Well, here we are on February 3, Thursday, having skipped Wednesday entirely (although we actually crossed the International Date Line about 10:30 last night, so we should have had about 1.5 hours of Wednesday; as David says, the ship can do whatever they want with ship's time, so if they say we skipped Wednesday, we skipped Wednesday). Our port today is Nuku’ Alofi, the capital of Tongatapu Island, which is the largest island in the kingdom of Tonga.

After seeing the other South Pacific islands (even Niue), Tonga looks flat . I don’t know what its highest point is, but I doubt it’s more than 100 feet; there aren’t even any hills to speak of. The Tongans have a legend that Maui roped the island (along with the other islands of Tonga) from Samoa and dragged it up out of the sea and then stomped on it to flatten it so it would be good for growing gardens. Well, Maui did a good job. The name Tongatapu, by the way, means "sacred garden" in Tongan: Tonga = garden, tapu = sacred. Tonga is certainly lush, and there are gardens everywhere.

The first thing we noticed in the harbor was a rusted hull sitting on a reef. We are not sure how it got there, or when, or why it is still there, but it is a very good object lesson for ships in the difficulties of navigating through the reefs of Tonga. When we left, our captain told us it would take an hour to wind our way through the reefs to open water.

We went on a tour called “Island Encounter and Cultural Center .”  Our guide was called Una, and he wore a skirt, just like the guides for the Polynesian Cultural Center on Oahu. (During the tour I noticed that schoolboys’ uniforms had similar skirts.) Coincidentally, our bus driver was named Willy (pronounced 'Veelee’), just like the bus driver to the Polynesian Cultural Center. As we boarded the bus, Una gave each of us a necklace of flowers as a greeting. The flowers had a very strong scent, very spicy.

The tour visited the Royal Palace, the Cultural Center and museum, and went to see the blow holes and the sacred bats. The visit to the Royal Palace was only a photo opportunity; we didn’t get to go in. It isn’t a palace like Buckingham Palace; it’s more like a very grand beach house, but it has very ornate gates (see photo). It has just been renovated, but no one was at home when we went.

At the cultural center, the hosts and hostesses were all dressed in different (and very beautiful) dresses . Even the men wore skirts. They had on grass skirts, but there were cloth skirts beneath the grass skirts. We were warned that Tongans have strict religious mores that dictate modest attire, and although they are not as strict today as formerly, even palangi (foreigners) can be fined for violating the dress code (shoulders and knees covered, except at the beach).   They demonstrated a kava ceremony, and some native dances, then showed us how tapa cloth is made, and finally how to cook in an imu. In Tonga, men do the cooking; although, since an imu is very like a barbecue, American men might do the cooking, too. After the imu demonstration, we went into the museum. The cultural center is on the shore, and the demonstrations were done in a building that was open to the sea breezes, but the museum building was more closed and very hot. I enjoyed looking at all the artifacts, but I was glad when it was time to go.

Next stop was the blowholes, and it was great. This wasn’t just one blowhole, like on Tahiti; it was an entire coastline of blowholes . Everywhere you looked there was a spectacular effusion of water into the air. I took a couple of videos, and about 80 photos. You can see a few of the best below.

The sacred bats were impressive in their own right, if a bit of an anticlimax after the blowholes. You aren’t sure just what you are seeing at first, because they look like hanging fruit, but they are far noisier than any fruit I have ever heard. The girl sitting next to David and me got a spectacular close-up of a single bat; I didn’t get anything like as good a picture.

We passed several cemeteries, and noticed some very colorful quilts placed on the gravesites or hung above them, and asked the guide what the meaning was. He said some people were worried about the dead people getting cold, so they gave them quilts to keep them warm.

I meant to call Jasmine to wish her Happy Birthday, but then I realized it isn’t her birthday yet, for her. I think we are now about seventeen hours ahead of Virginia, so it is still February 2 there.