Tales of the South Pacific - Neiafu, Vava’u, Tonga

Cruise Day 29

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

Last night we sailed to Vava’u, the northern island group of Tonga.  Today is a tender port as we are visiting the small town of Nieafu.  I called it small, but despite it's population of only 3800, it's the second largest town in Tonga and also the capital of the Vava'u island group.

We have moved from the southernmost island group in Tonga to the northernmost.

 

We had to sail into the center of Vava'u island group to get to Nieafu.

We had nothing planned for the day except to go ashore and walk around the town, so we slept in trying to catch up on our sleep.  Val and I are both sick, but luckily, we don’t feel too bad, it’s just this darn cough.  Val seems to be getting a little better, but not me yet.  After breakfast in the Neptune Lounge, we headed off to get a tender ashore around 10:00.  This island has an odd horseshoe shape where Neiafu is located in the round part of the horseshoe, so it was a fairly long tender ride from the ship to the tender dock.

 

Once we got off the tender, we saw we were pretty much in the center of town and there was a public market close by, so we headed towards that.  Besides the usual fruits and vegetables, they were selling some handmade craft items, so Val browsed through those.  She found some necklaces carved out of whalebone she liked and asked the young lady about them.  She said her brother made them and he had a small coffee shop further into the village where he had more to sell.

 

Val wanted to see what her brother had but was afraid that someone would buy the one she liked here, so the lady offered to set it aside for her, and off we went to her brother’s store.  It was pretty easy to find, but it was a bit of an uphill climb to get there.  Val didn’t see anything she liked better than the one she had already picked out, but I did find a T-shirt I liked.  It turns out that the lady we talked to at the market and her brother’s father had designed the T-shirts, so it’s quite a family operation.

After purchasing my T-shirt, we walked further into town and found another handicraft store.  They had very nice things, but we decided not to purchase anything and started walking back to the market.  Since we are downsizing, we have had to resist the urge to buy too many of the local handicrafts we have found as we just don’t want to add more stuff to our house no matter how much we like it.

Some pictures of the town of Nieafu.

Lots of pineapples.

At the market, the lady was true to her word and had set aside Val’s necklace.  She was very nice and talked for a bit and after Val purchased her necklace, we headed back to the tender dock.  There were tables with vendors selling handicrafts and some local entertainment going on so we stopped to look at that for a bit.  The temperature was quite mild, but as usual, the humidity was stifling so we soon had enough and took the tender back to the ship.

This is the lady that sold Val her necklace, she was very nice.

There were vendor booths set up near the tender dock ...

and entertainment

When we were back in our room, we relaxed for a while in the cool air conditioning and then we headed to the Lido for lunch.  After lunch I sat down and started updating the blog and Val went out on the balcony to read.  I didn’t finish updating the blog as I was running out of steam, so I joined Val out on the balcony.  As I said, we are not exactly full of energy these days, but I will say that despite that, we haven’t missed any activities except the tour we had in Suva, Fiji.

We had another mediocre day at trivia but as Arthur said, “we excel at good conversation”.  We returned to our room and rested for a while and then went out on our balcony to watch our sail away from Tonga.  To leave this island, we had to sail out of the odd shape of this island and around some smaller islands, so it was pretty scenic.

 

As the sun sets, we sail out into the open seas.

It was soon time for dinner and after that a visit to the casino.  Val and I did well in the casino tonight.  I had a good win and decided to call it a night, but Val decided to stay on.  When she returned, she said she had a very nice win that topped mine, it’s always nice when we both win.

We have four sea days ahead of us that we are very much looking forward to.  Besides being sick, we have spent eight of the last ten days in ports and that is always tiring.  There seems to be some sort of bug going around on the ship, so I guess we are not alone, but we sure would like to get healthy again.