(Day #29) Nuku' Alofa, Tonga

Tonga is suppose to be the poorest of all the Polynesian islands.  It consist of 170 islands and Nuku' Alofa is the capital.

 

I'm not sure what we thought it would look like because we had seen some pretty poor conditions on other islands.  We were pleasantly surprised by it's town and people.

 

We took a cab to the temple which was a lot farther away than we thought it would be.  We couldn't believe it, the temple was closed until next week.  We took some time to walk around and admire the temple and the grounds.  It was so beautiful.  We found out that this was also where the mission headquarters was located.  We met three senior missionary couples and a couple of elders.  One of the senior couples drove us back to the city.  On the way they showed us the high school that the church runs.  The couple had only been in Tonga a week and they were in charge of the housing for all the missionaries there.

 

In town we walked around and went to the public market.  We saw some of the crew members from the ship and took their pictures.

 

I love the island's cemeteries.  They were every where.  We passed three just on the way back to the ship on the shuttle bus.  The pictures of the cemetery on my blog was taken from our verenda, across the port, and on to the next road.

 

I couldn't get over how many coconut trees covered the island.  As we left the port this afternoon, the captain told us that we would have to zig zag our way out to open waters.  There were so many little islands that the ship needed to pass.

 

By the way we didn't get a February 2nd because we crossed over the international date line during the night.  We went from February 1st to February 3rd.