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This was what I’d come for. This was an experience I’d wanted so badly that I’d put aside my trepidation about Big Blue and embarked on a 5,000-mile pilgrimage that could well have ended up becoming an exercise in terror management.

Just a few feet from me, the calf rolled onto his back, opening his knobby pectoral fins wide. We made eye contact: a six-week-old, 18-foot-long marine mammal and a woman from California. What could he have made of me? His beauty thrilled me almost to the point of pain.

His mother ascended, surfacing to breathe. At such close range, her size was overwhelming, a moving wall of whale, her skin encrusted here and there with barnacles. Her body language was relaxed, tail and flippers low, but she kept her eye fixed on the gaggle of snorkeled paparazzi extending GoPros toward her hammy, curious baby, who was now turning a backward somersault. In the water, whales’ conversation is often audible, and after a few whistles passed between the pair, they swam away unhurried, their oscillating flukes vanishing into the blue.

“Okay,” Nisi said, smiling broadly below his mask as we all popped up among the waves, five pinheads atop a dark and choppy sea. “We go back to the boat, yeah?”

Tonga is not one of the South Pacific’s most storied destinations, but the upside to its obscurity is that it is relatively unspoiled. On the island of Vava’u, the largest in the archipelago, the cows, pigs, dogs, chickens, and children are all free-range. Walk more than 20 feet and someone will offer you a ride. Island time is strictly observed.

“It’s raw and authentic,” said Annah Evington, our other guide. A New Zealand native, she has returned often to Vava’u since a transformative humpback encounter in 2001. “There’s no major tourism here. There’s no huge hotels, and there’s no white coated waiters and cocktails by the pool. The boats are still small, and the experiences are still very personal.”

In the harbor of the main town, Neiafu, white yachts float at their moorings while small fiberglass boats put-put among them, people from outlying islands crowding the bows and perched on the roofs on their way to shop or pick up their kids from school. Storefronts offer day trips to go reef diving and sport fishing. Waterfront cafés like the Mango and Aquarium have pleasant decks for afternoon beers and hearty pork or seafood dinners. In the evenings, hymns waft from the churches, only to be drowned out, at sunset, by a roaring chorus of cicadas. Every Wednesday night at Bounty Bar, above the harbor, a wry and regal matriarch in a mesh dress and sensible shoes presides over a rowdy drag show and dance party. Her name, both in life and onstage, is Brian.

“Here people are nice to you because they want to be nice to you, not because they have to be,” said Ben Newton, a former Bay Area entrepreneur. He and his wife, Lisa, arrived on a sailboat in 2004 and, to their mutual surprise, never left. “It’s hard for Tonga as a developing nation, because people want the Disneyland experience. But I appreciate its raw beauty. It’s out here on the edge of the planet.”

After settling in Vava’u, the Newtons started several small businesses, including a restaurant and a dinghy-rental shop, before a twist of fate brought them to Fetoko Island, a round, sandy blip surrounded by reef in a tranquil bay. The couple had helped a Tongan family with a house loan; in gratitude, the family offered first their unborn baby, then the rights to Fetoko. The Newtons passed on the baby, but they eventually accepted the island, with the stipulation that the family remain shareholders in the eco-resort they’d dreamed up, to be called Mandala. After four years of construction, which they did mostly by themselves, the Newtons opened in 2013 with just a restaurant and a tree house. Since then they have added four bungalows and a yoga porch overlooking the water. “The island already had its own vibe,” Ben said. “We just had to figure out what to do with it.”

Though Fetoko Island is only about 70 yards in diameter, the Newtons found space for some big ideas. Ben’s swooping design for the open-air restaurant was inspired by, among other things, manta rays and fractal geometry. Upon arrival by boat, guests are greeted by the couple’s two dogs, Higgs and Boson, named after the Higgs boson, a theoretical subatomic particle. All electricity is supplied by solar panels and all water by the clouds. The toilets operate on a composting system, and plans are afoot for an aquaponics garden, which will allow them to grow more of the resort’s (excellent) food on site. There’s talk of keeping chickens and dairy cows on a nearby island, since there isn’t space on Fetoko.

These green measures feel especially urgent in Tonga. Like other Pacific island nations, the kingdom is especially vulnerable to climate change, as rising sea levels and increasing water temperatures have begun to cause inundation of low lying coasts, reef degradation, and saltwater infiltration of soil and freshwater reservoirs. “Be the change and whatnot,” Ben said. “We’re not real focused on it as a business. It’s been more about the project, building it and enjoying it as we do it.”

One of Ben’s businesses back in San Francisco involved arranging personalized experiences designed to help people confront and conquer their fears—for example, skydiving for those afraid of heights. “I got addicted to it,” he said, “but I realized I hadn’t faced my own biggest fear.” Which was? “Running out of money.”

To that end, he and Lisa traded the rat race for the boat. “We sailed through the Golden Gate and turned left,” he said. Three years later, they arrived in Tonga. Money ran out a few times while they were building Mandala, but the rewards have been rich. “How do you beat the tropical island lifestyle?” Lisa asked.

As I sipped a rum cocktail in a hammock on Mandala’s beach at sunset, I wasn’t sure you could.

As undiscovered as Tonga remains to most people, whale swimming is drawing a growing number of visitors—from a few hundred annually in the early 1990s to more than 3,000 a year in the past decade. That might not sound like a lot, but as with any other tourism enterprise built around encounters with wildlife, whale-swimming companies must balance a desire to spread the gospel of conservation with the risk of intruding on the animals and disturbing their habitats. Australia, the Dominican Republic, and Tahiti are among the few countries besides Tonga that allow operators to put customers in the water with humpbacks. To its credit, Tonga has regulations in place to protect the whales—limits on lengths of swims, mandatory breaks between encounters, prohibitions on harassing the whales, and caps on the number of swimmers allowed and boat licenses issued—though these are largely self-enforced.

This story is online at https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/adventure-travel/swimming-with-whales-south-pacific