NUKU’ALOFA, TONGA. I never truly knew where my home was. But that was not a present thought, when I stepped barefoot over the intertwined root of a mangrove tree. Birkenstocks in one hand, camera in the other. The ground felt soft and moist.
It was low tide and I was exploring a vast mangrove forest on Nukunukumotu Island, not far from Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa. But there was something… odd going on inside of me. I was feeling a warm and relaxing sensation somewhere in the center of my chest, peacefully pulsating.
I stopped inspecting the local flora and fauna, and just watched. Putting down my camera, I saw my friends Michael and Toshiya wading over the beach, discovering for themselves. Behind them, separated by a calm ocean, were groups of small tropical islands, stretching out so far that they appeared only like dark dots on the horizon.
I took a deep breath of the salty air, there was a damp and slightly fishy note to it. I liked the smell. A female frigate bird circled through my vision. Suddenly, the calm sensation streamed through my whole body, tickling very softly.
This is where you belong.
The thought appeared in my mind out of nowhere, and I remember that I was watching it in a sort of third person perspective. I didn’t create this thought with my mind, it appeared to me. Pretty much like the serene sensation that just started to kindle when I explored the mangroves.
I knew what it meant.
Not Tonga though, was the thought that followed, this time generated by my mind, but in a place like this. A place in the tropics, surrounded by rainforest, mangroves, marine wildlife, and colorful, happy people. The sensation persisted, as if agreeing.
It was an odd thing to say. I come from the dense concrete jungle of the Rhine-Ruhr area, the largest metropolitan area in Germany.
The environment I grew up in was purely urban. Sure, in my hometown we had some forests and a beautiful nature reserve around the local river, but otherwise I would describe the area as grey and industrial. Germans from other parts of the country make fun of the ugliness of my home region.
So how did I end up finding it, the one thing I was looking for my whole life, in the mangrove forests of Tonga?
ABOVE: Strolling through the mangrove forests of Nukunukumotu Island at low tide. Besides jungles and reefs, my favorite habitat on planet Earth.
As a child, I once borrowed a book in the local library. This book became my favorite in an instant. It was a beautifully drawn piece about all the different biospheres that exist on planet Earth and the animals that live in them. It was like a lexicon and what I loved about it the most was that each time you looked at one habitat you could find new animals somewhere on the page.
There was one double page that I particularly loved. It showed a rainforest edging on a tropical beach. The vegetation was drawn in many shades of green and the depicted animals were new and exotic to me. There were tapirs hiding in the bush, strange looking crabs on the beach, whales in the ocean, and … a frigate bird in the sky.
I asked my father to print this particular double page on the printer at his workplace – color printing was quite expensive back then. He printed the whole book. And for quite some time I was totally in love with my own copy, using it to draw my own animal habitats, over and over again. I was living my passion.
My sketches were complemented by frequent daydreams about faraway places. Every weekend I would get all excited since this was the time when nature documentaries were usually shown on German TV. Placing myself on the carpet right in front of the TV, I would find myself soaked into all those wondrous and exotic places. Besides the tropics there was another place that deeply fascinated me: The underwater world.
The creatures in that world were so different, it was hypnotizing. Their world appeared to me like another planet. The Coral reefs, kelp forests, mangroves, the deep sea – One day I will visit all these places, I dreamed back then.
But with each passing year, my sketches and daydreams became scarcer and scarcer. Adulthood was calling, and with it came oblivion.
In school I had to pay attention to geometrical forms when I’d rather draw animals and fantasize about different habitats. Unfortunately our standardized education system works like this. We have to sit down in tightly ordered class rooms, shut up and dedicate our time and effort to subjects we don’t like.
In a system aimed at conformity and mass education there is no room for our highly individualistic self-expressions and passions. On top of that come social dynamics like group pressure and etiquette which will beat even more uniqueness out of us. Naturally, our childhood dreams and desires slowly fade away with each school year.
That’s what happened in my case.
LEFT: View from Nukunukumotu Island’s mangrove forests, with small islands in the Nuku’alofa bay area. Just a few hundred meters distance from these islands I saw many Humpback whales.
ABOVE: View from Nukunukumotu Island’s mangrove forests, with small islands in the Nuku’alofa bay area. Just a few hundred meters distance from these islands I saw many Humpback whales.
After twelve years in this education system, I came out lost and confused. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, I didn’t know where I belonged, and of course I didn’t know who I was in the depth of my soul. Strange, because didn’t I know that some time?
Documentaries and animal names became faint memories of the past, reappearing from time to time whenever I came into contact with them. But I didn’t understand that the flicker of joy whenever I watched a nature documentary or saw a wild animal meant something. No, instead I stumbled around, became a police officer over the years and fantasized about a better future and a place where I finally would feel at peace.
Even though I traveled excessively, I never found that place. The feeling of arriving and peace never came. Worse, when the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, my excessive traveling came to an abrupt halt. That made me stuck in a job and a place I disliked with no chance to escape. I felt more lost and confused than ever before. It was a dark time… and a blessing in disguise.
After a couple of months of suffering and feeling sorry for myself, my subconscious started to talk to me again. Deciding I had enough, I sat down one day and listed all the things I wanted to do before I die. And there was a common theme in my Life’s Bucket List: 35 out of 85 items had to do with the tropics or the underwater world.
Strange, but suddenly the daydreams started again. I had no clue what was going on, but I used the momentum and went to Central America on my sabbatical in 2021/22. There I discovered the tropics and the underwater worlds for the first time in my life.
I learned how to dive in the tropical waters of the Dominican Republic, came into contact with the abundant biodiversity of Panama and Costa Rica and developed my passion for mangrove forests on lagoon tours in Rio Lagartos, Mexico, and the Everglades, Florida.
Manatees, spider monkeys, sloths, toucans, eagle rays, white-tip reef sharks – the creatures I encountered in those places were exactly the ones depicted in my beloved childhood lexicon and nature documentaries. On top of that came the warm and genuine people who lived in those places. I was happy and I felt alive. However, I didn’t remember. The oblivion and conditioning was still too strong.
When I ended my sabbatical, I left the tropics and underwater worlds and thus distanced myself from the place I felt most alive once again. The animals, tropical beaches, mangroves and coral reefs became remnants of past travel memories. I found myself feeling disconnected to Germany, where I wrapped up my police job, and New Zealand, where I worked afterward. Why? I couldn’t name it.
However, all it needed was one more experience – the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back – to remember.
LEFT: A Tonga Fighting Conch attached to one of the mangrove trees. Mangroves forests are biodiversity hotspots and serve as a nesting, breeding, and nursing ground for local wildlife.
ABOVE: A Tonga Fighting Conch attached to one of the mangrove trees. Mangroves forests are biodiversity hotspots and serve as a nesting, breeding, and nursing ground for local wildlife.
In late May 2023, my friend Conrad, who had just visited the place, hit me up and said: „Hey Nick, you really should go to Tonga in the upcoming months. It’s humpback whale season and Tonga is one of the few places on Earth where you can swim with them.“
It was a beautiful coincidence, because there was one specific item on my Life’s Bucket List: „Seeing Whales“. I hadn’t thought much about this item anymore, not until Conrad told me about this opportunity.
I checked and saw that the humpbacks indeed come to Tonga between July and October to have their babies in the warm waters of the South Pacific. A bit out of budget, but prioritizing this life’s dream, I booked the flights and a couple of weeks later I was on my way. The tour was scheduled right on the second day.
We had just jumped into the wide ocean, no land in sight, and my body was still adjusting to the new temperature when the guide yelled and pointed down. My heart was pounding heavily in my chest as I dipped my head underwater to look down.
Through the red specks of zooplankton, I saw two fully grown humpbacks gliding gracefully through the water. They were maybe thirty meters away and they definitely noticed us, because they were changing their trajectory towards us.
At around fifteen meters distance, now right below me, one of the whales rotated smoothly. It turned sideways, probably to get a better look on the humans which were staring so funnily and paddling so frantically. While it turned, I looked the whale right into the eye.
They were highly conscious and … so alive.
This was a very intelligent being and it was as curious and well aware of us as we were of it. The movements it made, the twists and turns, were movements of pure joy for life. This animal was happy to be alive, I could see it. For this brief moment I bounded with this marvelous creature. An animal I dreamed about seeing ever since I was a child.
Even though my pulse was racing to the extent that I felt it in my neck, my soul was at peace. A minute later and these two whales had passed by, slowly fading away in the deep blue.
Something inside of me had changed.
But what was it?
It was a quiet Sunday when my friends Toshiya and Michael and I decided to head over to Nukunukumotu Island. As we stood in front of the shallow river delta that separated us from the island, I spotted a huge mangrove forest. I was dragged into the moment by its beauty.
We wadded over and I separated myself from my friends to go right into the forest. Fueled by my passion for mangroves, I strolled around and filmed a bit. Every puddle and tree invited me to stop and marvel, because tiny life forms were inhabiting all these separate microcosms.
There was a starfish trailing through the wet sand, visibly moving. A heron was terrorizing a puddle a few meters away. Small fish were trying to escape frantically when they noticed me coming, with nowhere to go. A conch was attached to a sap green tree leaf.
I walked further and further into the forest, carefully stepping over the intertwined roots of the mangrove trees. Birkenstocks in one hand, camera in the other. This place was where I wanted to be.
And then it all came back.
The moment of intimate contact with the humpbacks two days ago. My time in Central America. My lifelong haunting to find peace and a sense of arriving. My childhood self sitting on the living room’s carpet, a nature documentary running on the screen. Colored pens. The copy of the lexicon. My dreams. My passion for wildlife, the tropics and the underwater worlds…
In that moment…
I found home.
