The South Sea Islands are great cannibals; they have eaten portions of the hearts of many of their visitors who will never be wholly at home anywhere else again. What is their appeal? Is it the submerged feeling in all of us that life in the islands is free from care, where even the poor are happy? Which is the title of a book by Roderic Owen. "Where The Poor Are Happy" is a bit long in the tooth as it was published in 1955 but it resonates with those who seek the real Eden, the physical Eden, as much today as it did fifty years ago. If home is where your heart is, where will your heart be after you've been to VILLA MAMANA on tropical Telekivava'u?

 

Return? not they! Why should they go back? Here they had all things which are wont to satisfy man here below. A paradise of Eden-like beauty, amid which they wandered day by day all unheeding of the morrow. Why - why, indeed, should they leave the land of magical delights for the cold climate and still more glacial moral atmosphere of their native land, miscalled home?" So wrote Louis Becke, the 'Rudyard Kipling of the South Pacific', about the South Sea traders. He and many others succumbed to the siren song of these remote and soporific islands which is that on this small and human-sized stage your life will count for more and even your smallest accomplishments will be remembered. Of those who do remain, few are ever struck by homesickness and none ever want to leave again. Nor will you after you have stayed at the luxurious VILLA MAMANA on Telekivava'u.

 

Steve, whom you see at the beginning of this video clip, has been Telekivava'u's longest-serving caretaker. Sit back and relax while he takes you on a tour of VILLA MAMANA and the island.

 

The word 'paradise' has been more consistently applied to the mid-Pacific islands than to any other region on earth", writes William Price in his book "Adventures in Paradise". On or off the beaten track, in French, British or American territory, whether he is talking to a hobo or a High Commissioner, watching fire-walking in Fiji, meeting a son of Gauguin in Tahiti, or in the arms of an octopus under Samoan waters, Willard Price extracts the maximum interest out of a situation with a minimum of fuss. His book is a unique time capsule of life in the South Pacific in the 1950s. Much has changed in the intervening years but not at VILLA MAMANA on tropical Telekivava'u where time has stood still where time begins.

 

In this German television documentary, two German families are given the opportunity to realise their dream of the South Seas. Paradise awaits them on a tiny coral atoll in Ha'apai in the Kingdom of Tonga where they will live for one year in a native hut without air-conditioning and running water, beds and a Western-style kitchen. They'll have intermittent power supply but no television and they'll eat what they can catch or grow themselves. They are "Traumfischer" - Dream Fishers - and they're not at all certain that their dreams will become reality. You can be certain that all your dreams will become reality when you stay at the luxurious VILLA MAMANA on tropical Telekivava'u Island!

 

Middle-aged Gerald Kingsland had to lie about his age when he advertised in a London paper for a female companion to spend a year with him on a desert island. Young Lucy Irvine answered his ad and later wrote a book (which was made into a movie in 1986) about life on a desert island with her "husband for a year". You won't have to lie about your age to find a companion to come with you to the luxurious VILLA MAMANA on tropical Telekivava'u!

If there is a place where a man can grow old contentedly, it is on some quiet, drowsy atoll, where today is forever and tomorrow never comes, where men live and die, feast and sorrow, while the wind and the waves play over the wet sands and gleaming reefs", observed Julian Hillas, an Australian beachcomber who, during the 1940s, settled on Rakahanga in the northern Cook Islands atolls where some 250 people live on 1,000 acres around a nearly landlocked lagoon." With these evocative words begins chapter 8 in this book which describes, amongst others, the story of Tom Neale on Suwarrow, one of the many incredible adventures of true-life Robinson Crusoes which make the real Robinson Crusoe's exploits look like a picnic on the beach. Alexander Selkirk, upon whose adventures Crusoe was based, was washed ashore on an island west of Chile, where he lived quite handily until his rescue four years later. Part of this book's fascination is that readers are told how the various survivors spent the remainder of their lives after they returned home. There is also a good bit of information about early voyages to the South Atlantic and the Pacific, the sealing and whaling trades, and life among the natives and early settlers in the South Seas. One of the accounts is of a woman who, along with her baby and Chinese servant, died of starvation on an island on the Great Barrier Reef. She left a journal detailing the bizarre circumstances of their demise. The incredible obstacles overcome by these resourceful, persevering souls will leave modern readers slack-jawed. No two stories are alike, and all are compelling. Of course, once you've been to VILLA MAMANA on tropical Telekivava'u you can write your own story of having been a castaway in luxury!