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essays | places
Tonga
the price of paradise
I had never heard of Tonga and if you have, you’re probably dreaming. You could count the tourists without counting. Fiji, sure. Samoa, of course. But Tonga? Tonga was the archipelago next door.
The bed and breakfast was more bed than breakfast, but the meager morning provision – toast and jam, a fruit here and there – was served with a full platinum-plate of sweet and sticky tunes: Piano Man, Hotel California, all sorts of nostalgic treasures from the 70s and neighboring eras. Always put me in the mood for a day. And every day felt like a day in this kingdom, the only island group in the South Pacific that had kept its sovereignty no matter who came knocking.
We mostly ran on coconut water and peanuts in those days. Fresh stuff. One nut plucked from the heavens and the other from the earth. To think that all this grows somewhere in the real world before you pluck it from a supermarket shelf. Almost incredible. After plundering God’s secret nut stash, we would approach the mainland’s mini-destinations like two bouncy balls, hopping from lava cliffs to overexcited blowholes and from a baby Stonehenge to a beach where I napped so blissfully that I can still feel the melody today.
And then there were the other islands, cheeky little things, peeking out of the waters around Nuku‘alofa. Fafa, Pangaimotu, What Have You. Now those were exactly what they sounded like: little white discs with green hats on turquoise velvet-water.
places / stories
Fafa / Remoteness²
A tiny drop of sand in the ocean, somewhere in the vast Pacific nowhere, Fafa was remoteness². But there isn't a nook in this world where you don't find Germans or that Germans don't find. They ran a resort and it didn't leave you wondering why or how.
It did make you wonder about the price of paradise though. You could walk round the entire island in no time, but if you live there you got all the time and time is really all you got. How fast does paradise get old?
Can the fantasy of the tropical island haven without worries, without shoes, ever come true for more than a few weeks, or days, or even just hours? Isn't it only true for as long as it remains a noncommittal dream, in which Robinson Crusoe didn't get bored yet of living in self-sufficient accord with beautiful, beautiful nature? Maybe that's the price of paradise: its temporary nature; that it is a place to visit, not to settle, let alone for eternity. Because eternity is torture, and it is longer when trapped inside the monotonous confinement of a tiny island suffering from a terminal dearth of stimuli. At a reasonable distance from paradise, one can see that Robinson Crusoe wasn't living a solitary dream, but a lonely nightmare.
Anyway, it sure felt like Eden for an afternoon or two.
Pangaimotu / Octopus & Snake
To waddle into the water with fins on your feet really made you look like the tourist you were. One time, I almost stepped on a striped creature, which was either a very venomous sea snake or a very harmless eel. Another time, I almost stepped on an, well, I didn't know what it was at the time. All I knew was that suddenly a blackish-violet cloud formed in the shallow water around my calves and that a mild panic seemed to arise from down there. With my thoughts ricocheting aimlessly through my skull, the most sensical hypothesis I found in there was that a shark had taken a good bite out of me and that I was standing in my own blood in shock. But that wasn't it. When I put on my goggles to have a look what was going on down there, I saw the tiny fella – no more than a handful of octopus – take off in a hurry.
Tongatapu / Eden Comedown
Tongatapu, the archipelago’s centerpiece and home to the capital Nuku‘alofa, wasn’t exactly Eden and had you plummet back down to Earth from whatever heights your appetite for paradise had reached. No cocaine-colored beaches, no psychedelic ocean-water. The reality of paradise, for those who live there, is a different story from the dreams you're making up from afar. This here was an impoverished kingdom whose inhabitants might dream of the kind of paradise you're from.
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