime aimed at foreigners. Our Lonely Guide noted that for fear of crime locals always take cabs after dark, even for trips of 300 meters. Ugh.

But we ended up having a fine time. First of all, the taxis were plentiful and cheap. While this was a problem for the cabbies, who drove for thirteen or fourteen hours a day to make a go of it on a series of two and three dollar fares, it made Suva a logistical breeze for us. Usually we spend a lot of time getting to know our way around new towns, but in Suva we just jumped in and said, “King’s wharf, please!”, or “Fijian Affairs Board, please!”, or even, “Can you take us to a good curry restaurant?” From the perspective of the cabs we watched the pageant of the city reel by. We drove past the Suva market where shoeshines and cobblers and peddlers of pirated DVDs jostled for trade. We drove past the bus station, where threadbare porters sprinted with their wheelbarrows to claim a place by one of the baggage compartments of each arriving bus. Pedestrians waded out into the traffic, alternately stepping into the way and holding back, scowling, in obeisance to a complex of implicit rules of the road that I did not understand. And it all happened with the disorientation that came from sitting on the left-hand side, where the driver should have been, and observing the continuing string of surprises and violations of good sense that is city traffic in a drive-on-the-left country. I became concerned for our chances when we begin driving in Australia.

I had great chats with cabbies. My enthusiasm for a new place was obvious, and a series of drivers roused from the waking dream of their endless days behind the wheel as I asked questions about Suva and answered their own about Alaska. A Melanesian driver in sunglasses bemoaned the loss of ethnic Indians from Fiji. “If it goes like this for three years or five years my friend, there will be no Indians left in Fiji. This is a very big problem.” The Indians in Fiji are the descendants of laborers imported in the early days of the twentieth century who, generations later, have generally made a success of themselves in their new country, but are still called “Indians” instead of “Fijians”, are prohibited from owning land, and have been the victims of political persecution following the coups. An Indo-Fijian driver with eyes red-rimmed for want of sleep told me, “All you can do is go with the flow. If they want to charge you two more cents, you cannot fight over this two cents or you will go crazy. Go with the flow, that is all you can do. If you eat two meals a day instead of three, go with the flow.”

The Melanesian and Indian populations give Suva a feel of the east, a feel of Africa and Asia. The view of the other side of the harbor from the Suva waterfront is incredibly beautiful, high silhouetted mountains disappearing one after the other into the mists of distance. The constant traffic on the harbor is mirrored by the struggle and fury of the crowds on shore. And over it all hangs the stench of unstable politics and possible violence.

I made the rounds of officialdom, visiting immigration twice, customs three times, the Fijian Affairs Board and the Health Department once each. A sign positioned directly across the street from the Health Department, so that it was the first thing you saw upon walking out the door, advertised “Federated Funeral Directors. All sizes coffins. Hearses for hire.” At the waterfront I watched the container ships being unloaded, and the fleet of rusty, once-were-white Chinese fishing boats that were locally flagged – “Winning no. 6”, home port Suva; “Jui Der no. 36”, Vanuatu flag.

Alisa and Elias and I made the rounds of the local markets, provisioning the barky. The Royal Suva Yacht Club was our refuge and our home base, a faded relic of British Colonial days, now making a living on its bar and its facilities for various functions and events, the grounds gone tatty and the gleaming yachts maintained by cheap Native labor gone forever. We met a great South African family, mom and dad and sons four and six, circumnavigating from their adopted home on the U.S. East Coast, instant good friends who we enjoyed a fine meal with aboard Pelagic and then waved goodbye to forever the next day as they set off for Vanuatu. And Elias got mosquito-bitten, stunning Alisa and me with our failure to keep him safe from the threat of dengue. And then, after a failed bid to see the southern island of Kandavu that saw us weather-bound in the middle of nowhere for a few days, we decided that it was time to leave, and we returned to Suva for a last go at the markets and a last go at Singh’s Curry House and we cleared ourselves out of Fiji and sailed west.

The Suva waterfront.

The Royal Suva Yacht Club, our refugium.

Two side of provisioning in Suva – the supermarket…

… and the Suva Market.

The other side of Suva Harbor.

Happy in Ha'apai

Well, we just pulled into Pangai, the port of entry for the Ha’apai group. We checked in here two weeks ago, and now we’re here to complete our exit formalities before heading west (ever west!) to Fiji. It’s September 11th as I write this. In six weeks or so we aim to be in Australia, well ahead of the start of the cyclone season. That means that we’ve got some traveling in front of us: the four hundred mile passage to Fiji, then the pair of seven hundred mile passages to get us to New Caledonia and then onwards to Oz. We figure we’ll get only two weeks in Fiji and a week in New Caledonia to break it all up. So the two weeks that we just spent in the Ha’apai felt like a real respite, a chance to take things at our own pace before the busy time about to come.

***

We left our mooring in Neiafu sailing under main alone. The best part about laying to a mooring is leaving it. There’s no messing around with the windlass, no stacking the anchor chain. Just put up a sail, slip the mooring line, and silently leave. Nice. We rode a fine northeasterly breeze out of town. But just as we were leaving the Vava’u group it died completely and we were left riding an oily swell with little palm-covered islands in the distance. The mixing elbow on our engine exhaust has started to leak, and I was hesitant to motor all through the night to the Ha’apai for fear of it getting worse. We talked about anchoring in one of the little islands in the southern part of the Vava’u group and waiting for wind, but decided that we might as well just get where we were going. A very good decision, it later developed.

We motored into the night, taking turns hand steering. At one in the morning we shut down and drifted to avoid arriving in the Ha’apai before dawn. It was a star-filled, still night, with just a bit of a roll to the ocean. We set the radar alarm and I woke every hour or so to check on things. At one point I realized that a whale was sleeping near us. I could hear the giant gasping breaths, and I could just see the occasional white patch of disturbed water over the beast’s back. It was close, and the night quiet enough that the sound of its breath was loud, and a little spooky. I turned the engine on and motored a half mile away to avoid any unwanted interactions.

We pulled dropped the hook off Pangai fuzzy-headed from our interrupted sleep. It was early afternoon, and a consensus was slowly building that we should delay the hassle of putting the dinghy in the water and rowing in to deal with officialdom until the next day. Even though we had only traveled within Tonga, we were still expected to check in with customs.

Then a voice came over the VHF.

“New yacht, new yacht, new yacht, this is harbormaster, harbormaster, harbormaster, do you read me over.”

“They beckon,” I said to Alisa. Then, “Harbormaster, this is sailing vessel Pelagic, sailing vessel Pelagic.”

Unintelligible.

“Could you repeat that, over.”

Unintelligible.

“Could you repeat that again please, over.”

“What I am saying is I am asking you to call me.”

Quizzical look to Alisa. “Um, OK, Harbormaster, this is sailing vessel Pelagic.”

“No, I am asking what time you will come to see me.”

“Um, how about in two hours, we still have to get our dinghy in the water, over.”

“I think, one hour, over.”

And so, our sense of enterprise was rekindled. We got the dinghy in the water, baby and adult crew in the dinghy, and rowed the quarter-mile to shore, all in the hour. But once we got to the village nobody could direct us to the harbormaster. Everyone was reserved, but friendly when approached.

The first man I asked was standing on the wharf.

“I have no idea where he is,” he said to me, successfully conveying his absolute ignorance concerning the harbormaster’s whereabouts.

I tried again, rephrasing my question like any experienced, yet patient, traveler. “Do you not know where the harbormaster man is, or do you not know where the harbormaster office is?”

“I have never heard of that person or that office,” he said, putting any lingering doubts to rest.

Another man knew exactly where the harbormaster was. He walked me to a vantage point in the middle of the staging area between the harbor and the military barracks and pointed down the coast. “There,” he said with great authority. “The office is right by that blue boat.”

When we arrived at the blue boat we found a mix of offices – the electric company, the revenue service, the customs service, but no harbormaster. Feeling the palangi’s burden of an appointment neglected, I stuck my head in the first office and startled a very sleepy bureaucrat by saying hello.

“Do you know where the harbormaster’s office is?” I asked.

He looked at my with perfect perplexity, and I realized that I likely represented the most surprising event to occur during office hours in recent memory. After pausing to parse his phrasing, the young man said, “I have never heard of that before in my life.” This was a response so airtight against any further enquiry, and so similar to the denials of the first man I had asked, that I began to doubt the harbormaster’s existence myself.

I figured that I might as well check in with customs while I was in the neighborhood. And the customs man directed me to the harbormaster’s office, which proved to be on the wharf, 30 meters from the first two men I had asked.

I found the harbormaster inside an open waiting room for ferry passengers under a galvanized roof. Two women sat in a corner next to piles of baggage. The harbormaster was in his mid-twenties. He had a big halo of curly hair and dewy eyes and wore a plastic port security badge with his picture and name on it. He was talking into a handheld VHF: “New yacht, new yacht, new yacht.”

Most Tongan adults that we have interacted with, even in the villages, spoke very good English. Not the harbormaster. I struggled to understand anything he said, but he seemed used to that, and just produced a sign-in sheet for me to fill in. The last entry from a boat checking in was five days old, which made me very happy. After I was done filling in the sheet, the harbormaster made me understand that he hadn’t heard from the other yacht that was anchored off the town. “They must check soon,” he said. “Overtime charges.” And as I left he got back on the radio, his voice an insistent drone. “New yacht, new yacht, new yacht.”

Elias was cranky, and the village of Pangai was not the kind of place where we wanted him to be rooting around in the dirt. Alisa was also done in from short sleep the night before, but she graciously let me take a quick wander before we headed back to the barky.

In my forty five minute tour, Pangai struck me as the archetype of the Pacific outpost that is sleepy in a way that is synonymous with poor, rural and tropical. There were banners across the main road celebrating the king’s recent presence during his coronation tour. Pigs grazed on a giant soccer pitch, a man in a skirt rode by on a one-speed bike. I talked to Mafi, the niece of a noble from Tungua Island in the Ha’apai group, who was sweeping up outside the palace after the king’s visit. And I met Asa, who spoke with a strong American accent, was heavily tattooed and missing his front lower teeth, and worked at a nearby resort that the Lonely Guide calls edgy and uncomfortable for lone travelers, especially women. And then we returned to Pelagic.

***

The next day we sailed south towards one of the many uninhabited islands of the Ha’apai. We were traveling inside the thirty mile long stretch of barrier islands and reefs that protect the whole group from the tradewinds. We passed a red yacht motoring north towards Pangai, and were gratified an hour later to hear a familiar voice on the VHF, droning on at great length without any response: “Red yacht, red yacht, red yacht. Red, red, red, red…).

After a few hours of sailing we dropped the hook off of Tofanga Island, a little piece of sand and coral heaven five hundred meters long and only thirty meters across. We rowed ashore and explored – Alisa and I checked out a new bird on the island (wattled honeyeater), Alisa found an exquisite shell the size of an apple, we took turns walking the beach that completely encircled the island, and Elias got busy picking up pieces of coral and digging in the sand. Another yacht was anchored about a mile away, but it left the next day and it was ten days until we saw another.

This is exactly what we had come for – a deserted tropical island. It’s amazing how infrequently we’ve had this kind of experience on our way across the Pacific. Every day we just read and played with Elias and worked on the boat and went to the beach and went snorkeling and just let the problems of the world take care of themselves for a while.

When Saturday rolled around we jumped five miles north to the village of Uiha so that we could attend church the next day. We were feeling very short on the getting down with the people side of our stay in Tonga, and, since Tongans are famously church-going, we figured that church was the place to meet people.

I’ll admit to a free-thinker’s jitters before the event, but it turned out to be a completely painless experience. The service, at the Free Wesleyan church, was entirely in Tongan, which spared me exposure to any theology. And the singing was strong, and crisp, and resonant, and different from anything I’ve heard before. A music leader gave the pitch before each song with a mouth organ and the little congregation of maybe thirty adults launched into two- and three-part harmonies and pulled them off very well. Men and women sat apart and little children wandered from relative to relative while old ladies dispensed smacks to keep them in line. The young men wore boldly printed shirts with ties and their tupenu, or skirts, and on the backs of the pews they rested corded forearms, broad palms, splayed fingers. The older men wore dark jackets and ties and tupenu. The women wore dark blazers and dark shirts and red scarves and tupenu and everyone wore the mats around their waists, the taovala.

After the service everyone walked together down the road, we guessed towards lunch, but we weren’t invited along. The vibe was very guarded, though friendly, and the people who did talk to us asked, “Are you going back to your boat now?” Alisa did share a great interaction with two old women and we both talked to Matetau, a big grey-haired man who we met after he rode up on his bike from the pre-service kava ceremony with the minister.



We went back to the boat and had lunch and printed up pictures as gifts for people we had met. Our return that afternoon was a mixed bag – Matetau smiled at the picture we had taken of him with his three grown kids, but then he seemed to get embarrassed and explained that his wife had died in 2006 and he was a poor man and did not have anything that he could give us in return for the picture. And the primary school teacher we had met seemed to barely remember us when we returned with some pencils and books we had said we’d bring in for her students. Even when there is no language barrier, communication can be so hard.

But then Alisa found one of the women she had been interacting with and completely bowled her over with the picture she had taken. She was a small bent woman in black with a smile that was the impish smile of a little girl, a smile that owed nothing to the resignation and wisdom of age. She was on her way to the second church service of the day when Alisa found her and she turned strait around and walked back home with the picture, holding it up in front of her face with both hands and smiling at it in disbelief.

On the way back to the boat Elias wouldn’t stop putting his hands into his mouth and this visit to a poor rural village started to feel like the limits of what we were comfortable doing with a two year old.

And then when we got back to the boat we switched on Australian Broadcasting on the shortwave and heard that Sara Palin would be the Republican nominee for vice president. General disbelief reined on board Pelagic, as well as an urgent, and of course unrequited, need to talk to some other Alaskans. Our reaction was two-pronged: she’s so inexperienced (“Three years ago she was the mayor of Wasilla!” “Two years ago she was doing Jock of the Rock on Kodiak public radio!”), and Barack’s a dead man (“He beat Hillary, he took down the Clintons, and now Sara Palin is going to be the one to stop him!” “Her political skills are so good. If she doesn’t fall flat on her face in the first week or two, everyone will end up loving her.”) Our snippets of news from the outside since then have tended to support that second immediate reaction. Sara Palin, a heartbeat away. Who would have guessed.

***

All that aside, the next day we headed south for another deserted island experience. The wind had been blowing strong from the southeast for a couple days, keeping Ha’apai-bound yachts that left after us stuck in Vava’u. We left Uiha with the wind gusting over 25 knots, and the dinghy soon began to surf uncontrollably from side to side down the following seas. We tried to pull into Tofanga Island to anchor up and get the dinghy on deck, but the wind had come around easterly and there wasn’t enough protection to anchor. We tried motoring back towards Uiha, but it was too slow going strait into the weather, so we turned around and continued on towards our destination, Limu Island. And a few minutes later the dinghy flipped upside down, and stayed upside down.

The load on the painter was immense, and after a quick try had convinced us that it was impossible to flip the dinghy back over in the midst of the crashing wind waves, we continued on. We both assumed that the loads generated by dragging the dinghy upside down would be too great for the painter and the boat, and we both silently assumed that the dinghy was gone. It’s hard to overestimate what a blow this would be to the trip –without the dinghy we can get nowhere, it’s our only link between Pelagic and the places we visit.

But we motored on gamely, keeping our speed below three knots. And when we finally pulled into the Limu island anchorage, the dinghy was still with us. There was some fiberglass damage to the joint between the two halves of the dinghy, but I was able to fix that the next day, which was a bit of an adventure in the thirty knot winds. And we both have a new appreciation for the dinghy, not realizing how much we valued that little boat until we almost lost her.
It blew hard for the first three days we were at Limu Island – we saw our first steady 35 knot winds of the whole trip, and our first 40 knot gusts. Limu sits at the apex of a ninety degree angle in the barrier reef, and we watched tremendous seas crashing into the reef on both sides of us. When the wind abated we found incredible snorkeling on the reefs around Pelagic, and another fantastic deserted tropical isle experience when we went ashore.

The world was reduced to a new set of elements: soft sand, turquoise water, and white clouds. And we had this slice of creation all to ourselves to discover, to reflect upon, and to enjoy. In the week we were at Limu we saw one local fishing boat in the distance, and no other yachts. Meanwhile, less than a hundred miles away in Vava’u, hundreds of cruising yachts were congregated. It felt like the cruising route across the Pacific was a six lane highway, and we had found a little cul-de-sac without any traffic at all. I figure that everyone out cruising in a sailboat makes the itinerary that most interests them, and there’s no cause to criticize other people’s selection of routes as better or worse than anyone else’s. But it is remarkable that we were in this place that offered everything that fuels the South Pacific dream, and so few other yachts had ventured down from the well-traveled environs of Vava’u to check it out. I think that our time in Alaska may have made it easier for us to be alone in a wild anchorage in the Ha’apai when a gale is blowing, and that we are at ease with the psychological demands of solitude and independence. And I also think that as much as people might say they want a deserted beach all to themselves, they’re a little more comfortable with a tropical experience that has been interpreted and validated by other visitors.

After Limu we sailed to the island of Ha’afeva, where we had a very interesting lunch experience in the village that I don’t have time to describe. Because it’s time for us to go into Pangai and check out, and tomorrow we set off for Fiji. More to follow from there.

Neiafu

We rented a mooring while we were in Neiafu Harbor, which is what most yachts do, as the water is very deep and the bottom full of obstructions. We were near the steep shore, where some building half-hidden in the trees was the sight of relentless band practice. In the mornings and late into the evenings we were regaled with the full kit of tubas, trumpets, trombones and various reeds playing vaguely martial music at broken cadences and slightly off-key. We assumed that we were hearing preparations for the coronation celebrations. But the practicing continued unabated after the king left. The band music became a part of our Neiafu soundtrack, along with the calls of the Polynesian starlings in the trees and the roosters crowing through night and day and the afternoon chatter of boys swimming at the water’s edge.

Neiafu is a rural town. The business district is a humble couple of streets that quickly give way to rambling neighborhoods of breadfruit trees and chickens and houses with corrugated roofs. Pigs run free everywhere.

One of the first things you notice in Neiafu if it is your first visit to Tonga is the way people dress. Both sexes where skirts, men to the knee, women to the ankle. And both sexes wear taovala, woven mats wrapped around the waist like a second skirt. It’s a very traditional look, and the sight of so many people dressed that way made me feel like we’d discovered a really out of the way corner of the world. Clothing is somber, trending towards the black. Color is provided by school uniforms – boys and girls in green and blue skirts.

For our purposes, what was interesting about Neiafu was the vibrant expat scene based upon the influx of yachties and the bars and restaurants that serve them. Our two big jumps from Raiatea to Suwarrow and then to Vava’u put us out of synch with the group of boats that we have been seeing in port after port ever since Mexico, and it was a bit of a relief to see new yachts and new faces. After the ludicrous expense of French Polynesia, Neiafu seemed nearly cheap, and we celebrated our arrival with the first cook’s night out since Mexico. Elias behaved superbly at the restaurant, even accepting our explanation for the fact that the lobster we had promised he would share was not on the menu. For days afterwards, he could be heard saying “lobsters got away!”. We were seated at an outdoor table overlooking the harborfront and the crowded mooring field, and Elias calmly sat in his chair and waited even though a twenty-person party of Japanese tourists had gotten their orders in before us. He did so well that we decided to brave the Wednesday night fakaleiti contest at Tonga Bob’s (traditional Polynesian crossdressers vamping up a western-style drag queen show). We were disappointed to find it canceled. “Pageant in Nukualofa,” the bartender explained. “They’re all there.”

We left Neiafu to check out a jam session at a very funky restaurant run by two Spanish expats on a little island near nothing in particular. Then we came back to town for the coronation events, and left again to visit a few anchorages with Macy. Everything is very close in the Vava’u group, and there are many good anchorages. The only down side is the number of cruising yachts and charter boats. Being “alone” in Vava’u means finding a spot where the nearest other boats are two hundred meters away. There is also this very tacky phenomenon whereby everyone refers to the different anchorages by their number in the local charter operator’s cruising guide: “Hey, we were at number 27 yesterday, you gotta check it out, great beach!”

The number of boats and the booming expat scene in Neiafu make Vava’u feel a bit like a theme park. There were some great places to see there, and great people to meet, but when we came back to Neiafu from our sojourn with Macy we were suddenly very ready to be gone. There was a new crop of yachts in town that for some reason didn’t seem as much fun as the ones that were there when we first arrived. We had burned up almost two weeks of our 31 day visas, and we hadn’t even been to the Ha’apai group yet, which is south of Vava’u and has the reputation of being more Tonga and less theme park. And so, after running the standard few days of errands that have kept us lingering in towns from Port Townsend to La Paz to Uturoa, we left.