Its no secret that traveling can wreak havoc on your looks. Just ask anyone who has stepped off a six hour flight (sans more than 3 ounces of cosmetics, of course) to be greeted by a bleary-eyed mess staring back at them in the airport bathroom mirror. Usually the flight itself is enough to make even the most gorgeous passenger look and feel like a deflated oxygen mask, but when a few friends and I traveled to Tonga last summer, I discovered that in terms of taming the beauty-stealing beast, getting there is half the battle.
Before actually getting to Tonga, our plane stopped in Samoa, or as I came to know it, Land Where the Little White Maiden Has Hair Bigger than Banyan Tree. Based off the presence of my morning breath and bed-head hairstyle, I determined that it was just before sunrise when we got there. Once the sun rose, which, that close to the equator is surprisingly fast, I got a good look at myself and my traveling companions. I was really grateful we weren't going to be greeted in Tonga like the Beckhams at LAX because we were not looking very posh. My clothes, which seemed very LA sloppy-chic when I left home that morning, were now coated with crumbs, juice, and the kind of wrinkles that can only be created by contortionist-style sleeping positions necessary for spending 12 hours in coach. But no matter. We didn't know anyone there anyway, and in just an hour we were back on the plane headed to Nukalofa.
Once we landed in Tonga's capital city, the first person I saw was dressed much sloppier than a paparazzo (which, if you've ever lived in LA's Westside, you know that is really saying something). He didn't have a camera in hand, thank God, but he did have two straw-impaled coconuts. And he certainly didn't seem to have any concern about appearances. At first glance, I thought he must have joined a cult...and it sure was nice of him to consider that his visitors would need some rum to ease their shock upon realizing what had happened to their open-minded friend...but then I realized his long hair and beard and dark conservative clothing were the results of living in Tonga for much too long. I'd say he had probably been there for about 6 months - with the Peace Corps, no doubt - and upon speaking with him for a moment I discovered he was, in fact, there with the Peace Corps and employed as a prison guard. He was wearing flip-flops and a long, dark, flowy skirt. That kind of outfit wouldn't go over well at any prison back in America. But the Tongan cultural aesthetic is different, which brings me back to my original point.
The process of getting somewhere to photograph beautiful sights is not always a pretty picture.
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