More about Neiafu

Neiafu is the administrative capital of Vava’u and made for a very nice home base during our entire stay.  It’s by far the biggest town in Vava’u, but it’s much smaller and less industrial than other capitals we’ve been to like Papeete or Pago Pago.  The capital of all of Tonga, Nuku’alofa, is more like these places.  Neiafu is more on the scale of say, Atuona, where we cleared into the Marquesas, but not as pretty or well groomed.  More than anything it reminded us of some of the towns in Mexico in terms of quality of infrastructure, friendliness of people (rather varied), and most of all the fact that there is a huge expat community here that serves the annual cruisers in transit.  Tonga is a much easier place to immigrate to than, say, French Polynesia, and it shows.  I wrote a post for my cruising runner blog called “In the Buffer Zone,” which explains this, and I’ve included that below.

In the harbor near Neiafu there were a couple of places to anchor for free, but they were at a much greater distance to the dinghy docks than the myriad of mooring balls that litter the harbor.  So, usually, when we arrived in Neiafu we’d pick up a mooring ball and pay the 10-15 pa’anga (Tongan currency) per night.  The convenience made it worth it.  Every morning we listened to the daily VHF net to hear what was going on and get a taste of the local politics among the expats there.  By far my favorite part of the net, possibly the only reason I kept listening day after day, was the market report by Primrose.  Primrose is a local Tongan guy who drives a taxi, and I don’t know his full story, but he seems pretty plugged in to the cruising community, and his market report has nothing to do with the stock market.  It has to do with the local daily produce and craft market.  I can still hear his voice telling us, “It’s a lovely market this morning, beautiful tomatoes coming up, lovely carrots at the market this morning…”  It seemed like things changed very seldom at the market and everything was always “lovely” and “beautiful” and “coming up” but I loved it.

Near Neiafu there is a nice hike about a couple miles long up to the top of Mt. Talau, which is the highest peak in Vava’u at about 450 ft.  I actually went twice, once on my own but when I got to the top I realized I had picked the wrong time of day for photos over the harbor.  So, I recruited Brenden to go with me a second time, and we made a very nice mother/son day of it.  I let him carry my smaller camera, so we have a photo record of the day from Brenden’s perspective, which includes a lot more photos of pigs, chickens, and spiders than mine did.

Link to Brenden’s photo album: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.569550663151223.1073741955.288817647891194&type=3

One of our favorite memories of Neiafu was our pub crawl with Lady Carolina.  We left all four boys on one of the boats, I can’t remember which one, and we headed to shore to hit as many bars/restaurants as we could.  This turned out to be not very many.  We started at the marina wine bar, which actually had decent food and wasn’t too expensive, but calling itself a “wine bar” is a bit of a stretch.  Their wine selection was one red and one white, so yeah, not much of a wine bar.  It was an outdoor setting, but other than that it really was your typical bar, with pool tables and darts and a group of guys with tattoos that always seem to be there at the same table every time you go.  Next up was the Bounty Bar, which is somewhat of a new establishment, and we enjoyed a few appetizer snacks in addition to our drinks.  They had a pretty decent selection of rum, nothing great, but more than we had seen anywhere else.  So, Steve orders a rum, I can’t remember the exact kind, but it’s one that he had bought back in Mexico that wasn’t even all that great, but OK.  The girl said she’d have to ask, and then the owner came out and said he wouldn’t open the bottle because it was really expensive.  OK, so why have it setting out then?  It turns out Steve was the first to ever order it.  I guess the guy bought it when the cast/crew of Survivor was there, but for some reason he never recouped his costs and now he was bitter about the whole thing, and he was taking it out on Steve.  I ended up just ordering a rum punch which was heavy on punch and light on rum.  The atmosphere was much nicer at Bounty Bar than at Marina Wine Bar, but the owner was a bit of an ass.  However, I should point out that we were all in the mood to have a bit of fun with it, not get all bent out of shape over it.  For dinner and nice wine, we hit the Spanish Tapas restaurant located on the main road heading back to the anchorage.  We thought this place was really good, but later we heard from other cruisers that it really isn’t, so we aren’t sure if we were just a little loopy by then or if it was the other cruisers who were loopy.  We intended to hit the Mango and Aquarium cafes to round out the night, but it was after 9:00 by this point, and they were actually closed.  What are we, back in El Segundo?  It was a great night with great friends, and we got to sample a little bit of Neiafu’s hoppin’ nightlife.