Meals at Mele Tonga

The private beachside bungalow place was called Mele Tonga. The deal was dinner and breakfast plus lodging, but no lunch. We were on our own for lunch.... I have explained this before, but let's talk about what we ate. The first night we had a truly delightful fresh (and fried -- everything was pretty much deep or stir fried, as I have also already explained), chicken (which actually seemed baked or something), very fatty pork rib, casava and a local leafy green vegetable (a lot like chard) stir-fried in butter and onions, fried bananas and watermelon. Now i had learned from Tero that the Tongans don't actually eat with their guests. He had been invited to a Tongan house for a typical Tongan meal and they served him a huge amount of food -- four tuna steaks, a whole chicken, and so forth, and the entire family sat there and watched him eat it (or as much as he could possibly eat).

Now it was our turn. Genevieve and i easily ate all of the fish, we had one of the 15 pieces of casava apiece, a good bit of the fried banana. I made a big effort as to make a good impression on our hostess, and did manage to eat quite a bit of the chicken, and we nailed the greens, too. We both took a stab at the pork, and made enough of a good show to impress our hostess. She did indeed sit there and watch us eat, but not any of the rest of the family. She didn't eat any of the big food, but she did have some of the watermelon, while we ate. We were allowed to save some of the watermellon which made for a good snack over the next few days. Otherwise she threw everything we didn't eat out to the pigs in the yard.

The second night, the other Antarticans joined us, but the food was a little less grand. Gone was the excellent fresh fish, but we had more fatty pork ribs, top ramen noodles, fried bananas (every night these were included), an excellent yellow curry dish with a bony flesh (that we figured finally had to have been pig's knuckles), green bananas which were grey and had a strange texture -- but with salt they seemed a little bit like potatoes, and young coconuts as a beverage. This made it hard on Megan and Joleen who are vegetarians/piscetarians whom did not/could not eat much of the food. So I again made a big effort to eat a lot (after all it was clear that this was our food and whatever we didnt finish simply got thrown out -- or rather fed to the pig.

That second night I was doing good until i got to a point where i had a bad textural episode with the green bananas. I tried to take a piece of the pork, somehow thinking that the flavour would help me get the thing down. However, it made it worse, and Genenvieve, who noticed me gagging asked if I was ok -- she thought i was possibly choking. After almost heaving the whole meal up (which would've been a cultural and hospitable disaster), she recognized what was happenning and took several steps back. I chugged some coconut juice to try and wash it all down. Of course this did not work either as the combination of the three flavors in my mouth was truly getting ghastly. Genevieve's eyes went wide, and she wisely backed further away from me. I resigned myself to fishing out the fatty pig flesh with my fingers and forced my self to swallow the remaining items. Disaster averted. However it was a mad gobble of ramen noodles with curry sauce in order to get the flavor removed, and phew... the dinner was done.

The third night, I approached the meal with a little less vigor. It consisted of roughly the same menu items, except this time there was an excellent deep fried chicken. The poor vegetarians, basically only had ramen noodles to eat for the two dinners they stayed at Mele Tonga.

Until next time.... Newo Out