Tonga

Strung along the western rim of the Tonga Trench, where the ocean floor drops to one of its deepest points, Tonga’s islands fall into three main groups. Tongatapu is flat raised coral around a broad lagoon, with blowholes spouting along its southern shore. Haʻapai is a scatter of low islands beside the volcanic cones of Tofua and Kao. Vavaʻu, to the north, breaks into limestone islands and channels around Port of Refuge, where humpback whales come each winter to calve.

Lapita settlers landed on Tongatapu nearly three thousand years ago. By the thirteenth century the sacred Tuʻi Tonga kings held sway as far as Samoa. James Cook called them the Friendly Islands in the 1770s. George Tupou I unified the islands, embraced Methodism and gave Tonga a written constitution in 1875. Never annexed, Tonga was a British protected state from 1900 until June 1970. Queen Sālote Tupou III rode in an open carriage through the rain at the coronation of 1953.

The constitution keeps Sunday holy, so shops close and families go to church in taʻovala, woven mats tied around the waist. Women’s groups beat mulberry bark into ngatu, painted tapa cloth given at weddings and funerals. Feasts come from the ʻumu with lu pulu, corned beef in taro leaves and coconut cream. Households lean on money sent by relatives in Auckland, Sydney and California; squash for Japan, vanilla and kava are the main crops, and whales draw visitors to Vavaʻu.