At 09:00 we took the bicycles back to the hire shop and having waited 30 minutes for the chap to turn up we abandoned the bikes and chained them to the front of his trailer conscious that we were being collected at 10:00 for an island tour.
We covered pretty much everything in our chauffeur driven tour. From 10:00 until 15:00 there was barely a road not travelled on the island of Tongatapu. Our first point was a group of trees which were home to hundreds of flying foxes, fruitbats. Then we drove on to Ha'atafu beach which was fairly deserted. Much to our satisfaction we revisited the spectacular Blow Holes, which on arrival appeared to be calmer than yesterday, then as we approached the edge of the cliff they picked up and smashed terrific waves at the reef with tremendous power! We filmed them a while then moved on to Captain Cook's landing place the other side of the island. Our chauffeur offered us some fresh pineapple and watermelon to revive us as we were falling asleep in the heat and from the motion of the car. We trekked down to the sea at the next point, Afa, which gave us the opportunity to see some beautiful green and silver geckos running in between the fallen leaves. Finally we slowly headed back towards the Blow Holes in search of Secret Cove. En route we stopped on the roadside and remarked how strange it was that an island has such violent, powerful waves crashing in to shore on one side and on the other side it was an image of peace and tranquility. It is fabulous. We descended to Secret Cove in the burning sunshine and found it too to be an active coastline with waves pounding at the reef. Having returned to the Divers Lodge for lunch we walked back down to the waterfront to see the King's Palace again and slowly walked back to the lodge for some rest.
Copyright 2002 Helen Fuller. All rights reserved.