Three birthdays in three days, one bathroom between eight people, an airline that lost my bag, and a humpback the size of a bus deciding whether I was worth her attention. All of it was the same trip.
There's a humpback whale the size of a city bus hanging in the blue about ten meters below me, and she's deciding whether I'm worth her attention.
That's the whole thing, really. You get in the water, you hold your breath, and an animal with a brain the size of a basketball makes a call about you. Your preferences don't enter into it. How often do any of us get to sit in that?
This was my birthday trip. I turned 41 in Tonga.
Now, I've already written a whole piece about expectations and whales, which means it's entirely possible I have not fully learned my lesson here (ha). So let's get into it. The good, the bad, and the ugly. At the end of the day it's a whale trip with friends, am I right?
So What Is It Actually Like Out There?
Tonga is one of a very small number of places on earth where you can legally get in the water with humpbacks. They come up from Antarctica between roughly June and October to mate and to calve in the warm shallow waters all around the South Pacific, and in this case Tonga, where for a few months the whole place organizes itself around them.
The rules are strict, and they should be. Limited permits. Four swimmers and a guide at a time. You stay back, the boat stays further back, and nobody chases anything. If a whale wants to leave, she leaves, and that's the end of your encounter.
If you want the biology, NOAA Fisheries has good material on the species and the migration.
What the brochures tend to leave out is that it's a wildlife encounter, which means it is a lottery. Have you ever paid a lot of money for something nobody can promise you? Some years the bay is full of them. This year it was not. The whales were noticeably fewer and further between than trips I've done before, and the weather was against us for a good stretch of it.
The comedy of errors
We do each other a disservice when we only post the good frames, so here's the rest of it.
The first leg was perfect. I got upgraded, and somewhere over the Pacific the cabin crew handed me a box of chocolates with Happy Birthday written on it in marker, signed from your VA92 MEL base crew. Total strangers. I still have the box.
Then the trip started actually happening.
The second leg ran late. My bag came off the belt broken and soaked, having apparently spent some time out in the rain. I got charged extra for it on top of that, for the privilege, I assume, of having it destroyed. I stood there at the counter for a minute deciding how much of my day I wanted to give to this, and then decided the answer was none of it. (I would like to report that was maturity. In actuality I was just too tired to argue.)
We got to the house. One bathroom between seven or eight of us. Mosquitoes that treated me like a buffet (I have no idea why they pick a person, but they picked me). Storms rolling through most of the week, wind, rain, and water temperatures well under what I had packed for.
That last one was entirely my fault. I was told to bring layers. I looked at the word "tropical," looked at how heavy my bag already was, thought about the fact that I had been to Tonga before and been fine, and left most of my warm gear at home. I was cold for most of a week because of a decision I made in my own living room.
I also sliced my thumb open on my drone propeller in the first couple of days there, which has never happened in all the years I've owned it. And I took a decent chunk out of my shin before I had even left (both entirely self-inflicted, neither one serious). Ever notice how the injuries you get at home are always the dumbest ones?
And then the whales
And in the middle of all of that, this happened.
I got a singing male. If you've never heard that underwater, you don't hear it so much as feel it arrive inside your chest. It moves your ribs. You feel it in your sternum before your brain catches up and identifies it as a noise.
I got a mom and calf, which is what everyone goes to Tonga hoping for. They were few and far between this year, and the interaction wasn't as close as I would have otherwise hoped for. (How picky can I be, right?)
I got water so clear it stopped making sense. I got caves. I got long slow snorkels over reef with nothing to do and nowhere to be. If you want this same story with sharks instead of whales, that's Is it Safe to Dive with Tiger Sharks?, and the time showing up unplanned turned into twenty pilot whales is over here.
Now the part where I have to tell on myself a little, which is also the point.
While all of this was happening, part of me was stuck in my head doing arithmetic. Fewer whales than other times I'd been out. Other people on the boat saying the same thing, which just echoed it back at me. Weather eating days. Some quiet running tally of whether this was the right season to have chosen.
Bear in mind I had phenomenal encounters. A few so close I had to kick back off them, more than once. We saw whales every single day, whether we got in the water with them or not. By any stretch of the imagination this was a fantastic trip.
So what exactly was I doing?
It's tolerance. The same thing that happens with a drug, where you need more of it to get the effect you got the first time. That mechanism does not stay politely inside addiction. It turns up in relationships, in work, in animal encounters, in anything you do enough times to get used to. Desensitization is the clinical word for it. I know it as the part of my brain that has always wanted more in order to feel the same.
I was not a grumpy pants out there, to be fair to myself and to this piece. I was present. I was grateful. I was also quietly in my head about it.
At the end of the day we had whales nearly every day, I was with some of my favorite people on earth playing card games at night, and I had a bed I could sleep in with an ocean view people save for years to see. Some bugs. Big deal.
I was standing in the middle of the thing I had flown across the world for, quietly grading it.
How often do you catch yourself doing the same?
The bag, and the day of misery
The trip home is where it properly fell apart.
Fiji Airways lost my luggage, and apparently they do this a lot. From what I was told it happened on close to every flight, to multiple people. So if you go, put an AirTag in your bag and pack enough in your carry-on to get through a few days without the rest of it.
Not delayed. Lost, in the way that generates a case number and a lot of unanswered email. Still in processing as I write this, for anyone keeping score.
I also came home genuinely sick. Not travel-tired. Sick, flat on the couch for over a week, useless.
Somewhere in the middle of that I got told the bag had been located and was at the airport. So I got in a cab, sick, and went to get it. It wasn't there. I spent about six hours on that, which is six hours I didn't have in me, and at the end of it I gave up and went home with nothing.
I ended up taking what I called a day of misery. I didn't actively try to reframe anything. I didn't look for the lesson. I laid on the couch, watched movies, felt sorry for myself, and let the day be as bad as it actually was. (Which, to be fair, I didn't do a fantastic job of, but I did my best.)
I am telling you that on purpose. I am not interested in the version of sobriety where you are grateful on command. Sometimes the appropriate response to a bad week is to have a bad day about it, and then get up.
I got most of my things back eventually, though some of it never turned up at all. The bag is still broken. The claim is still open. There was a long tail of pain-in-the-ass admin behind every bit of that.
But we come out the other side, because that's what happens in life. Right?
It's not about the bag
It never is. It is never about the thing.
I had an attachment to an outcome. I expected the bag to arrive. I expected a bay full of whales who wanted to sing and play and hang out with me. I expected the weather to behave and my packing to be adequate and the whole thing to run smoothly because it was my birthday and I had earned it.
In the rooms they say expectations are premeditated resentments. For me that's not a rule against planning. Reasonable expectations are how adults function. It's a warning about the gap between what you decided would happen and what actually did, and about who ends up paying for that gap, which is usually the people nearest to you.
The orcas piece I mentioned up top came after seventeen days on the water across three weeks in Mexico, without ever finding one. That one was about not getting the thing.
This one is different, and I think harder. I got the thing. The whale, the calf, the song, the water. And I still had to work to stop grading it against a version that only existed in my head.
So Was It Worth It?
Here's what I'll remember in ten years, and it's not the bag.
Three of us had birthdays in three consecutive days. August 23rd, 24th, and the 25th, which is mine. My good friend and host of the trip, Olivia, and her now husband Andrew produced a cake with three candles on it, a 1, a 3 and a 5, for the 135 years between the three of us. We sat around a table in a rented house on a Pacific island and laughed about it.
A kava ceremony with the locals. Card games. Dancing badly (me, not them). Two married couples on that boat, and watching people you love be that happy isn't a small thing.
These are my people from Hawaii. Some of the best underwater photographers and freedivers working today. Some of my earliest photos in the water were taken by them. My first real freediving was with them. My first shark encounters, and the training in how to read an animal and redirect it safely, came from them. They opened a door I've walked through for years now.
Elizabeth Sides, who everybody calls Morri, is one of those people. She and her husband Duke run High Seas Expeditions out of Kona, and if you have ever wanted to get in the water with something enormous and be looked after properly while you do it, that is who I would point you at.
Olivia and Andrew ran this one as Manō Collective Expeditions, and they run a variety of others too. They put the trip together and held it steady while the weather did what it did, which is a harder job than it looks from the guest seat.
And there's the sober part, since this is a sober travel blog. If you're earlier on and wondering whether any of this is even possible yet, How to Travel Internationally in Early Sobriety is the practical version of the question. Three flights each way. Multiple time zones. Airport bars, broken plans, no sleep, being cold and wet and irritated, a lost bag, a week of illness. I didn't drink through any of it, and honestly it never came up as an option. That's what nineteen years buys you, coming up on twenty next November. Not immunity. Just a nervous system that no longer treats a bad day as an emergency requiring chemical alteration like it once did.
What I would tell you
There's a line I come back to often. Be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
My struggles on this trip were a broken bag and a head cold.
For somebody reading this, a broken bag and a head cold might be the worst week they have had in a year. For somebody else reading this, a broken bag and a head cold would be a dream scenario next to the year they are actually having.
We have no idea what anybody is carrying, and the only reasonable response to that is to be decent to people while you work out your own thing.
I have a friend who has started calling me a shitty traveler, which I take playful offense to, because I've had a great many trips go beautifully. Sometimes the law of averages just catches up with you.
That trip was real. Storms and whale song and mosquito bites and a cake reading 135 and six wasted hours in a cab and a humpback coming close enough that I had to kick back off her.
All of that was the same trip. There's no averaging it into something in the middle. It just sits there, all of it true at once, and you get to decide what you carry out.
So here's the question I'll leave you with.
What in your life are you quietly grading against a version that only exists in your head?
Sit with it honestly. Then go anyway.
Thinking about a trip like this?
Whether you're newly sober and wondering if travel is even possible, or years in and wanting something bigger than a beach, I help people build trips that support their recovery rather than test it.
Email me directly about 1:1 Clinical Coaching, or start the conversation here. You can also read more about the inner work at Love Unlocked.