Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania, page 294: “I could just imagine a sick Tongan’s
sense of doom when he or she looked out the hut window and saw the family pig
being fattened.”
Rigor mortis doesn’t make you
pretty, but it’s tough to look good when a big metal pole has been shoved into your
ass, through your body, and out your mouth. You’re being roasted clockwise over
a pit of coals. You’ve been eviscerated. Your eyeballs have evaporated. Your
legs and skinny tail are stiff. Your long tongue is sticking out. You actually appear
to be laughing. You’ve got a gaping red hole in your belly, where your organs
once were, now being wolfed by a big brown dog in a corner of the yard. Your
neck features another red hole with boiling blood bubbling from it, trickling around
your shiny, pink corpse.
“And then what kind of meat do you
get off of it?” Ryan Burch asks the man turning the pig. “Ham?”
“Yeah, ham,” the man says.
“Is it nice ham?”
“It’s like pulled pork,” Billy Watts
says. “But I can honestly say I’ve never had a pig like this.”
A fat woman in a bright orange dress
sits on dirt near the pig. She’s using aluminum foil to wrap onions and pieces
of taro and breadfruit to be set in the umu
(“earth oven”) to be cooked by hot rocks. Tonight we will feast Tongan style to
celebrate the first birthday of the daughter of the guy who’s cooking the pig.
His wife is the one doing the umu
stuff. Neither has a problem with roasting the family pet.
“Many more where this came from,”
the man says.
“Not sure if I got a pig on a spit
when I turned one year old,” Daniel Jones says. But it’s possible since he’s Hawaiian and they do
this sort of thing there and throughout Polynesia. I guessed that umu was a far healthier and wholesome
alternative to the usual modern Polynesian diet of Pacific Brand corned beef
and other imported junk.
But dog is modern fare, too. All
meat is fair game — Tongans have been eating Fido for millenia. Back in the
day, dog was a delicacy, far tastier than pork, and both species were raised domestically.
To sweeten their flesh, dogs were fed only vegetables and, in 1774, when
Captain James Cook landed in Tonga, he likened the meat to English lamb. But ol’
Jimmy was weird since his colleagues thought that barbecuing household pets was
terrible.
I glance across the yard to the
dog chewing pig intestines.
“Are you guys going to eat that mutt?”
I ask the pig-roasting man.
“Yeah. But not tonight.”
With his teeth, he removes the cap
from a green bottle of beer. Back home I was told that, since Tonga is home to thousands
of Mormons, drinking was bad. But this man was Mormon and visibly buzzed whilst
swilling from his bottle of Mata Maka, the weak so-called “Tongan” lager that’s
only available in Tonga but is actually brewed in and imported from New Zealand,
2,000 kilometers away.
“This beer sucks,” Watts says to
me. He’s just finished his second; I’m on my fifth of the afternoon. Watts and
I are the drinkers of this trip. Burch and Jones rarely booze. Patrick Millin has been voluntarily
dry for six months.
Mata Maka is also the name of a low
hill on Nomuka Island in Tonga’s Ha’apai Group, clamped between Vava’u and
Tongatapu, an archipelago my guidebook described as being a “sleepy, seductive
place.” Nobody really surfs Ha’apai, but I know of at least one excellent left.
Nomuka and its surrounding reefs might have good waves, too. So might nearby Mango,
Kelefesia, and Tonumeia, green stars on a galaxy of blue. There are dozens more
— Ha’apai has many secrets. A boat is required. Viewed from space, the group
looks like two big atolls with no western sides, which would be clean and
offshore most of the year. Yet another cruelty for surfers since east swells are
painfully rare. Our boat is small, so we won’t visit Ha’apai this week.
Starting with Ha’apai, Captain
Cook spent three months in Tonga. He commanded the HMS Resolution while his colleague manned the HMS Discovery. When the two ships landed on the isle of Lifuka, a lively
food festival was underway. Cook and his men were so gaily greeted that he dubbed
Tonga “the Friendly Islands,” a motto still used by the Tonga Visitors Bureau.
Cook didn’t know the warm welcome
was actually bullshit and that Lifuka’s opportunistic chiefs planned to kill and
eat him and all his men, then loot the two ships. But the nobles couldn’t agree
on a plan, so they shined the whole thing.
I’m drunk by nightfall. Finally,
with equally drunk Tongans, we eat the pig. The white meat is leatherlike, unchewable.
Under my chair, I feed most of mine to the big gut-eating dog. He’s happy. He’s
not on the menu — yet.