m + m: October 2010

Isileli To'a

Mike and I have been back from Tonga for almost three months now. I can't believe how time flies! This post is super full of pictures and will be even more full of words by the time I'm done with it, so beware. I've been smiling over and over again as I've looked at these pictures. I miss the people we loved in Tonga so much. I'm also sad because I lost the first half of my pictures from this area--including the portraits I took of the neighbor children, which were some of my best photographs I've taken to date.

Vava'u was the second island group that we stayed in. We stayed there the longest of the three groups. We lived with Muli and Tiana Lisala, and got to know four of their ten children: Soape, Leina, Ana, and Amanaki. We also got to know several other families in the area. Isileli, in the above picture, is son of Ofa and Uini. They had lots of little rascals running around and hosted a number of the students that we traveled with.

The entire group of BYU students flew into Vava'u to do a book project. We learned how to make tapa cloth, a traditional Tongan art form, and had to use that in our books. That was our only criteria for the project. Below are pictures of Mike and my books. He used an old hollowed coconut, tapa, and natural dyes (that we learned how to make)! His coconut housed a scroll with a carved...twisty thing.

He also painted traditional Tongan designs on his tapa. Mike always says he's not artistic (everyone says that to you when you are an art major, though many people are lying), but I think he did a great job with his book!

I built the structure of my book using 300 lb. Arches watercolor paper, stained some of my tapa with natural dyes, and also painted the image inside with some of the dye we made.

I couldn't get the picture right above to orient right, but, oh well. He's a close-up of the mini painting I did inside. It's a scene from the beach we visited with our "family" in Tonga.

I loved playing with my new camera in Tonga! It was a great place to learn about the settings and all of the options it provides me with! I also loved all the tropical flowers...they were everywhere but they never ceased to amaze me. I always think it's strange when things that were initially shocking become a part of our everyday lives. When I studied art in Italy I walked past the Duomo nearly every day. The first few weeks, it stopped me in my tracks. But as time went on it became something I hurried past on the way to get gelato, go shopping, or find a friend who was out solo so they didn't get in trouble with Peter or Brian.

Above is a picture of the general landscape. We were out on a boat on our way to snorkel in some beautiful caves...

That splash in the foreground is most likely from my husband jumping off the boat, a rock, or anything above the water.

Here is a picture from the inside of the cave...if you weren't looking closely on the ride over, you would easily have missed it. As you can see, Mike has a group of boys preparing to jump into the water.

Mike Wallace on the left, Mike Pacada in the middle, and Phil on the right. We were chums.

Wallace jumping from a high place.

Pacada doing the same thing, with Wallace waiting to jump again.

The Mikes looking for a place to set out Wallace's crab trap.

We stopped here to eat lunch on the way back from the caves.

The boat we took out to the caves.

Umu...lu (lu leaves wrapped around meat and sometimes vegetables--Tiana made the best I've ever eaten and sometimes I still crave it), kumala and breadfruit, puaka...sooooooooo good!

The chess set Mike and I made. We wove the mat and collected the seashells (very carefully) in Ha'apai and Vava'u.

Naki drew a picture of us together in a rainstorm. Below the picture it said, "The day I will never forget." I'm not sure what that means, but, I was happy he drew a picture of us!

Naki holding pictures he drew and I painted.

The neighbor kids doing the same thing. I loved these kids so much. Neha, in the middle, looked especially wonderful with her afro untamed.

I truly was (and still am) obsessed with coconuts. Eating them, drinking them, cooking with them...they're amazing. I miss them ALL the time.

Down at the Neiafu wharf.

Mike Wallace and Brian working on Phil's toe. Mike Pacada documenting the event...hahaha! This was so funny (and sad). Here is an email about the whole ordeal:

We slept over at Uini and Ofa To’a’s house the other day. They are the host family of our friends. We made rice pudding, played volleyball, and hung out with Americans, which was fun. We also worked on making tapa cloth there, a kind of fibrous paper made from mulberry bark, with a native Tongan woman. It was crazy. You cut into the bark and tear it off the tree, then strip the bark from both sides, then pound it out for hours and hours and hours with a (very heavy) wooden mallet. I was in serious pain after doing mine and Mike’s. I did Mike’s because…

Phil, a member of our group got a “blister” a few weeks ago that quickly turned into an enormous open sore on a huge balloon of a “toe” with black nastiness all through the pussy infected area. I’m sorry, but there is no classier way to describe it. Totally gross. And of course, as I have had small infections in scratches and Mike has taken care of them, I gave him puppy dog eyes and persuaded him that it would be a good idea to help Phil take care of it. So he did, which is how the sore ended up being so very open instead of a simple blister size. That’s how we found all the puss, black infected nastiness, and realized that it wasn’t getting any better any time soon without some serious antibiotics (have you ever wondered why people assume that doctor’s children are good at curing things)? Anyway, Mike ended up having to go to the hospital with Phil (who is fine now), and I helped with his cloth, which caused me pain. Luckily the Tongan woman is like a steel machine and pounded cloth out three times faster than any of us. She ended up finishing all of them, and we got beautiful cloth and blisters all over our hands.

This collection of signs was by the tourism center of downtown Neiafu. I was so excited to move to San Francisco every time we saw it!

On our way to see the whales...it started as a rainy day.

But the rain went away and we saw a full rainbow on the ocean. I had never seen both ends of a rainbow before!

I thought it was so cool and beautiful to see where the rainbow ended in front of the land like that! Absolutely gorgeous!

And here is a very long story (from an email) about what we were doing out with the whales:

One of the main attractions of Vava’u is whale watching. Every July (third week, wish we’d have known that earlier)-September (ish), hundreds of humpback whales come to the islands to bear their young. The island group consists of so many islands that there is plenty of shelter for all momma and calf whales involved. The other perk of whale watching in Vava’u is the fact that it is not illegal to swim with the whales. You heard me—you can swim with them. Tonga is the only place in the world where you can do this. Being able to swim with the whales depends on a few things: whether or not they are actually present and whether or not they stay in the same place long enough for you to get in the water. Especially at the beginning of the season, the whales are a bit more skittish and fewer in numbers.

Well, Mike and I obviously really wanted to swim with a whale or two. A whale was first sighted at the very beginning of July, but since then, there haven’t been too many sightings. La’ie, one of the girls we live with, works at a dive shop and has kept us posted on the status of our humpback friends. She finally told us about a week ago that her dive shop was offering trips and that others were starting to go out, too. So Mike and I looked around and found that Dolphin Pacific Diving (which hosted BBC Life for their segment on humpback whales!) was offering whale trips at a “discounted” price because actually seeing the whales still wasn’t a guarantee. We played around
with the idea of going in Tongatapu, but you are less likely to swim with the whales there and usually see less of them, so we decided on Thursday to risk it and sign up for whale watching on our last day in Vava’u.

Well, Sunday night, Vava’u hosted the largest thunderstorm we have seen in all of Tonga (it trumped the one that sent rivers down the street in Ha’apai—we figured Vava’u was just sad to see us leave). The rainstorm is a story in and of itself, but the highlights were: rain falling so hard on the sheet-metal roof that I honestly thought it was going to cave in on itself, dancing in the rain with Mike, and having the little boys next door call out to me (because they were also dancing in the rain), “Missyeh?” throughout a good portion of the storm. Every time lightning struck, the world would turn a luminescent purple and the boys next door would cry in unison,
“Oooooo-wah-oooooh!” It was one of my favorite nights in Tonga. However, it was not a promising night for whale watching. We fell asleep to the rain pattering on the roof and wondered if we would ever get to see the whales.

In the morning, the sky was still gray, and after we got to Neiafu, it even started raining a bit. Mike and I had been praying that the whales would come (is that inappropriate?), and although the skies were foreboding, we really felt like things would work out. After we checked in at the dive base, they gave us snorkel gear and wet suits and we took off in the rain. There was a young couple in our group from Germany that we were able to communicate quite well with, and also a young couple from Chicago who is in the Peace Corps (as well as the girl’s visiting sister and friend). Our guides were a man from England, named Alistair, and an obstetrician from New Zealand named Pete (he started his own practice, sold it five years ago and now has the freedom/money to come to Tonga and be a diving guide for 4-5 months of each year). Alistair and Pete were both part of the crew who helped the BBC Life get the shots they wanted over 27 days of filming. In fact, they are supposedly in the “making of” section at the end of the episode, which we will verify as soon as we get home. As we were driving to the outer islands, Pete gave us a nice, long explanation that there was no guarantee we would see any whales, that if we saw them, there was a good chance we wouldn’t be able to swim with them, and if we didn’t see any whales, they would take us to some nice caves for snorkeling on the way home. It was pretty depressing.

But, we watched and watched for the whales all morning long as the rain got heavier, colder, and our boat headed straight into dark gray clouds. On the radio in the cabin I could hear the whale watching crews from different boats saying things like, “I’ve been out all morning and nothing, nothing, nothing.” I almost fell asleep a few times (I really do have unique sleeping abilities), but a few hours into the trip, Pete told us that a whale had been spotted in the area ahead of us, so we should keep a close lookout (like we hadn’t been looking already). To me the area looked more flat and vacant than any that we had seen yet, especially because we were out of the small
clusters of islands and it looked like we were stuck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The area was very far out of the way, and the boat that called us out there was a fishing boat.

But Alistair seemed to know where he was going. He sat on top of the boat driving and had a seat on either side of him. The seats were taken up most of the morning by the hippies (our Peace Corps friends—though the Germans actually looked more like hippies than they did, especially when they rolled up smokes every hour). Mike and I didn’t get a chance to sit up top until around 11:30, but we quickly made friends with Alistair. We felt like we would have been friends
and hung out with him if we had met him earlier in the trip. He had been a fire fighter in England until he wanted a change in life, so five years ago he came down to Tonga and now owns Dolphin Pacific. We drove slowly through the area of the whale that had been seen that morning, but we saw nothing. The sun had been battling with the clouds for a few hours and finally won and beat down on us through the breeze. We even saw a full double rainbow at one point – each end
landed in full view on the ocean. I’ve never seen a rainbow that didn’t hide behind mountains. We turned around and stopped at a beautiful bay called “Blue Lagoon.” The water was an incredible shade of turquoise and cerulean—I wanted to paint it but felt like I would
never be able to get the colors right. We ate a quick lunch and part of our group went snorkeling, but since they were told they had to be back in ten minutes, Mike and I stayed behind with Pete and Alistair. We took a quick dip outside the boat and ended up talking with them while we waited for the others. They asked me which direction we should go, east or west, and I said east. They asked me which direction I thought was east, and I pointed the wrong way (southwest),
so they went west.

As we were driving back, everyone seemed a little disappointed, but tried to look like they were eagerly awaiting their first whale sighting. A lot of our hope was gone and we were dealing with our lowered expectations as best we could, but Alistair was still hopeful and wasn’t about to give up yet. At the beginning of the trip, Pete said that whichever group spotted a whale first (we were paired with the Germans), would be the first to go in the water. Nobody saw a whale, and we were now heading back the way we had come when we first started looking that morning. We later learned that that area is usually the best for seeing whales, but since we had already checked it earlier that morning Alistair was debating between checking again or going up the central channel – hence his asking me “East or West?” I was sitting in the corner of the deck, staring behind the boat at the water, when I heard scrambling and yelling and squealing (from the girls, obviously). Then in all the chaos I heard Pete’s voice, “Guys, it’s a whale, come see! Missy, get up here and take a look!” (Mike note: I was standing up on the side, somewhat near Alistair, so as soon as he spotted it I heard him turn around and say, “Who said we should go this way, eh?” I think he was saying it to Missy, so his first reaction was to get Missy to see the whales. Funny how people always seem to like her instantly.) It took me a minute to process
what was going on, but I managed to get up the ladder and see a giant, dark mass moving through the water. It reminded me of seeing a snake move between two objects—you can only tell that it’s moving because you see the scales sliding in one direction or the other. We were
completely mesmerized. We watched it blow and then saw its tail flip up as it dived back down in the water.

In order to swim, you have to keep track of the amount of time a whale spends under water. After you see the tail flip up in the air, you know it is diving, and then you start to time it. Our whale (and her calf), were under the water for eleven minutes. So, first we had to wait and see if they came up in the same place (which they did), and then we had to hurry the boat over to them—quick enough not to waste time, but slow enough not to scare them. Pete had made an
executive decision that Mike and I got to go in the water first (with the Germans), even though he first said, “Do you guys want to decide who goes in first or should I?” But when Alistair suggested picking a number, Pete acted like he didn’t hear him and said that our group would go first because I had said which way we should go and it resulted in a whale. Alistair started to make fun of me as I had said east and he had been the one to choose west, but it was all in fun.
So we all got ready in our wet suits, flippers, and masks. After the boat got over to where the whale had dived, Pete jumped in, scouted them out, and called for us to join him after he was above the whales.

We hurried into the water and tried to get to Pete as fast as we could without splashing, and then we looked down. First the only thing we could see was a few white spots, even those seemed like they were part of our imagination. Mike and I grabbed each others’ hands. Then, slowly, the spots seemed to get closer, the water seemed to be transforming, our hands were clasping tighter and tighter, and the outline of an enormous whale was suddenly visible right below us. We got to look at them for a good ten to fifteen seconds before they took off. It doesn’t seem like a long time now, but trust me, it was plenty.

After the whales took off, the next group jumped in and watched for a while. Then the whales moved off and began swimming a bit more quickly. Alistair said that we could get in again, so our group was waiting, ready to go, on the back of the boat. The whales were swimming at the surface alongside us—maybe ten meters away. It was unbelievable to see them so close. Then we drove a bit ahead of them, jumped in the water, and watched as they changed directions and cut in front of our view under the water, giving us a beautiful view of them as they swam directly in front of and below us.

It all happened so quickly that I hardly remember what I saw. All I know is that Mike and I were in the water, with the whales, and although we didn’t frolic with them for a few hours (like we had originally anticipated); we still got to do the one recreational thing we wanted to before leaving Vava’u. We also did this against the odds of rain and very few whales. It was perfect.

There were little tiny islands like this everywhere. I guess that's why Tonga is technically an archipalego.

Naki getting me a coconut to drink...I have a video of him scooting up the tree, but it won't load.

Pigs everywhere, and they eat coconuts, too.

I never figured out why everyone loved to hang out on this dead car (or the one next to it that you can't see in this picture).

Tiana cooking something amazing over an open fire.

Me drinking from a coconut. That is so weird (not).

These were growing in our front yard!

Naki. I love the beautiful golden and purple light behind him.

VANILLA BEANS! This is what they look like processed.

This is what they look like off the tree. These are the most amazing vanilla beans I have ever cooked with (I brought a lot home), and my entire kitchen is filled with their scent. I guess that's not saying much because my kitchen is tiny, but still.

Ha'apai didn't have diet coke, but Vava'u sure did. And you better believe that finding diet coke was one of the first things I did when I got there!

Looking out over the wharf. I always loved it when Mike put flowers behind my ear...even though it was totally cheesy.

I loved this wall at the Mermaid Cafe! It was recycled glass.

If you got to the market early enough, you could drink an ice cold coconut that had been picked fresh that day. It was one of our favorite treats!

We hitchhiked all the time! This is one of my favorite pictures of us (ever)--sitting on the back of some stranger's truck! I'm not sure if it's the wind-blown hair or what, I just love it.

Playing volleyball with the village kids! But it was with a flat soccer ball, so it kind of hurt!

Cooking rice pudding for our family over the open fire. That thing is HOT! Tiana was a master.

Naki at the beach. He went exploring with Mike and they scared trees full of fruit bats...they flew away in a huge cloud that we could see from the shore below!

Mike and Naki...watching a show.

I bought this hammock somewhere (I think Argentina?) and have been waiting to find a good place for it. Tonga seemed like the perfect fit, and the Lisalas are hopefully enjoying it as I type!

Yep. Found that centipede eating that cockroach near the toilet/shower. We grabbed a razor for scale.

The book/tapa workshop. I loved watching the artists paint designs on the tapa...I had a video of it but I couldn't get it to load.

MANOA! The giant baby who is only two months old in this picture.

Full-sized tapa. It's beautiful!

Mike sawing away at his coconut, and Semisi copying him by trying to cut through vi (a little green fruit) with a plastic knife. Both of them are very cute, but Semisi is very very cute.

Semisi and Isileli. they're brothers but don't really look like it!

Some of the different books our group made.

Me and Gary, one my professors (and fellow celiacs), eating lunch.

Me and Mike all dressed up for the big dance! Our family dressed me (in their clothes) and they made those beautiful leis from leaves and flowers from bushes outside of their house.

Mike teaching the kids the pelvic thrust...okay not really, but that's what it looks like in this picture. Please notice Hika's amazing outfit (snazzy jacket and Hawaiian shorts), and the kids amazingly happy faces while imitating Mike's dorkiness.

Me and Hika.

Kaitlyn entertained this group of girls all night! Kaitlyn and the "other Mike" are married...we love these two and miss them a lot!

The jack Guttenbeil Store is next to the LDS Liahona High School. It is home of the greatest selection of candy on the island...including American candy like Snickers, Starbursts, etc. It was quite the find!

Me at the church school with girls from the ward Mike and I lived in. The girl making the crazy face is Leina, our "sister."

This is our neighbors' house. We loved the kids there so much. There were six kids under the age of 10. It was all crazy, all the time! This picture was taken as we were leaving Vava'u. It was so surreal, and so sad. If you look at one of the windows you can see Neha holding out the picture she drew and I painted. They were yelling that they loved us as we left them, and we were yelling it back! I miss them calling out to me every morning as I got ready to go for the day.

Mike and I were in the back of a truck, as usual, on the way to the airport. This time we knew the truck driver, which was nice!

Me, Naki, and Tiana at the airport. I kept thinking I'd see them when I woke up in Tongatapu. It was so weird to leave--they were really like family. And that lei, like the others, smelled heavenly.

Mike, Naki, and Tiana.

We loved Vava'u so much! We loved our entire stay in Tonga. Sometimes it was really hard, and sometimes it really just felt like an island paradise. We miss the food, the people, and the peaceful lifestyle there.

And I really miss fresh coconuts.

m + m

10.28.2010

I'm employed. Woot!

10.25.2010

Alcatraz.

10.20.2010

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TYLER!

10.18.2010

Happy Birthday, Momma!

10.17.2010

Vava'u, Tonga.