Sailboats, humpbacks, and the finest natural harbour in the South Pacific
Neiafu is the main town of Tonga's Vava'u island group — 50 islands wrapped around one of the most protected natural anchorages in the Pacific, which fills every year with offshore cruising yachts. From July to October, humpback whales come from Antarctica to calve and mate in the warm Tongan waters, and swimming with them (snorkeling only — no scuba permitted near whales) is the most remarkable wildlife encounter in the region. The town itself is small, photogenic, and unhurried.
The Vava'u group was consolidated under the Tongan Kingdom in the early 19th century under the chief Finau 'Ulukalala II. Will Mariner — a teenage English sailor who survived the massacre of the privateer ship Port-au-Prince in 1806 and lived among the Tongans for four years — documented Vava'u in remarkable detail in 'An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands' (1817), one of the most vivid records of pre-missionary Polynesian society. Missionaries arrived in the 1820s and Christianity became the established religion within a generation.