I ask Andy Cory how he came to live on the remote South Pacific island of Niue tending hives abuzz with one of the world’s most isolated populations of honeybees.
A 100-square-mile dot on the map located roughly between the Cook Islands and Fiji and home to less than 2,000 people, Niue is way out there.
But the towering New Zealander in the paint-splattered bee suit, who answered an ad for a beekeeper in the late ’90s and is now known as the “Honeyman of Niue,” has questions for me and my travel companion, too.
“You’re the Instagram husband, right?” he asks Jake, the handsome man by my side with the physique of a lifelong surfer and the humility of someone who’s definitely not an Instagram husband.
“I know what that’s like. I’m one, too,” Cory jokes in a thick Kiwi drawl, glacier-blue eyes sparkling with a cheeky grin. “You just have to look wind-swept and stay interesting, right?”
Jake and I laugh.
No, no, we’re not together, we tell Cory.
Jake’s wife, Sandy, is one of my best friends. Jake also happens to be my ex-boyfriend’s best friend, I add.
Sandy is at home in New Zealand with their poodle and my husband is in Florida with our kids, I tell the Honeyman, who takes this news in stride.
Jake and I have known each other for 25 years. We’ve traveled together — as a foursome, with Sandy and my ex, Chris — on many occasions, but it’s my first time vacationing alone with Jake.
“Well, that’s very contemporary of you all,” Cory says.
Jake and I found ourselves alone together on this atoll that rises steeply from the South Pacific Ocean then flattens across the top, like a birthday cake, because we had a few things in common — both with each other and the planeload of passengers on our flight.
The only commercial 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 tourists, mostly New Zealanders, who’d come for the chance to snorkel with humpback whales that migrate within yards of the island’s cliff-lined flanks every year between July and September on their journey north from Antarctica.
That’s when Niue’s glimmer of a tourist season, which coincides with winter in the Southern Hemisphere, springs into high gear. The sight of spouting and fluking humpbacks from the oceanfront deck at the island’s lone hotel, Scenic Matavai Resort, is so common that a “whale bell” gets jangled nearly nonstop to alert guests to look up from their cocktails and poolside lounge chairs.
For as long as we could both remember, Jake and I, both ocean lovers (he’s a lifelong surfer and I’m a lifelong scuba diver), had longed to swim with whales.
And during the incredible — and utterly platonic — week I spent traveling with a married man as a married woman in the company of more humpbacks than we could count, I found myself wishing such a travel arrangement could be more commonplace in our contemporary times.
I turned 50 in October in unsettling times.
Conversations I could have easily waded into abroad, far from the divisiveness of home, had become landmines to pirouette around mid-chat with neighbors and friends in Florida. I’d never felt more worn down by the day-to-day.
My career as a travel writer, with decades of experiences with people and places to draw stories from, was under threat from artificial intelligence that would surely be able to tell human stories better than I could soon enough — or so I was being told.
It only made me want to see more of the world as it was, right now, with my own two eyes — and with other living, breathing humans to enjoy it with.
I’d done a lot in my first 50 years, from backpacking in New Zealand and scuba diving deep within World War II shipwrecks in Micronesia to cage diving with great white sharks and an epic Arctic expedition around Svalbard in a 37-foot sailboat.
Since becoming a mom, I travel with my family every chance I get, too, including the month we spent in Bali last summer, spring breaks in Spain and Korea and closer-to-home weekends away in places like Bend, Oregon, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
When I decided I wanted to swim with humpbacks to mark a healthy half-century, I researched a few places that included Northern Norway (cold) and French Polynesia (pricey).
Then I remembered a National Geographic Pristine Seas documentary I’d watched about Niue, a place home to less than 2,000 people that I’d never heard of before, where international tourism is still nascent and the whales abundant. It felt like the perfect place to dive in. And getting to transit through New Zealand to visit Sandy and Jake was an added bonus.
My usual travel companions weren’t available to join. My husband couldn’t take time away from work. And my sister was busy ushering her two oldest kids, my usual up-for-anything dive buddy nieces, off to their first year of college.
I’d asked Sandy if she wanted to join me in Niue, since she was already in New Zealand and it was just a three-hour flight. But she declined, saying she’d rather spend her limited vacation time on a few days together on the tail end of my trip at Huka Lodge, her dream hotel on New Zealand’s North Island.
I felt a bit wistful that I wouldn’t be sharing such an epic trip and milestone birthday with anyone, but the humpbacks were waiting, so I booked my trip.
A few weeks later, Sandy rang me up with an idea.
“Can Jakey go with you? I know he’d love it,” she asked, hoping my husband would be cool with it, too.
He was.
And that’s how I came to spend a week alone on vacation in a South Pacific paradise with my ex-boyfriend’s best friend.
Jake and I first met in 1997, when we were in our early 20s and I’d fallen in love with his childhood best friend, Chris, quickly inserting myself as the third wheel on their surf trips around Florida.
Years later, I’d been on the path toward the good health insurance and stable career my parents craved for me when Chris, a born adventurer who could always get me out of my comfort zone, suggested we follow a different kind of American dream that didn’t involve 40 hours a week in an office.
We quit our jobs for a round-the-world trip that kicked off with a stop in Fiji and New Zealand before settling in Australia for a year on a working holiday visa.
Jake, the third wheel by now, joined us. And during our second stop of the trip, he met Sandy, a New Zealander, at a surfer hostel in Raglan where we all stayed.
He’s been in New Zealand ever since.
Chris and I basically grew up together in the years that followed, at home in Florida and out in the world, making the most of our 20s and 30s. We saved money to go scuba diving in places like Palau and Papua New Guinea, snowboarding in Colorado and the Alps and on surf trips to Guam and Indonesia.
One summer, we even drove Chris’ aging van, loaded up with surfboards and a makeshift bed in the back, from Orlando south through Mexico and Central America until we made it all the way to the Panama Canal. We were “vanlife” before vanlife was cool.
But eventually, our very long and adventurous relationship went up in flames, the most catastrophic breakup of my life. I was 37 years old by then and wondered how I’d ever get over messing things up with the person I thought I’d one day have a family with — and if I’d ever find that level of true friendship with a man again.
An older friend who’d been through something similar told me, during that difficult time when I was full of should haves and would haves, that losing someone you spent so many years with left a gash as deep as a canyon. But that it would eventually fill in with time, if never completely.
He was right.
I fell in love again while out traveling the world, no surprise to anyone who knew me.
By that point, Chris and I hadn’t spoken in years, and our relationship began to feel like a mirage because I couldn’t relive the memories of all the things I’d done with the person who’d been at my side.
But I’d stayed friends with Jake and Sandy, meeting up with them in Florida every year when they’d come back to visit Jake’s family and sell Christmas trees at their lot in Orlando for the holidays, sharing laughs about all the fun of the past.
I never imagined that I’d travel alone with Jake, however.
Everywhere we went on Niue, people assumed Jake and I were a couple, even when we would emerge from separate rooms at the hotel to sit down for breakfast by the ocean. Every time we explained our situation — that he was my ex’s best friend, and my best friend’s husband — we’d get the same surprised then accepting reaction.
We spent our days in Niue scouting for whales with Niue Blue, the island’s only dive shop, with guides who showed us how to slip quietly from the edge of the boat into the water to snorkel above them.
Far below us, Jake and I listened to the lone males as they sent their songs out into the deep blue with a decibel level so intense I could feel my insides shake. When they surfaced for a breath you could catch their eyes looking back at you before they deep-dived down again. Their songs were so loud, we could even hear them above water on the boat, something I never could have imagined.
Jake hadn’t been scuba diving in years, and we’d never been diving together. But he was a natural underwater just like Chris, my first dive buddy. We’d surface wide-eyed at the sight of Niue’s endemic katuali sea snakes, falling like curtains through the water column, their black and white bands as dizzying as an M.C. Escher drawing against the blue sea.
The visibility of Niue’s ocean is clearer than any water I’d ever been in —there are no rivers running off the island to muck it up, and being able to see 100 feet (and often much farther) underwater is the norm. It’s like diving in air. And I was grateful to have found a new dive buddy who loved the ocean from every angle.
We drove our small rental car around the island, which doesn’t have the traditional sandy beaches of other islands. We pulled over at tracks that led down through the limestone cliffs to shallow shelves of water at low tide, where we snorkeled in rock pools carved into the limestone and full of hard coral fingers threaded with tropical fish.
We went deep into a forest with Tony Aholima from A5 Tours Niue, a dreadlocked local who sent us off with giant papayas from his farm and showed us how to find the uga — coconut crab — lifting the super-sized crustaceans with formidable claws carefully, heavy in their basketball-sized shells, from behind.
We pulled over by the ocean cliffs and waited for the skies to clear at night to see what the heavens would look like in the world’s first Dark Sky Nation.
If it sounds romantic, it wasn’t. And after plenty of romances, most gone awry, that’s what made traveling with Jake so great.
There was silence in the car, in the water, on the boats, at the tables, but it was the comfortable silence of a long friendship — not that of a couple that no longer had anything to discuss.
I was enjoying the presence of a man in a way I never had my entire life because we had been given the full confidence of the people who loved us to be in each other’s company doing the things we loved.
One afternoon, Jake came to my hotel room with a six-pack of beer, and we sat outside on the balcony drinking it while the breath of humpbacks just offshore punctuated the air and the sun melted toward the horizon.
Later, he put his phone on speaker and played some music that Chris, who started playing guitar in his early 20s when we’d just started dating, had finally put out in the world.
“I don’t think he’d mind,” Jake said.
For a minute, my ex was there with us, like old times.
And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t shed a tear at the sound of his voice, guitar and words. At the feeling of being connected to someone, if only for a minute, who I’d grown up with — and lost — so long ago. He was still out there, living his best life, just like I was. I was proud of him.
By now, I’d learned that friendship, in its many enduring forms, is the truest form of love.
Terry Ward is a Florida-based travel writer and freelance journalist in Tampa who has lived in France, Australia and New Zealand.
