Easter in Tonga - Not much goin on

Good Friday. It is one of those "special" holidays here. Everything is closed with the notable exception of the bread shops. Thank God they are open.

No cabs or buses, no ferries and, obviously, the airport is closed. I am up at 03:00... not healthy. The church bells clamor before 05:00. The bells wake those roosters that are still snoozing and the clamoring is deafening. I am listening to the radio, on these 'no work' days they play a feed from the BBC world service. I can't hear anything until the bells finally quit.

After tea I wait for sunup then I wander the town, chatting with folks I see. The local bakery has hot cross buns to celebrate Easter, so I grab half a dozen and eat them outside the closed public market.

All in all a quiet day. Good for reading and not much else.

Saturday is the opposite. Everything is open, at least until noon. We know that both Sunday and Monday are holidays here so everyone is bulking up to survive until Tuesday.

The Prime Minister's grocery store has a remote from Cool-90 FM. For the remote they are offering free ice cream cones and cheap sausages. They have boxes of expired wine at about half price. I battle through the line and scarf a free cone. I load a box of wine into my back pack along with a six pack of roach baits and a bunch of small presents to send to my PCV friends on Eua. A couple of PCVs from here are heading over for Easter and offer to carry the stuff.

I bike out to the campsite and empty my backpack, then back into town. There is a place near the market that has a couple of freezers and a scale. The freezers have frozen slices of local tuna. I grab a chunk the size of a dinner plate. 2.2 kilos. It is frozen solid and that's a good thing.

Back to the campsite to toss it into the fridge. I will eat half of it today (Easter). Then back into town.

As you may recall the male PCVs all dropped a dangerous amount of weight during training. I lost over 20 pounds, all muscle, in only ten weeks.

Since coming to the capital I have managed to put it all back on. I go the the gym and often bike ten or twenty miles a day and a heavy and primitive bike. I eat about a kilo of meat, a loaf of bread, a couple of cups of white rice for dinner most nights. I may die of malnutrition, but i won't be a skinny little twerp of a corpse when I go.

Today is Easter. I manage to sleep until the bells, real progress for me. I turn on the lights and... no scurrying roaches! I look in the kitchen, there a few roaches, but they apparently died while practicing the backstroke on the kitchen floor. Good riddance. I recommend the Mortein roach baits! I don't really mind the little arthropods, but I'm concerned that their presence may attract the larger predators. And I do NOT want another interaction with a molokau.

After doing my daily emergency coordinator research I do the rounds of the bakeries. Nothing available early, not unexpected, but I appreciate the chance to get some exercise. I'll go back to the bakery, this one is about 4 miles from my campsite in Maufunga. It is early so I usually hang for five minutes and chat with the bored staff. They and I both appreciate the company.

It is about noon here now and I'm thinking of heading out again. They promise to have cinnamon rolls sometime today. Having just talked to my daughter who is making the same at her boyfriends house, I'm kinda craving them. There is a heavy downpour outside the Peace Corps office. As soon as it quites I'll make another dash to bakery.

Pretty quiet here. My molokau bit is still inflamed. Not much else to report.