Uoleva

Uoleva is the island just to the southwest of Lifuka (where Pangai is located), and it was definitely one of our favorite places in Ha’apai. It is a small island with a white sand beach around the entire perimeter, although I never did do a circumnavigation. The sand was packed enough to run with shoes but soft enough to run barefoot too, so I had plenty of options. There are two anchorages listed in the guidebook, and we anchored in the southern one. Our second anchor location was the much better of the two anchor spots we had with fewer bombies to get your chain wrapped around. A couple of low-key resorts are on the island, and we inquired about dinner at one of them (the one furthest south, I don’t remember the name) and it would have been 50 pa’anga per person including a cultural show, but in the end, we decided to skip it.

The boys kept busy on the beach and had a good time, even though they were seriously missing other kid boats at this point. They built a fort, no, it was more like a house, and they got pretty engrossed in the project. Tim even had to whistle them home for dinner at dusk. They weren’t lonely for long, though, because a kid boat that we met in Pago Pago pulled into the anchorage and stayed for a few days. S/V Wildlife has a 14-year-old boy and 12-year-old girl, and they actually live here in Ha’apai, on the island of Nomuka (spolier alert: we will visit them there a little later in the journey). They have a whale watching charter business, and that’s actually why they were at Uoleva, to take some tourists from the resort out on their boat. I don’t know what came over me, but I gave the boys the entire week off from school. We hadn’t been with other kids for a few weeks, so I let them spend their days with the kids from Wildlife building another hut, gathering coconuts, and going dinghy surfing. They had a lot of fun, except that Brenden, and only Brenden, got covered in bug bites, kind of like no-se-um bites that we used to encounter in Mexico. He seriously suffered, because they were all over his back, chest, and naval. I’m guessing that since they were on shore at dusk, and because he’s Brenden and he doesn’t just sit and play in the sand, he lays in it and rolls around in it, which is why the bites were where they were and not on his ankles and calves.

There was very nice snorkeling along the reef on the south side of Uoleva. Lots of live coral, sharks, and big and small fish. This was one of the better spots we snorkeled in all of Tonga.

We stayed at Uoleva so long partly because we had to wait out some weather, but it was also just a nice place to be. We enjoyed several fun and relaxing evenings with Iguana, and a couple times it was even warm enough to venture out to the net of Exodus to enjoy a little breeze and fun conversation. Just like old times.

Uoleva Photo Log – Link