Quotes of the Day

On a sparkling winter morning at Ha'atafu Beach on the northwestern tip of Tongatapu, the Kingdom of Tonga's main island, Sokoi Liava'a crouches on the shore and eyes the building swell with visible excitement. The forecasts that have been buzzing about the beach were right. After a week of flat or messy seas, clean 2-m waves are rolling in. The tall 25-year-old took up surfing eight months ago. He's unemployed now - a friend chips in that this is because Liava'a kept taking sick days to catch waves. Liava'a laughs this off, but without diverting his gaze from the breakers he says happily, "I have all the time I need now." There is no lack of obsessive surfers in the world. What's unusual about Liava'a is his nationality. Save for the odd wave-chasing tourist, surfing vanished from Tonga nearly two centuries ago. Liava'a is among a group of locals who've discovered its peculiar challenges and joys, unknown to generations of Tongans before them.

Why would a sport vanish from a country? And how does it then reappear and flourish? The first question is the harder one, and answering it involves a short trip through history. From the writings of George Vason, an English missionary dropped on one of the country's 170 islands in 1797, we know that Tongans used to surf. From the shore he would watch the natives take "particular delight" in an amusement they called fanifo. "It is astonishing to see with what dexterity they will steer themselves on the waves," Vason wrote, "one hand being stretched out, as the prow before, and the other guiding them like a rudder behind. Several hours are often spent at one time in this sport, in which the women are as skillful as the men."

Clearly, Tongans enjoyed bodysurfing. And they were good at it. Less clear is why, not long after Vason admired them, they abruptly dropped the pastime. Except for Vason's, missionaries' accounts of Tonga during the 1800s make no mention of fanifo or any aquatic activity that could be mistaken for it. What happened? The widely accepted theory is that someone convinced Tonga's ruling chiefs to ban the sport. That someone was not Vason, who arrived with eight others sent by the London Missionary Society. Amid civil war, three of Vason's colleagues were killed; the others fled. Vason, a young bricklayer, saved himself, he wrote, by assuming "the revolting customs of a savage life." Far from banning anything, "I entered, with the utmost eagerness, into every pleasure and entertainment of the natives, and endeavored to forget that I had left a Christian land to evangelize the heathen."

Missionaries who came to Tonga shortly after Vason appear to have stuck more closely to their brief, and to have frowned on a pastime in which men and women, boys and girls - almost certainly naked - cavorted in the surf. It's thought that the missionaries convinced the chiefs that fanifo was corrupting Tongan youth and didn't belong in a budding Christian society, and that the chiefs placed on the sport a tapu, or ban. "This is, to some extent, speculation," says Po'oi Puloka, secretary general of the Tonga Amateur Sports Association and National Olympic Committee (tasanoc), "but it's more than likely what happened." (The banning of a sport has a more recent precedent in Tonga. In the 1920s authorities prohibited the playing of cricket, which had so gripped the local men that they were neglecting their crops. "It was a food security issue," says Puloka, adding that the ban lasted a decade. In the 1950s, rugby overtook cricket as Tonga's favorite sport and it remains so today.) Many Tongans lament the impact of the 19th century missionaries on local culture. Yes, they say, the preachers did some good things, such as curtailing cannibalism and incessant warfare. "But they also put a stop to a lot of our fun," says Puloka. As well as fanifo, underwater rugby (played among the breakers with hilarity and all manner of monkey business) seems to have been a casualty of British decorum. Traditional culture survives, though only in more formal incarnations, such as kava ceremonies and dance. Despite the hot climate, it is still forbidden for men or women to go shirtless in public.

And surfing's Tongan revival? It all began with a love affair. In 1977, a 21-year-old chef from Sydney, Steve Burling, embarked on a holiday with some mates. Their plan was to surf Indonesia's best spots, then check out the less popular destinations of Tonga, Samoa and Fiji. But Burling's holiday ended on Tongatapu, where on his first day he met a local beauty called Sesika. Burling had never had a girlfriend before; never been in love. Sesika knocked him sideways. "It was her femininity," he says. "And she was slamming attractive." She followed him back to Sydney, where they were married within six months of meeting.

Not long afterward, a tantalizing opportunity emerged on Tongatapu. It turned out that Sesika's family had a piece of vacant land adjoining the secluded Ha'atafu Beach, some 20 km from Nuku'alofa, the capital. The Burlings thought about opening a restaurant there, then became excited about the idea of a resort. Burling considered his choices: stay in Sydney, he recalls, and be another "brick in the wall," or take a risk in Tonga. For a free spirit like Burling, it was a no-brainer. "I figured that if we ended up back in Sydney with the arse out of our pants," he says, "we wouldn't be much different to a lot of other young couples." Like the missionary Vason, Burling's father, Alan, was a bricklayer. In 1979 he helped his son build the Ha'atafu Beach Resort, which today comprises 10 thatch-roofed bungalows and a common area nestled among pandanus and coconut palms. From the outset, Burling's guests were foreigners on surfing holidays. No Tongans surfed at the time - though, for some, their curiosity had been pricked by a 1967 photograph of their (present) monarch, King Taufa'ahau Topou IV, riding a tiny wave for the purposes of a magazine shoot. A hulking figure in black trunks, the King is perched on a board given to him by the legendary Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku, widely acknowledged as the father of surfing. Burling had a copy of the photo enlarged, and it has pride of place in the resort's dining room. It seemed natural to Burling that he would teach his children - he and Sesika have had six of their own and adopted two others - how to surf, and it was their eldest son, Michael, who first showed promise. By the time he was in high school, having featured in the local press for excelling in overseas competitions, Michael had drawn a number of his friends toward this unfamiliar sport. None of them had a board of his own - one still can't buy surf equipment anywhere in Tonga - so they used boards donated over the years by guests of the resort, usually superseded old faithfuls. "If the surf was good, I'd pick them up from school and bring them back here for a couple of hours' surfing," says Burling. "Sometimes they'd sleep here and I'd run them back to school in the morning. On weekends they'd bunk in the dining room. After an afternoon's surfing they'd stay up late studying. They found that surfing totally concentrated their minds, like meditation, and they came to their study feeling fresh and 100 percent focused." Ha'atafu had become a special kind of boarding school.

Through the '90s, Burling's coterie of young surfers expanded and diversified - it took in numerous girls, for one thing - and in 1994 the Australian established the Tonga Surfriders Association, which now boasts more than 30 active members. As a surfer, Burling lacked champion qualities, but he was technically sound and adept at imparting what he knew about staying on a wave to these wide-eyed pioneers. "I don't know what I've done right, but I've just explained simple technique and the kids have taken it from there," says Burling. "With video, too, it's great these days: you've got the world champion in your living room. It's just play and replay . . . and Kelly Slater is showing them his moves." And Ha'atafu provides good learning conditions. "We get some world-class waves here," says Burling. "They're clean and a good size, though we don't get the huge waves you'd associate with Hawaii."

The tuition and practice have paid off. Michael Burling, now 21 and a medical student at Auckland University, is a four-time Oceania junior men's surfing champion, twice the Oceania open men's champion, and the current Oceania longboard champion. Steve and Sesika's 19-year-old daughter, 'Anau, has claimed similar honors, and the Tongan surfing team were overall winners at the 2003 South Pacific Games, stunning favorites Tahiti. "These victories raise the profile of Tonga," says tasanoc's Puloka, "especially in aquatic sports, which we're trying to get our kids into. Once they see Tongans on the international circuits, the kids will aspire to do the same."

By occasionally subsidizing their travel to overseas contests, tasanoc has helped some of the country's best surfers. But by virtually any standard its budget is small: its government grant last year was $T20,000 (about $11,000), and nothing for the two years before that. "In all sports, not just surfing, the raw talents are here," says Puloka. "Every time a coach visits Tonga he says, 'You've got the talent, they just need to be developed.'" Tonga's all-time brightest sports stars, rugby players Willie Ofahengaue and Jonah Lomu, both achieved fame playing for other countries, Australia and New Zealand respectively.

But the competitive success of some Tongan surfers seems less important than the joy the sport has brought to local converts. "It is pure soul surfing for most of them," says David Boardman, an Australian staying at the resort. For the idle Liava'a, it was friends' involvement in the sport and their brightly colored surfing magazines that sparked his interest. Having had two serious knee injuries playing rugby as a schoolboy, he appreciates how surfing can provide equal or greater thrills without rugby's bone-jarring collisions. "I love it," he says. "It is fun for hours." Other foreign observers have been surprised at how quickly Tongan girls have learned to surf - from being scared, at first, to paddle out beyond their depth, to within weeks showing competence, upright on a board, 100 m out to sea. They feed, suggests Australian visitor Amber Mercy, off the enthusiasm of their friends. Many Western boardies regard surfing as a largely solitary, internal experience. "But Tongans are a very social people who like to do things in groups," says Burling. Between sets one morning the girls are whooping it up. Tongan Idol is back on television and they're in the mood to sing. First it's Ain't No Mountain High Enough, and then the Tongan national anthem gets a whirl. If they could stop laughing for longer than a few seconds, they'd sound pretty good.

On an island where nearly everyone could lose a few pounds without keeling over, Burling's students are among the fittest-looking folk around. Lavinia Sunia, 15, had no interest in sport until she started mucking about on a board seven years ago. "I just watched TV," she says. Now she'll surf two hours every day if conditions allow it, and her toned body would be the envy of teenage girls anywhere.

Tonga's next generation is coming through. On this morning there are probably more complete surfers than 10-year-old Alan Burling showing their wares. But he's the kid who catches the eye. While the others appear wary of falling, he zips across the waves with abandon. "I want to be a pro surfer," he says later during a game of ping-pong, in which he at first pretends never to have played the game, and then begins swiping balls into the corners. Dad Steve is not ruling it out: "I think he's surfing better than Michael was at the same age."

Vason was 24 when he tried to bring Christianity to Tonga. Burling was just a year younger when he brought the country his own gift of surfing - nothing so profound, of course, though along with golf there's no other sport that stirs such zeal in its disciples. And Burling wants to keep spreading the word. Though a shortage of boards and passable surf spots will limit surfing's growth on the Friendly Islands, "If a kid comes up and asks me to teach him to surf," says Burling, "I'm never going to say no." With salt in their hair and the sun on their backs, Tonga's band of wave riders is making up for 200 years of lost time.

• Daniel Williams
• Tonga has waves aplenty, but its people had long stopped riding them - until a chance meeting brought surfing back on board