To Savai’i

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An announcement comes over the PA telling us that we’re about to land. Issy says that we can’t land now because she’s just got comfortable. I tell her that I’m sure the pilot and the rest of the passengers wouldn’t mind if we did laps of Samoa for a couple of hours while she got some sleep.

The airport is on the main island of Upolu, but our first stop is the larger but much less populated island of Savai’i which is an hour’s ferry ride away. It‘s 5am when we land and the ferry doesn’t leave until midday, so it seems that we have a few hours to kill. Issy spies that there’s a Sheraton resort near the ferry terminal so we decide to head there to try to get some breakfast and find somewhere comfortable to sit.

Our taxi driver tells us that he lived in Melbourne for twenty five years and ran "security" for a lot of the nightclubs. He’s a big boy. I don’t think I would have argued with him if he’d tried to stop me from getting into one of his establishments. He is talking too much and not concentrating on his driving. I panic. He’s driving on the left hand side of the road. The last time we were here we drove on the right hand side of the road. I remember this very well because I nearly got arrested for driving around a roundabout the wrong way in the middle of the capital. I think I only avoided being locked up because the policeman who stopped us felt sorry for me. We see a car coming the other way. It’s driving on the left hand side of the road as well. It seems that I can now stop panicking. Our driver tells us that the Samoans decided to switch driving sides back in 2009. As if they didn’t have enough excitement in their lives, on 30 December 2011 they also decided to switch to the other side of the international dateline. This means that the 30 December 2011 doesn’t exist in Samoan history; it’s completely missing. This would suck if it was your birthday. That’s Emma’s birthday. If she’d been born in Samoa she’d only be 22 now instead of 23.

The staff at the Sheraton seem happy to feed us breakfast. We’re very tired so we pull up a couple of sun lounges on the beach and try to catch some shut eye while we wait to go to the ferry terminal. We’re not staying at the hotel, so I’m not sure we’re allowed to be here. I keep one eye open for the burly security guards who I’m sure will be here any minute to evict us and toss us out into the street. I hope they’ll be gentle with us. I’m sure they’ll be big; everyone here seems to be big.

The sun lounges are under a small wooden umbrella shaped shelter, and Issy quickly nods off. I’m getting a bit hot so I move a few metres up the beach to the next shelter which is in the shade of some trees. I doze off too, but not for long. I hear a loud crash. Issy’s now wide awake too, and we both watch on as a coconut rolls gently down the sand towards the water. The crash we heard was the coconut slamming into the roof of the wooden shelter right above Issy’s head. I don’t think my beloved would still be with us if it wasn’t for the wooden shelter. Milk is now leaking out of the coconut onto the sand. I remember thinking only yesterday that this trip could only be worse than the previous two if there was a cyclone or an Ebola outbreak. I hadn’t accounted for the possibility of us being attacked by coconuts. I wonder what other disasters I haven’t considered. I think that we need to be very vigilant.

The ferry is big and the ride is smooth. We arrive and head off in the hotel van through stunningly colourful villages around the north coast of Savai’i. Every village seems to have at least half a dozen churches. Many of these are massive masonry towered structures which dominate the skyline, and are in stark contrast to the single storey open sided fales which surround them. Sunday seems to be a sleepy day, and most of the fales are full of locals sprawled asleep on the floor. The many pigs, dogs, horses and chickens we pass seem to have made a fine art of staying clear of the traffic. Someone in the van asks if the dogs are friendly, and someone else then mutters something about forgetting to get their rabies shots before they left home. I think that I now need to add getting rabies to the ever lengthening list of things that could go wrong here.

As we drive on we find that the road is now surrounded by a continuous expanse of flat black rocks. Issy says that she’s read about these. She says that they’re lava fields from an eruption of nearby Mount Matavanu in the early 1900s. The lava is apparently more than 100 metres deep in places and wiped out a couple of the villages near our resort. Issy says that the volcano is about due to erupt again. I clearly haven’t even begun to think of all the things that could cause our demise here. We’ve only been in Samoa for a few hours and I’ve already had to add attack by coconuts, rabies and now volcanic eruptions to the list. I decide to email our offspring to let them know where our wills are kept.

We arrive at the hotel. It’s been 22 hours since we left home, and we’ve spent eleven of them just hanging around waiting for planes and boats to grace us with their presence. We could have been in Europe by now.

We set off for dinner, which is on a deck on the beachfront. As we go to sit down I narrowly avoid tripping over the leg of the young man from the next table who is down on one knee looking for something on the floor. He doesn’t seem to be looking too hard; he seems more intent on talking to his dinner companion. I’m about to ask him to move when I spy that he’s holding a small box in his hand, and it’s housing something that looks suspiciously like a ring. His companion asks him if he’s joking before saying "yes". Whoa, what just happened!! The rest of the deck quickly cottons on to what’s going on and there’s loud applause all around. It seems that Stacey and Paul have known each other for 12 years, and if appearances are anything to go by that means that they met when they were both in kindergarten. We’re both feeling very emotional. We can’t quite believe we’ve just stumbled into absolute front row seats for something so special.

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