Buy Now: Theroux and Tonga

Theroux, not the average tourist (which would be the type of tourist to make their way to our shores) paints a bleak, sometimes ugly, sometimes wonderful, perspective of what the indigenous of Tonga are really like away from the glitzy brochures. The roads are dirty, structures run-down, shop-keepers rude, hoteliers their normal selves, immigration impossible, almost everything seriously looking pretty bleak. The contradiction between what people profess, and the reality of their behaviour as he discovers being with the regular citizens instead of the confines of the cultural displays is disarmingly close to home.

Theroux is nonetheless at pains to write the good things he sees in the population, there are the kind towns folks, pretty girls. Theroux's time in Tonga paint a broad brush of different things people in Tonga get around to.

There are those who would blame Theroux for judging the people on standards/markers inappropriate, and it behoves the Tonga hospitality industry to read Theroux's book and address at least some of the concerns he writes about. At times it was not nice reading some of Theroux's comments, but it was an enjoyable read about things we as Tongans should be aware of in how we look to our visitors and friends from abroad.

"The Happy Isles of Oceania is a superb blend of sharp-eyed observation and pungently expressed opinion. It's hardly paradise, this lovely part of the world, but Theroux makes it endlessly fascination"
- New York Newsday

As a Tongan, he is telling the truth that I don't want to hear.
- Paul

Theroux, Paul. The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992.

[ref: http://www.tongatapu.net.to]
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