While the United Kingdom’s Queen Camilla fanned herself to cool from the stifling tropical heat in Samoa’s capital city, her husband King Charles III took part in the traditional kava-drinking ceremony before a line of bare-chested and heavily tattooed Samoans as he readied to be made a ‘high chief’ of this Pacific island paradise.

The British monarch is on an 11-day tour of his Australian and Samoan realms—the first major foreign trip since his cancer diagnosis earlier this year.

Wearing a cream safari-style suit, Britain’s 75-year-old monarch sat on a stage at the head of a carved timber longhouse known as a ‘fale;’, where he was presented with a polished half-coconut filled with the mildly narcotic brew called kava.

The peppery, slightly intoxicating root drink is a key part of Pacific cultures and is called locally as ‘ava’ or ‘yaqona’ in Fiji.

Charles III’s adoption ceremony as ‘high chief’ began with a symbolic debate among so-called ‘talking chiefs’, arguing over who would prepare the king’s drink.

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The kava roots were paraded around the marquee, and finally prepared by the chief’s daughter and filtered through a sieve made of the dried bark of a fau tree. Once ready, a Samoan man screamed as he decanted the drink, which was finally presented to the king.

Charles uttered the words: “May God Bless this ava” before lifting it to his lips. The ceremony concluded with loud claps from attendees of the traditional ceremony and praises to the new ‘tulafale-alii’ or orator chief.