Tongan Feast

0800 Position 18-43S 174-04W. At anchor of Matamaka Village, Vava'u, Tonga

The Van Diemen crew spent another lazy morning enjoying the serenity of the Hunga lagoon. At 230PM, close to high tide, we weighed anchor and headed for the pass. This time Rob saw no less than thirteen feet of water as we exited the lagoon. Piece of cake.

We powered south around the end of Hunga and past "The Blue Lagoon", one of the few shallow sandy bottomed areas in Vava'u, and turned east toward Matamaka Island. At about the halfway point we stopped to watch a humpback whale, but he wasn't in performance mode so we didn't stick around. By 4PM Van Diemen was anchored off of Matamaka Village.

There weren't any other boats anchored off of the village, and I wondered if the Tongan Feast was going to happen. I couldn't see the village going to all the effort of putting on a feast for a single boat's crew, but soon thereafter the fleet started to arrive. By 6PM there were five boats moored off of the village and heading to shore in their dingies.

"Kalo" met us at the pier and took us on a tour of his village. The houses were simple but modern, similar to what you'd see in other third world countries. There was no road, just a foot path through the center of the village. Each house had a water catchment system with a small swimming pool sized plastic tank next to it and a stand alone solar system consisting of a single solar panel and battery on a steel frame in a concrete foundation. The solar-battery systems were built by the Japanese government. The solar systems are large enough to charge cell phones and provide emergency lighting and not much else. We saw a lot of dogs, but only a few of the village's inhabitants and no pigs. Pigs are everywhere in Vava'u, but some of the remote villages have banned them from the populated parts of the island.

We caught up with the other cruisers on the lawn outside the village community center. We met sailors from England, Australia, and New Zealand. There was also a couple from Dallas, Texas, who were paying guests on one of the Australian boats. They arranged the two week Vava'u charter on-line and had just arrived four days earlier. An interesting group.

The villagers showed us how they make baskets from coconut fronds, mats from pandanus, and kava. Kalo brewed the kava much like tea is made using a cheese cloth filter, squeezing water through it with his bare hand in plastic bucket. It left me wondering where his hand had been lately. The braver cruisers tried the kava.

Dinner was served inside the community center after an interesting prayer by Kalo about communicating with God via VHF radio. Hmmm. Whatever floats your boat. A buffet of breadfruit, curry chicken, potato, oysters, sweet and sour pork, and a few different kinds of salad was provided. Conspicuously absent was roast pork. The centerpiece of any traditional Tongan Feast is a roast suckling pig on a spit. That was the case for all three Tongan Feasts I attended while cruising here in 2014. It takes a lot of effort to roast a pig. Apparently the Tongans have figured out that they don't have to make that effort and the cruisers will still be happy. The missing roast pork was disappointing to me, but the other cruisers didn't know the difference.

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