11 Years Living Off-Grid On A Self-Built Island (full tour)

so we're in tonga an extremely remote island nation in the south pacific and more specifically we're anchored out near one of the 55 tiny islands in the viva group and we're sort of stuck here because while we're waiting out cyclone season and a pandemic which has given us a lot of time to make new friends and we're excited to introduce you to two of them today they're a couple of sailors who rocked up here many years ago and what i assume is a similar spirit to when the first polynesians arrived with no real expectations or plans just an endless sea of possibilities and before we head over i just want to note that it did take some convincing because well publicizing your life on the internet isn't exactly on everybody's bucket list but we're glad that they agreed and without further ado i hope you enjoy the story sunrise what a beautiful morning okay time for a little coffee [Music] [Music] beautiful look at this no more rain no wind it is a spectacularly beautiful day yeah okay coming to work two here comes the welcome committee well hello boys how are you oh yeah half the stuff out here is just kind of figuring out you know by trial and error making a plan and just seeing what happened yeah not a lot of uh not a lot of youtube videos for uh a ramp you know a ramp with a four foot tide with cyclones and uh shallow feel that earthquake water earthquake a couple nights ago we had a big old earthquake man geez yeah so this is real island life always repairing much like boat life just uh on land yeah yeah this is a sailboat just permanently anchored yeah yeah with no sails it has coconut trees instead of sailing yes yeah so this is uh this is ben but of course we've caught him in the middle of trying to finish repairing his uh dock we just had a cyclone not too long ago and so this is the reality of what you have to do afterwards shall we go up and say hello to lisa let's do it welcome to mandala resort and into the jungle [Music] [Laughter] all right well let's meet ben and lisa hello yes so fellow cruisers came here how long ago 2004 four yeah you were 12. yeah yeah we swam here as children olympic swimmer is clear yeah yeah clearly yeah so came here in 2004 from california but it was a very long route here a few years of cruising yeah and tell us about your boat she's a 42 foot pilot house sloop the cooper the canadian built boat which is now the u.s yachts yeah they're still around yeah it's a 1980 older boat but took care of us we still have her yeah nice beamy boat she wrote the seeds really well and took very good care of us the story evolves from there because not only did you arrive but you got here then you loved it decided to start a little like wi-fi cafe first internet um actually we put zor balls and rolled people down a hill in these big inflatable balls for a while because you know that's what we do sounds very flaming lips actually it was it was uh it was not smart actually but um did you really do that yeah oh okay so we had a hillside and um it's a long story from my previous we did extreme sports and stuff like that and this was something left over from that world then we brought here and tried to make it go it was tonga sphere as well yeah for a tourism thing to do do you have any photos of that we do yeah okay i'd love to see one all right so you start to spear sphere sphere sphere sphere so you rolled people down a hill yeah and then you gave them internet yeah we started a little coffee place and then needed wi-fi of course and then we wanted to have that burger and beer and ice cream place because what else do you want other than laundry yeah yeah so we just okay we'll do all those things take all those boxes and then it just evolved from there into a restaurant with the wi-fi which you set up the first broadcast to the whole bay of yachts right yeah i figured out how to take our landline and broadcast is wireless and back then there were no smartphones everybody came in with no 3gb no 4g nothing yeah you know focused on making the business be a great thing it was just taking us over so we didn't tip into our kitty right yeah while we were here for the first few years and we got to meet people and it was fun yeah yeah so the resort's called mandala but what's the name of the island again it's faytoko okay f-e-t-o-k-o okay and how did you end up on the island because there was nothing here when you got here right yeah yeah it's a good question um all right so we befriended a local carver long story short we partnered up with him and got the lease to the island that took six years to get that to happen wow okay so here's okay so we started a restaurant in the meantime hearts safaris we brought carts and took people on tours to the jungles and stuff like that we wanted to have fun yeah we ran a regatta here for five years and the big full moon parties funny i actually remember reading about that because like the only cruiser guys i've been able to find for here are older cruiser guys but i remember reading about one of their regattas and and like the parties and stuff afterwards yeah yeah so we had a lot of fun for a while and then um and then dumped any money that we had left into building this place and with the intention of running it as a resort at some point so we moved here from town 2010 yeah and then built for a few years and we didn't take any guests till late 2013. we had one room we had the treehouse it was our first and the restaurant and then the restaurant and then so we have like a four month season that's the peak of the tourist season yeah and then yeah exactly and and the great sailing as well and so then when the season starts to die down we would be able to you know the guests would go and we would build the next room and just kind of kept carrying on that way throughout each year so is there a long slow process process not nothing not the smartest way to build a place but a labor of love as well yeah flavor of love and still an evolution like because i mean there's always new projects going on right oh it never ends as soon as we get to one end we have to go back and start over and start repairing from the other end yeah the environment here is really harsh everything we took from boating and being cruisers and what we learned about the boat we were able to apply it's actually a big boat and how it how it runs in the technology so it's uh been a great learning experience for us and a lot of fun you know a lot of challenges as well of course but it was easy everybody would do it yeah right that's right yeah okay well so do you mind giving us a just a quick tour sure okay let's take a look around yeah this is the restaurant we'll start right here yeah so this was uh 50 000 bags of concrete rock and sand one over the shoulder one on the arm walk through the surf to get it to the beach in the beginning and we wanted an outdoor like when we cut everything back right now everything's really grown in because we're in wet season yeah and no tourist so we just had to kind of go through tourists what season and covet there's there hasn't been a guest here in well yeah yeah way too many counts against us at the moment yeah yeah sorry i won't bring that up again yeah so we got interested in patterns and chaos a long story but i like the fibonacci sequence is something used in art and we use that in building a lot of our structures but primarily this so some of the arches and stuff we're trying to use the curves we see in nature instead of right angles and that kind of thing so yeah to blend in yeah so this whole thing is poured concrete so it was poured as a liquid and then solidified with steel and stuff inside mixed by hand no concrete trucks are coming here no right yeah so it was a crazy endeavor to try to do this thing so this one didn't break us so we were inspired to build a folly after that a treehouse and then this blossom over there now we have seven structures on the island all of them different wow really quick for the people who don't know what fibonacci is can you do a quick quick explanation quick is not usually ben's thing but we're gonna we're gonna give you yes yeah all right yeah okay here we go all right so fibonacci is represented in geometry with the golden spiral the gold mean ratio if you take a string of numbers from zero to infinity you add the first two numbers to make the next so zero and one make one one and one make two two and three make five three and five make eight so on to infinity but it takes intelligence to make the computation and then when you plot that string in geometry it makes these this kind of spiraling out you'll see it all over there's evidence from quantum areas to galactic areas that that these seemingly random mathematical occurrences seem to be prevalent in all areas of nature and i wanted to build with it right just to play with it i i like that concept and it's not the only one that's out there but it's one that at the time i could build with yeah like it's sort of like it's like finding patterns in nature essentially right yeah for me pattern recognizing is what makes us a special animal on the planet and in the quest to finding truth and trying to figure out what it's all about i've landed on this crazy equation that i wanted to put my hand to and hence the name mandala because it's it's structurally integral to what a mandala is so that's why we named the place one dollar as well the structure everything has kind of been made with that theory in mind right yeah every every structure this one you could see it more evident than the others but even pathways and how we do things also the ethos of how we run the place and what we feel is us playing into nature instead of being something sitting on top of it but actually what nature is doing and trying to let ourselves get into that well cool let's take a walk because i think you'll see it a lot more as we as we go but that's what i love about mandala is it's a very like biophilic experience all of the buildings and nature it kind of everything is all one it's not separate we're at the first tree house and we actually stayed in this tree house we stayed here for halloween because they invited us over for a halloween party that they had here on the island so we got to stay in this treehouse because well the boat was still on hard at the yard on the heart of the yard this wasn't your first tree house was it no no this was actually going to be our place and we wanted to look in mama tree that's mama tree that's the heart of the island right there all the other rooms look out we wanted one that looked in to monitor so we built the deck looking at the tree looking at the tree yeah so why a tree house tree houses are fun right because why not a tree i'm not a guy i needed to build a tree house and they're fun they're fun to build everyone people respond to tree houses as well you know if you're gonna come to a little island like this you gotta at least uh give a go at a tree house yeah one thing we wanted to do from the outside we didn't want to change the look of feitoko the azian to the people so our structures are very hidden we didn't want a big restaurant that's pronounced out we wanted nature to take it back over so we're going to train the vines to come up over and build it so that we don't need paint and things like that that always have to strip it down and do that so we've built everything like this bamboo is called cajo and it's from a whole nother part of the island that we had to go into make a deal with the people and it's a weed to the autonomous and they're happy if we clear-cut because they go back and they plant crops there yeah and usually they burn this so it's all built framework around and then stretched around the top of that and it gives the interior of the room a bigger feel than a straight one yeah and it looks really cool and like you said you don't need paint yeah and even the areas that look like paint is just the mud mixed into the final rendering concrete so we never have to paint those too yeah that's um but that one's dude that's amazing mildew counts as the earth has taken it back i love all the little details like the hand collected shells that become the sink or the rope for the toilet paper the tongans they shuck these giant clams so they shuck and take the meat so so and they've been doing it for eons and some of these distant little islands like we went the other day i had just piles these under the ground that still falling over yeah yeah i'd go out there and uh i'd say a little boat around for months and uh dig them out and pull them out and align the restaurant and we use them for things like that so they get some decorative yeah little tokens from the past this is hopi she's a sweetheart he is reluctant love yeah come on hopey now we got the dogs and the cat because you have to have an island kitty and how can you not have such a cute one yeah okay so this is your fall this is your home and do you move around the island are you always in this room we do move around we need to be able to feel how the rooms feel and see what needs to be done you know and so we kind of cruise around when that's empty when we don't have when borders are closed we don't have any kind of yes yeah you can just flip from one one room to the next last year we've had a lot of choices yeah it's like your backpackers on your own way too much actually they need to be lived in them yeah no for sure any special details or anything i think the ceiling i love the ceiling well it's a look it's a it's a nine-sided polygon so it's called a nanogun nonagon yeah um so some of the wood has been cut out of the forest here like this is called uh oh oh oh yeah ohia from hawaii that a guy i had a container of that i i bought these are a fast-growing wood that's around here so we just tried different ideas again with the cajo on the ceiling and it's a passive solar so there's a hole in the top of the ceiling so when the wind the idea is when the wind blows by it creates a venturi effect that'll take the heat out and pull in the cool from the bottom and these rooms stay quite cool the summer months get quite hot here so we wanted to keep that in mind also it's on the other side of the island that gets hit pretty hard there's four big pine trees that are just falling over they dominoed here before we got here so we built around those they're still alive okay so so we built around those as a wind block so this side has been hit hard before so wanted something round something and so all the ties tie from the foundation all the way to the roof to you know yeah what do you tell us what you really think yeah yeah we just do what the boss tells us she wanted the treehouses she did i think the neatest part about this resort is the fact that they built it themselves just the two of them with obviously help from the locals hiring help when needed but they just kind of started one one dream of having a little tree house and it just sort of flowed into a foley and then another fallet and then another tree house and now it's just this lovely organic resort that sort of just happened it's not that they had some sort of master plan it was just something that happened and i love that like the whole idea behind it just letting nature take its course and seeing what happens okay so this is the first treehouse you ever built yeah so yeah we built this first and we were kind of figuring it out as we went and we've had to go back and fix the things we didn't know but we wanted um as you can see behind me this is a gorgeous area the islands that are just out on the other side are right on the tonga trench which is the second deepest in the world and it's a massive chasm in the earth that spans from new zealand all the way up to small 500 miles or something right now think it's more longer than you know even longer yeah so it's bigger than himalayas but you can't see it because it's underwater but if you were in the himalayas the peaks would be everest and so those would be the peaks right there those are literally the edge of the earth the tip of them right and we're just a mile from that and the international date line runs down that trench between samoa you know all the way up the the earth so we are literally the east side of a vow the easternmost point of tonga yeah and so we're seeing the first of the day in the world because even samoa is um yesterday on the other side it's weird yeah yeah so you are the first sunrise of the day and that's what this tree house sees so your view from this tree house is the first light of every day yeah so we wanted to build a treehouse that you know played into that a bit so you could watch the sunrise and then look right out across that area [Applause] look at that [Music] the showers the showers are definitely my favorite just because of the open air the views you get to shower in the jungle but not actually in the jungle and this breeze as well there's there's no humans in between here and the antarctic where the air is kind of cleaned by that whole kind of earth system you know and so this is the freshest air on the planet and it's just beautiful breeze from the southeast prevailing and it's just lovely up here yeah the southeast trade winds that blew us here are created by the arctic jet is what lisa was talking about and so literally there's no continent that's just open ocean to a southeast trade to no humans so we're the first to uh put our breath into it so we get the really fresh air from southeastern elisa is actually 150 years old it's just that it's the air and the light it is it makes sense and if you if you come here you will get younger right that's in our marketing that's it one more time on that one yeah come to mandala where you get younger and more broken i actually broke my heels when i when i built this i fell off of it your actual heel oh yeah both of my heels i fell off that platform and hit a uh we have composting septic systems here so i hit it and um that was our first year of operation so had to hobble around on crutches through that one that was fine yeah wow talk about an initiation yeah so this one is it's not the hobbit house but it's kind of inspired by a hobbit house yeah manta rays yeah so i was inspired i wanted to build something unique that hasn't been done here before but also on this side of the island it's closer to the edge there's no beach on this side so i needed something strong so this thing is built underground and we dug a notch into the side of the island but i wanted a manta ray i'm passionate about manta rays and i wanted to kind of own homage to the manta ray and it's hard to see now because it's grown up in this time of the year but um this will all get back filled to where when we're finishes or just look like a bump on the edge of the island right now it's just a passion fruit have taken over here but it's gonna be like a living roof yeah so we have a few living roofs on the island but this one will be living roof right up to the edge so you wouldn't see it from this side at all except the stairs going down to it and then i'll show you the inside it's like a it's like a little rabbit hole like yeah it's hidden yes and we'll swale the dirt so it looks a bit like a tail but you won't be able to tell because i don't know we don't want it cheesy but we want it to look like amanda so the wing is there but there's no tail so the hill will be into the into the dirt and the grass will go up over that okay cool we'll know it's there anyway right yeah it's the little like hidden treasures you don't even need to go snorkeling you just look down it's amazing when we see you sitting on these but yeah 101 just so it's right off right off the side tell us about this one all right so this is the inside of the work in progress of the hobbity house i showed you on the back side so this is all poor concrete like the kitchen and restaurant area is obviously it's a work in progress we have a lot to do here but we're pretty close yeah so this is it so you got the bed looking right out yeah to the east and if i stand here i'm underground there is no bad view no you know like that's the thing it doesn't matter where you are what room you're in you have an epic view and you got a really cool room i'll move in i'll take it thank you going back to the fact that this is essentially a boat yeah so this would be your engine room for the island right so and a total disarray of tools is what we build the island out of and also our power hub the roof of this building holds seven kilowatts of solar trickling into 36 kilowatts of batteries but they're lead acid so you can only use half of that so we run the island on 18 kilowatts of batteries and around here the solar is usually topped up on a normal day without all the rain we've been having but on a sunny day we're topped up by 11 noon something like that and then the rest of the energy that can't be stored anymore for nighttime use is diverted to a water maker and it runs at 280 liters an hour we can sometimes you know depending on the day we can get 2000 liters a day of water uh gallons divided by four yeah this is the water maker it's a uh ecotec water maker the same one we have on our yacht so we can interchangeable parts yeah so basically you just um click on one one brings up i have a pump down on the at the ocean it pumps it up underground comes into here and brings salt water to pre-filtering to the main pump which charges up to 800 psi and fresh water separates from the sailing and the salty water goes back over the side back into the city that's it and that all that's all running off the off the sun right now you capture rain water as well i do yeah two roofs capturing water we have some tanks right behind you we have about 50 000 liters of storage more than enough for this yeah yeah the watermaker just stays on top of it so if there's ever a problem with either the power or this or rain because it's not always the rainy season yeah and it's all 110 it's a outback system which i love they've been great the solar trickles down to solar controllers fills the batteries and then the inverters invert back to the on pretty simple we run 110 energy out to the follies but then we transform them with transformers we transform them back to 12 volt and so all the lights are led 12 volt and um and we can run each fall a with a car battery so there's boat pumps there for water pumps and it's gravity fed to them and then so if we ever have a problem out here we can't run to the store or we can't and you don't have to turn on a generator which is really cool we don't have to turn generator on we do have backup generators right necessary yeah but we can buy this car batteries here so we can run a falay for a couple weeks on a car battery so we've focused on low amp use when building the place not just you know a massive array and that kind of thing so we only put in what we need for it's worked out so pretty good so far we're able to run a commercial kitchen and and with freezers and fridges and all that it works out pretty amazing ben mentioned it's the same water maker that's on their boat but he's not talking about their monohull they actually have a big catamaran out there it's a what sixty gym text on screen they have a big catamaran which is part of trade winds because they have kind of a little deal with trade winds so you can come and you do part of your time on the boat and you do part of your time on the island which means you get to get out you go sailing you see loads on the island and it's definitely whenever you non-cova times if you were to come here this place would be pumping because there would be guests coming through and people are going on adventures every single day i mean it's really yeah it's a thing it's like it's like a dream yeah a few days on an island exactly yeah it's like if you are not looking to just simply sit around on a beach all day on which is totally fine but if you're like the adventure traveler and you want to go and see and do an experience it's quite the package like it's pretty cool if you're still watching you might be thinking what a fantastically curious island and couple of humans and naturally when such curious people head out to explore their backyard well they do that a little differently too but we'll save that story for next week so stay tuned and thank you so much for watching i got the wide lens you gotta come closer i'll circle around and come back okay

Channel: Gone with the Wynns

Views: 1,423,339

Rating: 4.9012704 out of 5

Keywords: Gone With the Wynns, the Wynns, Sailing, Catamaran, Sailboat, Sail Around the World, Cruising, Nikki and Jason Wynn, Blue Water Cruising, Ocean, Living on a Yacht, Boating, Boat life, lifestyle, curiosity, travel, adventure, off grid, tiny house, Self Built Resort, Off Grid Living, self sufficient, life on an island, remote, island, unique, liveaboard, home, self built, self reliance, sustainable, treehouse, tonga, vava'u, tour, treehouse tour, full time travel, unique accomodations

Id: rArauuXVtp4

Length: 27min 9sec (1629 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021