I ask Andy Cory how he got here to reside on the distant South Pacific island of Niue tending hives abuzz with one of many world’s most remoted populations of honeybees.
A 100-square-mile dot on the map situated roughly between the Cook Islands and Fiji and residential to lower than 2,000 individuals, Niue is approach on the market.
But the towering New Zealander within the paint-splattered bee swimsuit, who answered an advert for a beekeeper within the late ’90s and is now generally known as the “Honeyman of Niue,” has questions for me and my journey companion, too.
“You’re the Instagram husband, right?” he asks Jake, the good-looking man by my facet with the physique of a lifelong surfer and the humility of somebody who’s undoubtedly not an Instagram husband.
“I know what that’s like. I’m one, too,” Cory jokes in a thick Kiwi drawl, glacier-blue eyes glowing with a cheeky grin. “You just have to look wind-swept and stay interesting, right?”
Jake and I chuckle.
No, no, we’re not collectively, we inform Cory.
Jake’s spouse, Sandy, is certainly one of my best buddies. Jake additionally occurs to be my ex-boyfriend’s best buddy, I add.
Sandy is at dwelling in New Zealand with their poodle and my husband is in Florida with our youngsters, I inform the Honeyman, who takes this information in stride.
Jake and I have recognized one another for 25 years. We’ve traveled collectively — as a foursome, with Sandy and my ex, Chris — on many events, nevertheless it’s my first time vacationing alone with Jake.
“Well, that’s very contemporary of you all,” Cory says.
Jake and I discovered ourselves alone collectively on this atoll that rises steeply from the South Pacific Ocean then flattens throughout the highest, like a birthday cake, as a result of we had a few issues in widespread — each with one another and the planeload of passengers on our flight.
The solely business flights to Niue, a self-governing nation in free-association with New Zealand, arrive from Auckland, 1,340 miles to the southwest, on Air New Zealand.
Our flight was giddy with vacationers, largely New Zealanders, who’d come for the possibility to snorkel with humpback whales that migrate inside yards of the island’s cliff-lined flanks yearly between July and September on their journey north from Antarctica.
That’s when Niue’s glimmer of a vacationer season, which coincides with winter within the Southern Hemisphere, springs into excessive gear. The sight of spouting and fluking humpbacks from the oceanfront deck on the island’s lone lodge, Scenic Matavai Resort, is so widespread that a “whale bell” will get jangled practically nonstop to alert friends to search for from their cocktails and poolside lounge chairs.
For so long as we may each bear in mind, Jake and I, each ocean lovers (he’s a lifelong surfer and I’m a lifelong scuba diver), had longed to swim with whales.
And throughout the unimaginable — and completely platonic — week I spent touring with a married man as a married lady within the firm of extra humpbacks than we may rely, I discovered myself wishing such a journey association could possibly be extra commonplace in our modern occasions.
I turned 50 in October in unsettling occasions.
Conversations I may have simply waded into overseas, removed from the divisiveness of dwelling, had develop into landmines to pirouette round mid-chat with neighbors and buddies in Florida. I’d by no means felt extra worn down by the day-to-day.
My profession as a journey author, with many years of experiences with individuals and locations to attract tales from, was underneath risk from synthetic intelligence that might certainly be capable to inform human tales higher than I may quickly sufficient — or so I was being instructed.
It solely made me wish to see extra of the world because it was, proper now, with my personal two eyes — and with different residing, respiration people to get pleasure from it with.
I’d finished a lot in my first 50 years, from backpacking in New Zealand and scuba diving deep inside World War II shipwrecks in Micronesia to cage diving with nice white sharks and an epic Arctic expedition around Svalbard in a 37-foot sailboat.
Since turning into a mother, I journey with my household each probability I get, too, together with the month we spent in Bali final summer season, spring breaks in Spain and Korea and closer-to-home weekends away in locations like Bend, Oregon, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
When I determined I needed to swim with humpbacks to mark a wholesome half-century, I researched a few locations that included Northern Norway (chilly) and French Polynesia (dear).
Then I remembered a National Geographic Pristine Seas documentary I’d watched about Niue, a place dwelling to lower than 2,000 those who I’d by no means heard of earlier than, the place worldwide tourism remains to be nascent and the whales plentiful. It felt like the right place to dive in. And attending to transit by New Zealand to go to Sandy and Jake was an added bonus.
My typical journey companions weren’t accessible to hitch. My husband couldn’t take time away from work. And my sister was busy ushering her two oldest youngsters, my typical up-for-anything dive buddy nieces, off to their first 12 months of faculty.
I’d requested Sandy if she needed to hitch me in Niue, since she was already in New Zealand and it was simply a three-hour flight. But she declined, saying she’d reasonably spend her restricted trip time on a few days collectively on the tail finish of my journey at Huka Lodge, her dream lodge on New Zealand’s North Island.
I felt a bit wistful that I wouldn’t be sharing such an epic journey and milestone birthday with anybody, however the humpbacks had been ready, so I booked my journey.
Just a few weeks later, Sandy rang me up with an thought.
“Can Jakey go with you? I know he’d love it,” she requested, hoping my husband could be cool with it, too.
He was.
And that’s how I got here to spend a week alone on trip in a South Pacific paradise with my ex-boyfriend’s best buddy.
Jake and I first met in 1997, after we had been in our early 20s and I’d fallen in love with his childhood best buddy, Chris, rapidly inserting myself because the third wheel on their surf journeys round Florida.
Years later, I’d been on the trail towards the nice medical insurance and secure profession my dad and mom craved for me when Chris, a born adventurer who may all the time get me out of my consolation zone, advised we observe a totally different form of American dream that didn’t contain 40 hours a week in an workplace.
We stop our jobs for a round-the-world journey that kicked off with a cease in Fiji and New Zealand earlier than settling in Australia for a 12 months on a working vacation visa.
Jake, the third wheel by now, joined us. And throughout our second cease of the journey, he met Sandy, a New Zealander, at a surfer hostel in Raglan the place all of us stayed.
He’s been in New Zealand ever since.
Chris and I mainly grew up collectively within the years that adopted, at dwelling in Florida and out on the planet, taking advantage of our 20s and 30s. We saved cash to go scuba diving in locations like Palau and Papua New Guinea, snowboarding in Colorado and the Alps and on surf journeys to Guam and Indonesia.
One summer season, we even drove Chris’ growing older van, loaded up with surfboards and a makeshift mattress within the again, from Orlando south by Mexico and Central America till we made all of it the way in which to the Panama Canal. We had been “vanlife” earlier than vanlife was cool.
But ultimately, our very lengthy and adventurous relationship went up in flames, essentially the most catastrophic breakup of my life. I was 37 years previous by then and puzzled how I’d ever recover from messing issues up with the individual I thought I’d at some point have a household with — and if I’d ever discover that degree of true friendship with a man once more.
An older buddy who’d been by one thing related instructed me, throughout that tough time when I was stuffed with ought to haves and would haves, that dropping somebody you spent so a few years with left a gash as deep as a canyon. But that it might ultimately fill in with time, if by no means utterly.
He was proper.
I fell in love once more whereas out touring the world, no shock to anybody who knew me.
By that time, Chris and I hadn’t spoken in years, and our relationship started to really feel like a mirage as a result of I couldn’t relive the recollections of all of the issues I’d finished with the one who’d been at my facet.
But I’d stayed buddies with Jake and Sandy, assembly up with them in Florida yearly once they’d come again to go to Jake’s household and promote Christmas bushes at their lot in Orlando for the vacations, sharing laughs about all of the enjoyable of the previous.
I by no means imagined that I’d journey alone with Jake, nonetheless.
Everywhere we went on Niue, individuals assumed Jake and I had been a couple, even after we would emerge from separate rooms on the lodge to take a seat down for breakfast by the ocean. Every time we defined our state of affairs — that he was my ex’s best buddy, and my best friend’s husband — we’d get the identical shocked then accepting response.
We spent our days in Niue scouting for whales with Niue Blue, the island’s solely dive store, with guides who confirmed us the way to slip quietly from the sting of the boat into the water to snorkel above them.
Far under us, Jake and I listened to the lone males as they despatched their songs out into the deep blue with a decibel degree so intense I may really feel my insides shake. When they surfaced for a breath you possibly can catch their eyes trying again at you earlier than they deep-dived down once more. Their songs had been so loud, we may even hear them above water on the boat, one thing I by no means may have imagined.
Jake hadn’t been scuba diving in years, and we’d by no means been diving collectively. But he was a pure underwater identical to Chris, my first dive buddy. We’d floor wide-eyed on the sight of Niue’s endemic katuali sea snakes, falling like curtains by the water column, their black and white bands as dizzying as an M.C. Escher drawing in opposition to the blue sea.
The visibility of Niue’s ocean is clearer than any water I’d ever been in —there are not any rivers working off the island to muck it up, and having the ability to see 100 ft (and infrequently a lot farther) underwater is the norm. It’s like diving in air. And I was grateful to have discovered a new dive buddy who liked the ocean from each angle.
We drove our small rental automobile across the island, which doesn’t have the normal sandy seashores of different islands. We pulled over at tracks that led down by the limestone cliffs to shallow cabinets of water at low tide, the place we snorkeled in rock swimming pools carved into the limestone and stuffed with laborious coral fingers threaded with tropical fish.
We went deep into a forest with Tony Aholima from A5 Tours Niue, a dreadlocked native who despatched us off with big papayas from his farm and confirmed us the way to discover the uga — coconut crab — lifting the super-sized crustaceans with formidable claws fastidiously, heavy of their basketball-sized shells, from behind.
We pulled over by the ocean cliffs and waited for the skies to clear at night time to see what the heavens would seem like on the planet’s first Dark Sky Nation.
If it sounds romantic, it wasn’t. And after loads of romances, most gone awry, that’s what made touring with Jake so nice.
There was silence within the automobile, within the water, on the boats, on the tables, nevertheless it was the snug silence of a lengthy friendship — not that of a couple that now not had something to debate.
I was having fun with the presence of a man in a approach I by no means had my complete life as a result of we had been given the complete confidence of the individuals who liked us to be in one another’s firm doing the issues we liked.
One afternoon, Jake got here to my lodge room with a six-pack of beer, and we sat outdoors on the balcony ingesting it whereas the breath of humpbacks simply offshore punctuated the air and the solar melted towards the horizon.
Later, he put his telephone on speaker and performed some music that Chris, who began taking part in guitar in his early 20s after we’d simply began relationship, had lastly put out on the planet.
“I don’t think he’d mind,” Jake stated.
For a minute, my ex was there with us, like previous occasions.
And I’d be mendacity if I stated I didn’t shed a tear on the sound of his voice, guitar and phrases. At the sensation of being related to somebody, if just for a minute, who I’d grown up with — and misplaced — so way back. He was nonetheless on the market, residing his best life, identical to I was. I was pleased with him.
By now, I’d realized that friendship, in its many enduring varieties, is the truest type of love.
Terry Ward is a Florida-based journey author and freelance journalist in Tampa who has lived in France, Australia and New Zealand.