“Thinking of Leaving the Rat-Race?” by Robert Bryce

This is an invitation for you to join us. We have room for just a few more, and you will be pleasantly surprised how easy it is to get a residency visa. Investing in your own or any business of just $29,000 USD earns you a business visa. A retirement (non-working) visa requires only $5800 USD in annual assured income to qualify. Where in the world is it easier than Tonga?

Like the foot soldier that made it to the safe bunker, we are home-free, or free from home, as it might more accurately be restated. We are now in full control over our lives here in paradise. We are self-sufficient. We don’t rely on any system in the hands of others that might fail us. We provide our own electric power, water and even food and lots of it. We are insulated from the worst that might come to pass and yet, in the event of the best of all of what the world might actually render up, we would still chose this paradise to live and prosper.

We lack nothing that was vital or important back home. We have stores, building supplies, restaurants, hotels and even a mini shopping mall. Some of us have been here for many years. Even back when the world was a better place; this was still the best place. In our paradise, not much has changed. We live a life that is depicted as what Heaven is like. Fruit, none forbidden, with gardens of free food, tropical forests, blue skies, azure seas and white sandy beaches, and just like in Heaven, no serpents, snakes, wild animals nor any critters that can harm us. We have no snakes, dragons or deadly anything in our Heavenly haven. And the natives are friendly. Not many places in the world can boast of being able to allow an unattended child to roam freely about and never fear anything will harm child or adult, for there is nigh or nothing so inclined in this paradise.

We are like you, some of us from near and some from far, from Canada, London, Malibu, New York, California and Austria, Germany, Italy, AU, NZ and Norway, Mexico and even South America. The reasons why we live in this remarkable place run very deep and might take many pages to thoroughly explain, but for the sake of those who have little time or penchant, I will recap the driving forces.

We live in the Vava’u Island Group; one of the Kingdom of Tonga’s four island groups and the one that wins in about every category that people use to chose a new place to live on the planet. We will get into these reasons, choices and why Vava’u, but first, we might want to set the stage for why some of these choices even need to be considered.

The reasons for any of us to move from our homelands range from urgent to why bother. Vava’u remains the logical choice regardless of the reasons of urgency or complacency. I have found that the people who study the world situation in depth, some with hundreds of hours of research, tend to believe that we are headed for a worldwide crisis - save for a very few ports of refuge. There are few places on earth that are impervious to these concerns, warranted or not, and the aptly named "Port of Refuge" of Vava’u Tonga is one.

The folks who have studied the world situation see a looming worldwide meltdown on the horizon in spite of what most of our smiling leaders are telling their nervous herds and flocks. Cowboys have been deceiving cattle since they invented slaughterhouses. Mesmerizing and reassuring voices of exalted ones whom we trust singing "Home on the Range," keep us grazing right into the stockyard.

Those who are aware of the phenomenon claim that this time we have a disaster on our horizon that is unlike anything endured ever before and it is caused by something we have never experienced before. The matter being, in part, something to do with having tapped out both economic and human growth with populations that reached the limit of what earth can support. The huge demanding consumption by our cities and countries of our 7-billion (and growing) termites are eating the place up. They say we are hitting the walls of the limits of what the earth can tolerate in its loss of its vital resources. This combined with a similar situation in the monetary system which is wholly dependent upon enormous growth; we are set up for a multiple railcar train wreck. It is a little like the guy who jumped off the Empire State Building, as he passed the 23rd floor, he remarked aloud that everything was just fine, save for it being a bit windy. The termite colony that finally eats the entire house loses it all on the same day too. A rude awakening is in store, they assure us. Those who have taken the time to study what we have done to ourselves offer a solution in the undamaged part of the world, the Southern Hemisphere.

Using a football stadium as the visual, they say to best understand how population growth and diminishing food resources can sneak up on us like a hungry thief in the night. Picture the illustration of how just one drop of water placed in the stadium, allowing it to double every minute until it grows such that it overflows the stadium’s highest seats, and under one hour. It takes a while for the stadium to fill up to five feet of water below, but from that five foot level, in just 6 minutes the water will be over the high seats. The point being, perhaps we are approaching the five foot level in the stadium of life and we humans cannot comprehend the thing we have done to ourselves. Nor can we comprehend the speed at which it can happen that we hit the walls of resources. We are wrecking the place, evidence the Gulf oil volcano. (insert: Fukushima now too)

At some point the acceleration of it occurs so rapidly, like an atomic explosion, which will be too late to do anything about it in the time left as it explodes in our faces. The first to get hit hard will be the cities since they are wholly reliant upon everything delivered and provided by people and systems they have no idea of who they are. The students of this phenomenon tell us that all of the big world leaders have their hideouts and safe havens all lined up. They have their own lifeboats, but what about you?

We have a little haven in the Grand South Pacific and ever separate from the continuing perils and conflicts of the Nordstrom Hemisphere. We are safely secure in our tropical isle as if in a magical castle with a big moat around it. We don’t know what to believe for certain either, but in any event, we are about as secure here as one could be on this assuredly changing planet.

The worst case scenario might just be an enhanced version of "Chicken Little" where the sky is falling. In keeping with the fairy tales, we chose this place for less vile reasons, more like for Alice in Wonderland experiences of living in a fun and amusing place that can laugh at the serious world on the other side. The virtues of Vava’u need to be laid out in order that you might be able to make comparisons.

Assuming the worst, Vava’u is out of harm’s way from about anything man or nature could fling our way. The island group is rising, not sinking, and is protected by a huge reef and island system that keeps us in a safe and secure lake-like, water park environment in the middle of the ocean. Some of the island cliffs are barriers over 600 feet high. Tsunami that if you can.

On the brighter side, we have all of the attributes of the first choice in lifestyle living.

Let’s start with the air. You can’t see it, which can be scary at first since it doesn’t appear to be there. No soot, smog, dust nor chemical pollutants to remind you it is at hand. So you breathe deeper naturally and, remarkably, the body responds. The water is as soft and pure as rainwater falling through clean air; for that is where we get our most potable essence of life, from the see-through, blue sky.

The grass is truly greener in the South Pacific. The earth is naturally rich and has not been depleted nor artificially recharged with chemicals that synthetically stimulate what results in fake food. When you eat a home grown tomato from Tonga, you taste it and feel it working like Popeye did his spinach. Real food is a wholly another study and how that is part of what is having us loving it here. Fish - imagine the kind that aren’t swimming in oil or eating it so we are what they eat. Clean, unpolluted and vital are the expected in these crystalline waters where you can clearly see 100 feet deep. This is just another thing to get used to when you come from the polluted bays where you can’t see anything but the surface of the water. I remember feeling a sensation akin to a fear of heights when I first looked down into the water while stepping from the boat to the deep water dock. I could see to the bottom as clearly as through the air. It was like living in an artificial world, but it was real. Anything this beautiful back home would have had to been fake - something from a theme park. In Vava’u we live in nature’s own naturally made theme park. The entire island group is like a huge resort, the world’s largest perhaps, within find numerous restaurants, hotels, accommodation choices and supplies to build your own resort or home as you might see fit.

So what about building a home here and living happily ever after? Got to live somewhere; might as well be in Paradise - ‘Cocomo Village’, Vava’u, Tonga.

Building a home is something you can hire out with confidence. You just need to select a good place to have that home. How about in a community of like minded folks who enjoy the neighborhood environment with maybe a house next door, even if you can’t see it through your own private jungle? On the island of Hunga in Vava’u’s lake-like water wonderland there is a community of about 80 home sites offered recently, with probably a few left by the time you are done reading this. The sites are on a 1,000 acre island within the great reef protected inter-island waterway, about 12 miles from the main island where the main town and airport, hospital and suppliers are located. There is a large deep water lagoon where boats are insulated from the sea outside, safe to moor there year round. The name of the new village underway is Cocomo. This month they tell me the price will go from $5000 to $6000 USD. Anyway, at twice the price that is certainly a bargain. And the view is absolutely spectacular, if you can imagine looking safely from the lofty height of 200 feet out to the open ocean below with the big island of Late before you in the distance. The sunset is right there with no homes in front of you or behind you and nothing in the way of your watching that golden ball slowly drop into the sea. The scene is quite inspiring.

During the whale season, pods of Humpbacks swim to Vava’u and frolic right below Cocomo Village, the newest eco development in Tonga. The huge but docile Humpbacks put on their show of spy hopping by leaping high into the air and hang there with their massive tail flukes treading water till they fall back into the sea with a huge splash. This is how they look around and over waves. It is in the Vava’u waters that the Humpback whales migrate each year to bear their young. A mother and child sight to behold, and you can even swim with them in Vava’u. Imagine that. These islands are the magnificent Humpback’s safe have choice too. When in doubt, do what the whales do. And ‘Cocomo Village’ is a "whale" of an idea!

For more on Vava’u and in particular the Cocomo Village, go to www.cocomovillage.com . You will be glad you did.

As ever, Robert Bryce