‘Will they let

me back in?’

By Bob Jones

Vavau Island, Tonga: My four

and-a-half-year-old daughter

Brett has made a friend. A two

and-a-half-year-old girl that

she decided to call Hillary. It turns out that Hillary’s name is Otio and she is a he. The clothes fooled us. I mean the dress, and all the jewellery.

And the two pigtails done up with silver bands. Otio’s mother dresses him that way because the woman who helps take care of Otio always wished she had a girl. And Otio’s mother does not want to disap point her friend. When Otio was born, the nurse at the

hospital thought that ‘Audio-

Visual’ was a nice name and sold it to mother. But when she took him home she phone ticised it to Otio.

Honourable Ma’afu’s House, Nukualofa: It is the first Sun day of our stay with one of Tonga’s 33 nobles of the realm and Ma’afu is also the speaker of the parliament. The Queen of Tonga, Halaevalu Mata’aho, has just sent me and spouse Denby a whole roast pig, a roast duck, several baked fish and a kind of octopus puree.

Cooked in the royal household.

Not bad at all.

The Dateline Hotel, Tonga tapu: It is Friday and the

weekly night-time dance and

bash is going. The Crown Prince is in a corner of the bar talking with the American am

bassador and others about US aid. The Princess Pilolevu is ringside at the dance-floor.

Some drunks throw their beer bottles on the floor and the bouncers drag off the more obstreperous inebriates. Never have so many been so soused.

The straights and the gays are two-stepping across the floor.

They may never let me back into Tonga, but I’ve got to tell you that every minute was worth it.

Items:

* The Friendly Islands Bookstore carries just about everything from The Egg and I to William Wheeler’s Complete Checklist of the Ants of Oceania. Tolstoy’s Civil Dis obedience sneaked in somehow, but don’t look for contem porary fare. The Wesleyan Church is always looking over your shoulder. * Never on Sunday. Every thing but the church closes down in Tonga on the holy day.

We 11... almost everything.

The buses and taxis stop run ning and the stores shutter and the boats tie up. But you can always manage to get a can of beer if you have a friend who belongs to the Tonga Club (males only and no riffraff).

The movie theatre closes Sun day and opens for business at a minute after midnight. * Neiafu has an airstrip so

small that only short-field planes can land there. It cannot be enlarged because coconut trees would have to be cut down and that is a very serious matter in a coconut culture.

The field was to be built in an area where there aren’t any coconuts. It was surveyed and plotted and half-a-million dol

lars appropriated and they

bulldozed and levelled and made a primary dirt strip. But the end of the strip was also a 500-foot cliff. The foreign pilots who do all the flying here flew in and said ‘You can’t build an airfield on the edge of a clifT. And that’s why there are two airfields in Neiafu.

Only one in use. * The King of Tonga used to weigh 440 pounds. I talk to him about that and he says that he went on a programme to reduce and got down 60 pounds. But then he went on a visit to Samoa that included lots of feasting and he put back 20. How has he been reducing?

He tries to eat mostly Japanese food minus the rice during the week ... saving the weekends for snails and lobster tail. He loves lobster tail. A tentmaker has made him a canvas ‘vest’ of sorts. It has lots of pockets and he has filled them with sand and goes up and down the Royal Stairs with the sand- j laden vest on. The sand is vol canic. Not beach sand. The King says beach sand has live organisms in it and starts to I smell after a while. Volcanic does not. Besides, he says, vol canic sand has iron in it and ■] that makes it heavier than j beach sand.