Hi!
Another long day, lots of fun but nearly asleep now!
We started by moving to Sally’s friend’s house by the beach (now known as Sally’s beach house) which is light, airy and lovely to be in!
It’s also VERY yellow, which makes it really easy to find 😃
All the houses have mesh over the windows so you can keep your windows open without all the moths (which are gigantic here!!!) flying in. Love that SO much!
We went shopping at the market after that and found a few goodies. The sales people are fairly pushy on occasion and I have had to practice saying no without explaining anything. Gosh I could bring home heaps of wood work if I was wealthier! It’s just gorgeous. We had lunch at Friends Cafe and had a look at the craft gallery next door – some funky stuff there and Sally’s upstairs neighbour was there too 😃
Then we went to Sally’s place and picked up essentials like toiletries, modem, water and toilet paper! We thought we’d done so well on our first exodus… we weren’t entirely correct.
Dropped them back at the beach house then headed for the blowhole – it’s a lookout on the south coast that has a stunning view of a huge portion of the coastline and all the waves that geyser up along it. We got there about an hour before high tide which is not optimal viewing time, but it was still impressive!
My fingers are all over the show – they’re little fat camera hogs in fact!
We were there for about half an hour listening to the thunderstorm hitting the north and basking in the sun! There was a family parked out under the trees opposite the lookout that had spread out four or five tables filled with jewellery and were quite persistent in selling them but I suspect not very successful as they had no change. There was some lovely stuff, but it must be a sucky way to spend the day – there’s very little shelter there and the sun was belting down!
Then we went looking for a beach. We headed north first but was unwilling to put our poor wee rental car through the pain of the last 500 metres of off road needed to get to Monotapu beach and my feet are so swollen it’s painful so a half k walk wasn’t feasible. So we headed back down south and found a resort that needs a good $1000000 + injected into it and it would be absolutely gorgeous. We think it must have been hit hard by cyclones. It was still beautiful and the beach looked like paradise!
The sea had a very strong tow though, so while it was lovely to roll around in the waves getting wet we didn’t do it for long. Sat in the sun for a bit and then headed back up the hill(!! There are very few hills in Tonga!) to the car. There are also very few gardens and the garden around the reception/(nonexistent) restaurant is beautiful. You don’t see many flowers here either.
Then off to find water. Back in Nuku’alofa the recent thunderstorm had brought more rain so the flooding has expanded quite a lot and for some reason we hit a traffic jam as we came into town! Was a bit like trying to get out of Wellington at 5pm – don’t know why it was quite so busy but the state of the roads definitely didn’t help.
Got water after a ramble through town and the back to Sally’s beach house to have a shower and get ready to go to the Vietnamese restaurant for dinner with a few of the Australian volunteers. Was lovely – great spring rolls!! Hit by sleepiness while there so I wasn’t exactly a sparkling dinner companion but the company and food was great once again.
And now we’re curled up on the couch in the little yellow house and I’m about to roll into bed.
Sweet dreams, talk to you tomorrow!
BlueKahu 