Fiji and Tonga

This is a slightly modified version of the email I sent to my parents, which many of you may have seen already...

We left Honolulu at 7 am on Jan. 18th and arrived in Fiji at 11:55 am on the 19th (Fiji is 22 hours ahead). We didn't have a whole lot of time to explore Fiji, mostly we drove around town (Nadi, pronounced Non-dee, on the main island of Viti Levu) and saw the pretty extensive flood damage from last weeks storms. It was pretty bad, most of the downtown area was completely closed and the roads were in horrible shape, fences and walls knocked down, houses with muddy destroyed furniture and all sorts of junk outside. Apparently the water level was 15-20 ft above the river level (which is close to the town). Fiji felt much more like a foreign place than Hawaii, it is a mix of polynesian-looking people and Indian-looking people, who were apparently brought in to be workers many years ago. We were pretty much the only white people around with the exception of a few tourists at the hotel (mostly from New Zealand or Australia), and a few occasional people around town. Everyone pretty much speaks English and all of the signs are in English, so that helped. The same way there is American influence in Hawaii, there is a New Zealand/Australia inluence in Fiji. I'm sure I'll have more to say about Fiji once we go back there at the end of the cruise, and I will be staying on a resort island for a few days.
On to Tonga (where this was originally written): we are on the island Tongatapu, which is the main island, in the capitol Nuku'alofa. Tonga is one of the last true kingdoms on earth. The king owns the entire island and has multiple palaces, his coronation was just 5 months ago, so he is still new. We saw his house and the main palace (from a distance). The house looked like something out of Hillsborough, but the palace was actually a bit less impressive than I expected. Nearly everyone here looks like what you'd expect of Tongans, and they all speak English as well (Australian influence here too). There is a sizeable Chinese population as well (similar to Indians in Fiji), although we haven't seen too many around town. The Chinese tend to own these little cinderblcok shops stocked with a bunch of cheap crap, as you might expect. As you walk down the main road through town, you find many Tongan families selling fresh watermelons, pineapples, Taro roots, bananas, as well as some beautiful wood carvings of whales, fish hooks (a symbol of strength in Tonga), and other animals.
The Kingdom is very conservative and Christian, the Tongans wear shirts in the ocean and dress very modestly, which was a bit strange. Also, I've never seen so many coconut palms in my life (even in Hawaii), they actually have farms with rows and rows of palm trees which I saw when we flew in. Yesterday, we went out to what we thought was going to be a resort on the beach. But after a half hour drive, with most of it on dirt roads, we found out from the cab driver that the resort doesn't exist anymore. So we stopped at the end of this dirt road and walked down to a beach while the cab driver waited for us (we had no way to call another cab). There was probably 10 Tongans at the beach and every one of them wore a shirt in the ocean except for one guy. They looked at us a little funny, but not in any sort of hostile way. One of the girls offered me some watermelon that she had been munching on. Overall, the people in both Tonga and Fiji were pretty friendly, so no bad experiences with that. Every time we walked into town from the hotel, almost everyone we passed would smile and say hi, or bye to us, and people in cars would honk and wave (it probably helped that I was always walking with a group of 3 or 4 girls, all 4 of the other students are female). We are planning on going out to one of the small nearby islands tomorrow for some scuba diving or snorkeling. The ship is already here, we can actually see it from a balcony at our hotel. We are getting on board on Friday (Thursday for you guys) and leaving the next morning.
Update (1/25/09): we made it out to Atata island on Thursday (1/23) (40 min boat ride from Tongatapu), which contains the Royal Sunset resort and we got to do some snorkeling. The scuba diving was going to be too expensive and I'll be diving in Fiji in March anyway, so we decided against that. It turned out to be a good decision, because the visibility wasn't fantastic (from the storms) and I doubt we would have seen much more than we did snorkeling. Probably the most interesting thing we saw snorkeling were these clam farms that the Tongans set up. Basically there are these nice neat rows of hundreds of humongous clams on the seafloor (1 to over 2 feet wide). There was some decent coral and a few colorful fish but nothing spectacular. The island itself was interesting, there are a number of people that live there in rundown houses, many were raising pigs. Also, there are lots of wild to semi-wild dogs that run around the island, sort of like the cats in Hawaii, but surprisingly no roaches. We even saw a bat hanging in a tree right by the restaurant at the resort, I took a bunch of pictures of it. I didn't think bats could be cute, but this one definitely was, it had a furry face like a little fox, not a stubby pig-nose like most bats (they call them flying foxes). Oh, and we did see a pod of dolphins on our trip out to Atata Island which was awesome. One disturbing thing I saw on that island and on the main island is the amount of trash. You would think tourists were bad, but the Tongans don't seem to be too concerned with trashing their home. There were pieces of trash strewn along parts of the beach, and even dirty baby diapers on the beach we went to the day before, worse than most beaches I've seen in the US (except maybe a really crowded beach in LA or something).
We boarded the boat on Friday morning at 10:30 and got our stuff organized, I'll talk about the boat in the next post (that's where I am right now). We had one last night in Nuku'alofa on Friday night, and a bunch of us and many of the crew went to a bar in town. When we first arrived it was pretty slow, but by the time we left it was like a packed nightclub in the US, I really did not expect that. Some of the Tongans were actually drinking at the bar, but I never saw any other Tongans drinking in other restaurants that we went to. We spent our first night on the boat on Friday night while it was still docked, and then set sail at 8 am on Saturday. More details on that in the next post. Overall, I definitely enjoyed the experience in Tonga, although I don't know that I would make a vacation trip out there again. If I did, I would go out to one of the smaller island groups north of the main island, which I imagine would be much nicer.