We reached Niuatoputapu in less than two days, one of the most remote islands in the Kingdom of Tonga. It lies far to the north, in the Niuas group, so far from the main Tongan islands that geographically it feels almost more connected to Samoa than to Nukuʻalofa.
The island itself is the remnant of an old volcano, low and intensely green, surrounded by reef and ocean. Its three main villages — Hihifo, Vaipoa and Falehau — are small, and from the moment we arrived it was obvious that life here moved at a completely different pace.
By the time we anchored, most of our little group had gathered again.
Entry formalities were simple enough. The head customs officer was a man called Bingo, a very pleasant character who immediately gave the impression that most things could probably be arranged, especially if alcohol somehow appeared in the conversation.
Over the next few days, Bingo became much more than a customs officer. He was our guide, organizer, local fixer and general man for everything.
There were four boats in our group by then. Stuart and Natalie were there with their three children aboard Neverland, Dennis and his wife were on Siempre Duo, Barney had arrived with his boat, and then there was us.
The locals suggested organizing a joint trip around the island so they could show us the main villages and a few places worth seeing.
We were all happy to accept.
A pickup truck was arranged, we all climbed into the back, and off we went.
Two Germans joined us as well. They were sailing two small yachts, only around thirty-two feet long. One of them was quite a story in himself.
He claimed he had taken his little boat around the southern tip of South America, through waters where the wind, cold and sea conditions were in a completely different category from anything we had experienced so far.
According to him, at one point the weather became so violent that he had to secure himself to ice to keep from being blown away.
“I still don’t know how I got out of there alive.”
Naturally, this fell into that special category of sailor stories you eventually learn to listen to without asking too many questions.
But at least this man carried evidence.
He had a camera full of photographs from his travels and said he also worked with a German magazine, sending them stories and pictures which they published in installments. How much of each story was fact and how much was the traditional sailor’s additional ten percent, I had no idea, but the photographs certainly proved that the man had not spent his life sitting in marinas.
Niuatoputapu does not take long to drive around, but its simplicity is exactly what makes it interesting. There are no large resorts, no organized tour buses and no real tourist infrastructure. The road passes through Hihifo, Vaipoa and Falehau, between houses, churches, plantations and stretches of coast, and then suddenly you are back in open green countryside.
In Hihifo we stopped at a freshwater spring, one of the more unusual places on the island.
In the middle of the village, the ground simply opens into a natural pool of remarkably clear water. There is no elaborate development around it. It is simply there, surrounded by houses, palms and village life.
The water was so transparent that the bottom could be seen clearly.
After months of salt water, boats, reefs and lagoons, the idea of a cold freshwater pool in the middle of a remote Pacific island felt almost luxurious.
The interior of the island rises gently toward the old volcanic high ground. The summit is not especially high, but because the rest of Niuatoputapu is so low, from above you can see much of the island at once — villages, reef, lagoon and open Pacific beyond.
The coast alternates between reef, quiet swimming spots and long stretches with almost nobody around.
Snorkeling and diving there felt different simply because there was so little traffic, so little development and so few people.
While we were exploring the island, we came across several old tsunami warning signs. One of them was simply hand-painted on a wooden board, with the large word FAKATOKANGA — “warning” — across the top, followed by numbers that immediately caught the eye. The locals also mentioned the tsunami to us more than once, so this was clearly not some distant piece of history displayed for tourists. People still remembered it very well.
On 30 September 2009, Niuatoputapu was struck by a devastating tsunami triggered by a powerful earthquake in the Samoa–Tonga region. The island was especially vulnerable because it is so low-lying and exposed to the open Pacific. The northern and eastern sides were among the hardest hit, and post-tsunami surveys found that in some places the water penetrated more than a kilometer inland.
For such a small island, the consequences were enormous. Nine people were killed, many houses were destroyed or badly damaged, and hundreds of residents lost their homes. In the years that followed, homes and infrastructure were rebuilt with help from the Tongan government and international organizations, so some of what we were seeing in 2018 was still part of the long recovery from that disaster.
That gave the locals’ stories a very different weight. Standing on Niuatoputapu and seeing how little elevation there is between the ocean and the villages, a tsunami no longer feels like some abstract disaster from a documentary. It becomes something very real — something that had passed straight through the same places we were now walking through.
The old sign also showed the figures 3.10 metres and 1.5 metres, but I was never able to establish exactly what each of those numbers referred to, so I would rather leave them simply as part of what we saw there than pretend to know more than I do.
What mattered more was the fact that the people living there still talked about that day.
At another point we came across a large open field where simple wooden structures were being built for an upcoming agriculture, fisheries, tourism and trade show.
A large banner already hung over the entrance, while the stalls themselves were being constructed from trunks and branches on the spot.
On a bigger island I probably would not have paid much attention to it.
Here, it looked like the whole place was getting ready for the event.
That was one of the things about Niuatoputapu: very quickly you got the feeling that everyone knew everyone, and that any community event involved almost the entire island.
We saw that again a few days later.
We were told that there would be a large celebration for the anniversary of the local school, and naturally we were invited.
We accepted immediately.
First came the formal part of the celebration, with speeches and ceremony, and then everyone moved outside, where games, dances and different group activities had been organized.
At some point even Damjan ended up participating.
After that came food.
And drinks.
Between these organized events we had plenty of free time, which we spent walking, swimming and diving.
Stuart had once been a very serious freediver. He had stopped after a frightening encounter with a shark, and for several years he had barely gone into the water at all.
By the time we met him, he was slowly getting back into it.
He gave me some of my first more serious freediving advice — how to breathe properly before a dive, how to relax, how not to waste oxygen unnecessarily, and how to gradually extend time underwater.
So between everything else, we began doing a bit of training.
Then, one day, Bingo appeared.
“Interested in a barbecue?”
Of course we were.
The plan was to go on Saturday to a small island across from our anchorage and spend the day there.
Early Saturday morning we all met near the dock.
Bingo arrived carrying a large sack.
Nobody paid much attention to it.
We loaded ourselves into the dinghies and set off toward the island, maybe fifteen minutes away.
A few minutes into the ride, the sack started moving.
I looked at Bingo.
“What is that?”
“Piglets.”
I looked at the sack.
“Alive?”
“I knocked them out. Looks like they woke up. I’ll deal with it.”
I just stared at him.
“This man is not normal.”
When we reached the island, everyone started collecting wood for the fire while Bingo took care of the rest of the operation.
Before long the fire was going, the spit was ready, and the piglets were on it.
I remember looking at the amount of food and wondering who on earth was going to eat all of it.
The answer, as usual in the Pacific, was everyone.
During those days we also discovered how valuable alcohol could become on very remote islands.
Everybody wanted it.
Very little was available.
When we left Panama, we had watched sailors buying astonishing quantities of rum. It was cheap there, only a few dollars a bottle, and at the time it made little sense to us why anyone would fill half the boat with it.
Now it was beginning to make perfect sense.
In places like this, a bottle of good rum could sometimes solve things that five hundred dollars could not.
The locals also showed us a homemade fermented coconut drink.
The coconut liquid was left to ferment until it became mildly alcoholic, and they were perfectly happy to drink it exactly like that.
Naturally, my first question was:
“Why don’t you let it finish fermenting and then distill it? You could make something like rakija.”
They looked at me as if I had proposed building an oil refinery.
“Who is going to wait that long? This is already good.”
That ended my contribution to local alcohol technology.
Niuatoputapu was, in the best sense of the word, raw.
There was almost no asphalt. Cars were rare, and most of what did move around the island were pickup trucks. The population was concentrated in a few villages, there were only a handful of small shops, and medical facilities were limited.
There was not much of what someone from Europe would normally call infrastructure.
And yet life seemed to function perfectly well.
Tonga soon revealed another side of itself too — a set of social rules and customs far more conservative than on most of the islands we had visited.
Walking around a village without a shirt was considered inappropriate. Swimwear belonged at the beach or in the water, not in the middle of the village.
But Sunday was something else entirely.
In Tonga, Sunday is not simply a quiet day.
It is taken seriously.
Very seriously.
Most shops close. Work stops. Sport, fishing and public recreation are heavily restricted. Running through the village, working out, swimming or making unnecessary noise on a Sunday is not something people are expected to do.
We had initially understood some of the rules almost literally, as if simply walking around might get us into trouble.
Technically, that was not quite the case.
But on a tiny and traditional island such as Niuatoputapu, the distinction did not matter much.
Sunday was for church, family and rest.
And if you were a visitor, you were expected to respect that.
So when Sunday arrived, we decided not to test the limits of local interpretation.
We stayed on the boats.
By midday, we had run out of things to do.
Nobody wanted to go ashore and accidentally offend somebody, so the entire day was spent at anchor.
We kept talking to each other over VHF radio, exchanging stories, ideas and possible plans for Monday.
After a few hours, the radio had basically turned into a floating village café.
One boat would call another.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“What about you?”
“Nothing.”
Perfect.
By Sunday evening, I had had enough of resting.
For Monday I had a completely different plan.
I was going to get up early, go ashore and make one long walk around Niuatoputapu.
The idea was simple.
I would start walking and try to make a complete circuit of the island, however long it took.
At that point, I had absolutely no idea how different the day was going to turn out from what I had planned.