Family and Fun Week

                                                                      Welcome to Tonga, Cody and Brandon!

Checking out the Tongan Temple

Dinner at Keleti Beach---to bad the whales have gone south

More of Keleti

Hiking down to Bob's Beach to find strange critters in the tide pools.

After arriving at the island of 'Atata, we headed out to a reef for snorkeling where the giant clams are.  Our original Tongan driver appeared to be about 16 years old, and when we got close to the buoy to tie to, the motor died, and the strong winds quickly blew us toward the open ocean.  He worked hard to restart the motor, finally gave up and tried to call for help on his cell phone.  As is typical for Tongans, he had no credit on his phone and none of us had brought a phone along.  There were also no oars in the boat.  The Tongan boy jumped in with a rope to try to dive deep enough to tie us off.  Meanwhile, we had drifted much too far for swimming to any island.  After many tries he tied our boat to some coral about 20 feet down.  We stopped drifting away from the islands, but how were we going to get back?----No water, no sunscreen, no food, no oars, no motor, no way to contact anyone.  Had we not been in Tonga, we would have expected the company  we had hired to be prepared.  Brando took charge of the motor and we were fortunate that his past experience wth boat motors saved the day!  He got the motor started and we headed back to the buoy where we had originally planned to snorkel.  We were afraid to stop, so we dragged the rope which was tied to a giant uprooted coral all the way back, jerking the boat along as it got hung up on anything in its path.  We did fianally stop at our original destination and had a fabulous snorkel, finding lots of giant clams and schools of fish.  Cody was excited to have a real adventure and live to tell about it.  After our snorkel, the motor restarted and our Tongan boy got us untied from the coral.  We all learned a good boy scout lesson---BE PREPARED.

Cody checking out the giant clams

Island of  'Atata

Feast and Tongan Live Show at Hina Cave

Beach and tide pools near the Natural Landbridge

A few of hundreds of blowholes.  Notice the guy sitting on the right.

Sick?   Puke is the name of a village, pronounced POOKAY.   In Tongan it actually means 'sick'.

The Ha'amonga is a structure which was built around 1200 AD.  and  is made of limestone slabs.   It is similar to the Stonehenge and no one is sure what it signifies, but it is in the area where the king lived.