After our relaxing weekend we were keen to get to the big smoke and check out the Kingdom’s capital. Big Mama’s ran a ferry that we all took to the boat harbour. Wow! First impressions… clean clear water, reef up to the rockwall and rubbish everywhere. Floating in the harbour, blown up against the fences and lying in the gutter… it was quite literally “littered” everywhere. This surprised me as we have become so used to clean roads and tidy towns in Australia. I do remember little Community Service Announcements on TV when I was young about Keep Australia Beautiful, and I have one memory of the sides of the Stuart Highway coming back into Darwin being so colourful with green cans, white cans and red cans, glittering like a Christmas tree in the late afternoon sun. I guess I had never thought about the time people did became aware of their littering and the process it must have taken to change the views and habits of a community. One reason given to me with regard to the rubbish was that the Tongan’s have always lived in a disposable society. Coconut leaves are used to make baskets, hats, mats etc, coconut milk is drunk straight from the coconut and then left. All of their resourses were disposable. Their way was to throw away the things they use and they would breakdown back into the earth being fully biodegradable. When plastics were introduced their habits never changed. Now I can understand this to a certain degree but as Duncan said, surely they would realize that plastics & aluminium were not breaking down and they would change their habits. Not so. And we also found it difficult to find a rubbish bin. Education may be the key but it would seem like a mammoth task.
So aside from my initial shock it was exciting to be in a new country. Taxis buzzed around the wharf area where we had landed and two rows of canvas covered tables out in the dirt lot represented the local fish market area. Plenty of octopus and sea cucumber, small reef fish and other sea creatures were up on offer. We decided to pass on the culinary delights and walk to town to capture as many sights as we could. Roadside sellers peddling their wares: cassava or tapioca root, taro, yams, peanuts in the shell, watermelons and wood carvings. It was all very interesting. Like the rubbish problem I was also surprised by the state of the yards surrounding the buildings. Bricks and rubble scattered around, fires burning (presumably some of the rubbish, judging by the smell) and household items no longer required just simply cast aside. Mangy dogs and even pigs roaming down the streets. In contrast to all of this were the people. Beautiful, inquisitive, friendly people all immaculately dressed. School kids in bleached white shirts, colourful tunics for the girls with matching ribbons in their plaited hair and pocket sulus for the boys (like a wrap around skirt with pockets) Even the thongs on their feet were scrubbed clean. It was refreshing to see what proud people they were. That day our eyes were like sponges soaking in as much as we could.
We visited a café for a quick coffee fix and located the Digicel office to come back and use the internet later and then looked through the market place. The central market place is the hub of the town. A large 2 storey building housed all the merchants selling handicrafts, carvings, fruit & veggies , even clothes and the odd Chinese stall selling stale perfume and wooden cotton buds. We devoured the sights and I was particularly enthralled at the little “stacks” of tomatoes, a whole table with varying shades of ripening fruit from green through yellow and orange, right up to almost ripe. Most things were $3/pile. There are a lot of Chinese business in Tongatapu and it brings a welcome supply of green veggies to supplement the starchy root vegetable mostly eaten by the Tongan people. Fruit was limited to bananas and paw paw and if you were lucky you could pay $8 for a bag of New Zealand apples or pick up a watermelon about the size of a large rockmelon.
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