Andrew Sparke - Piggery Jokery In Tonga

PIGGERY-JOKERY IN TONGA

In Search Of The Friendly Islan ds

Andrew Sparke

Piggery-Jokery In Tonga: In Search Of The Friendly Islands

Copyright 2015 APS Publications

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CONTENTS

The Decision To Go

So Where Are We Off To?

Flying The Basic Way

First Contacts

Base Camps

In Conversation With Salesi

The Dancing Rooster

Exploration

The Rugby

A Rival For Kew Gardens

Whales, Sharks and Yachts

Clandestine Assignations

Aftermath

Further Reading

The Royal Inquiry

Jatropha Biological Details

THE DECISION TO GO

W e arrive in Tonga , Paul and I, on a business trip which rapidly evolves into a fraud investigation and ultimately into giving evidence to a Royal Inquiry for King George Tupou V into land transactions across the islands. We come to Vavau hoping to create employment and earn some money and on both counts we ultimately fail. But what we do get is a glimpse of a hugely attractive culture and make friends within days that I'm desperate to go back to meet again. I also accidentally while drunk nearly get married. But that comes later.

Tonga is both very foreign and very familiar. Any country that lets un-corralled pigs wander down the Main Street but has English as its primary language after Tongan and whose religious leanings are towards Methodism, Catholicism and Mormonism will seem both familiar and excitingly alien at one and the same time.

Paul has been planning to visit Tonga for ages. I occasionally act as his legal adviser but I wasn't party to the deposit he made with an American land agent. I was however booking a five week break to see friends in Australia. Before leaving I get a telephone invitation to meet Paul in Sydney and travel to Tonga with him, really as nothing more glamorous than his carer. He needs knee surgery, can hardly walk and his wife, whos tied up with her own work and can't make the trip, understandably doesn't trust him travelling on his own. Hes offering to subsidise ten days of my holiday if I say yes. So I say yes. One of the better decisions in my life. And really as it turns out he needs a lawyer with him and we cram months worth of fascinating work and experiences into the short time were there.

Why Paul wanted a plantation is worth a book of its own. Suffice to say he'd been buggering around in Nevis for years trying to get one of his pet projects off the ground and he kept running into red tape of the governmental variety, inertia and distrust of foreigners. The project he had in mind and which he is now preparing to move lock stock and barrel to Tonga is about commercial exploitation of a plant called Jatropha.

Jatropha is an olive like plant. Its fruit is juicy but bitter. Even goats won't eat it. This means subject to decent soil, adequate water supply and a warm climate you're as near as dammit guaranteed a good crop. And the fruit when crushed yields oil you can simply burn. You can use it directly in a power plant to generate electricity or modify it with a simple chemical process to create a diesel substitute and run farm and marine engines with it. The only downside of producing fuel from Jatropha is that the refining process leaves glycerol as a waste product. And glycerol is expensive to dispose of. However if you set up a soap manufacturing entity right next door you can use the glycerol in a virtuous circle and create extra local jobs. It all sounds good especially when Paul discovers Air New Zealand are already test-flying a Boeing 747 on a fifty percent Jatropha mixture and are reporting improved fuel efficiency.

The plantation he has in mind is called Mandarin Estates on the small island of Fofoa near Vavau, placed for sale with a gushing internet listing including the following salient details covering the plantation, the residential lot and the buildings:

... an 80 year term... the full asking price is just $145,000 US Dollars...

The land agent marketing Mandarin Estates agreed to purchase the property for Paul treating the purchase price as a loan and agreeing to convey title to Paul once the loan of the purchase price was repaid.

So the purpose of this trip is to see Fofoa, settle the transfer of the plantation from the land agent to Paul in return for the balance of the purchase price after the deduction of 10,000 in loan instalments already repaid, resolve the importation obstacles for Jatropha seed and prepare the ground for Paul and family to move to Tonga as a main base away from the UK.

What follows is a travelogue, a detective mystery, and a cultural tour of a little-known part of the world which ideally needs to be visited before it changes. And the unique cultures of this region are already threatened by Chinese investment aiming to secure mineral rights in return for services and infra-structure which until now the islands have managed quite happily without.

SO WHERE ARE WE OFF TO?

T he Kingdom of Tonga comprises 171 islands, many of them uninhabited coral atolls, located in the Pacific Ocean. To put matters roughly in context The Friendly Islands can be found not far from Fiji, well to the north east of Australia, and north of New Zealand

The population of Tonga is about 100,000 concentrated in Tongatapu and the islands of Eua, Haapai and Vavau. After Tongatapu itself Tongas second largest town is Neiafu, situated on Vavau. It is home to some 6,000 people and blessed with a deep-water port of some significance.

Neiafu is our planned destination.

FLYING THE BASIC WAY