Yesterday we were going to kayak to a cool snorkeling spot outside of the bay, but it was too windy outside the sheltered bay. Instead, we spent most of the day doing boat chores. Eric changed the oils in the main engine and generator, changed the Racor fuel filters on both and changed the air filter on the generator.
We did go out to eat (of course) at a small cafe. It is run by a palangi (white person) and most of the food on the menu is the usual stuff we get at home hamburgers, fish burgers, etc. At this restaurant and at the Aquarium Cafe, fried eggs on your burger are optional. Also, at both places you can get French fries made of taro and kumala instead of potatoes. In French Polynesia they eat a ton of French fries, and we never once saw them made from anything other than potatoes. Using taro and kumala seems so logical that we find it odd that they don’t do the same in French Polynesia. Lunch was served with a fruit called Kola. It is a citrus fruit with a green peel, like a lime, about the size of a lemon, and the meat is orange, like an orange. It is sour and tastes like a cross between a lemon and a lime.
We also went to the Austrian bakery, which has multi-grain bread, whole wheat bread, and rye bread, which is exciting after so many months of only white bread. We got whole grain bread. It is good and it is dense. We may use it as a secondary anchor.
Today it was still windy and cloudy, so we decided to go on a hike to the top of Mt. Talau instead of kayaking and snorkeling. The round trip walk from dinghy dock to the peak and back is about 4 miles long and the top of the mountain is only 131 meters, so it sounded like a good hike for us. The main drag of Neiafu was deserted. The other days we have been here the road was teeming with cars and pedestrians.
Most of the way up the hill we were on a paved road. There were 6 churches on the one road. Each of the churches had beautiful singing wafting from the windows. Most of the houses along the road were small and weather beaten. There was only one or two fenced yards. There were a lot of pigs roaming around. The asphalt ended and we continued trudging up the dirt road. We could still clearly hear the singing, which made the walk somehow surreal. It felt like we were characters in a movie, and unbeknownst to the characters (us) there was going to be some crazy religious experience at the top of the mountain. The hiking trail to the view point was just before the sign announcing you had entered the park, so of course, we missed the turn off. After a few minutes on the dirt road we figured we were lost since the road was heading downhill. We turned around and found the hiking trail. The trail was steep, taking you over rock similar to the coral rocks in the forest in Niue. There were rope lines tied to hold on to so you could get up and down the rocks.
Up at the top there were a lot of trees and bushes, but it wasn’t the very thick and dense foliage we have gotten used to seeing in the South Pacific. Actually, the forest in Niue wasn’t very dense, either.
We could hear small snatches of singing carried on the wind, but Jesus never descended from the sky to say hi. Lonely Planet said there were four viewpoints, but we only found three. They were all pretty. You could see the Neiafu harbor, several outlying islands, and the ocean in the distance. We could also see rain coming in the distance, so we didn’t linger. We hurried back to Kosmos and made it back just as the rain hit.
Everything in Tonga is closed on Sundays, by law, so we just stayed on Kosmos and relaxed the rest of the day. Eric is proud to report he finished Neverwinter Nights 2.