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Published: September 29th 2005
Well, I spent the last week on the beautiful island of Samoa in the South Pacific. On first arriving I was just taken with how beautiful the country was. It is surrounded by the most beautiful blue water and is made up of rugged volcanic mountains with incredibly lush rain forest and jungle everywhere.
I made my way to the capital of Apia. As I was driving along you start to notice the different villages that make up the island. There are about 300 villages total on the islands and are made up of extended families. You start to notice the homes that make up each of the villages. They are open sided dwellings that are called fale. Each family lives in one large room with upwards of 10 people in one home. Some of the fales have curtains but most have nothing so as to get as much of the island breezes as possible because as you can guess there is no air condition. It is a bit less modern than I would have thought. The second thing that stuck me was that everyone (men, women and children alike) were wearing a type of sarong (skirt). This is their
traditional clothing and is called a lava lava. Men wore them with short sleeve button shirts and the women had matching tops. After reaching the city of Apia I was a bit disconcerted about being there. I was just not getting a good feeling about the city and was a bit desperate to get out to the coast and enjoy some of the beautiful beaches. Although I did have an amazing dinner at this restaurant called Sails. The third thing I noticed was how inexpensive everything was. The dollar was very strong and I had a meal that would have easily set me back $50 or $60 in the states for $25 and on my budget it was even worth it!!
Anyway, after leaving Apia I moved to a place called Salani Surf Resort which is located on the Southeast coast in the village of Salani. It was a beautiful resort that was at the month of one of the rivers that feeds into the ocean from the mountains. The resort was great and had only about 8 guests at any one time. The majority of the people there were surfers from the States and New Zealand. Even though
I had every intention of trying to learn to surf at some point all the surfing off Samoa is for experts only. The majority of it is reef breaks and unless you know what you are doing you can get hurt. So I forced myself to lie around in the hammocks and read and go to the beach and snorkel and look at some beautiful waterfalls! Hard life i know! We also went to see a traditional Samoa Village dance which was very cool and the fire knife dance which was performed by one of the boys in the local village.
Actually it was wonderful and the people were amazingly friendly and helpful but I was getting restless so I decided to go ahead and leave Samoa early for Australia and now I am currently in Sydney and working on my plan on getting around the great land of OZ…it is really big and a bit hard to navigate but I’ll figure it out and be on my way!
Hope everyone is well and keep in touch!
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J.R.
non-member comment
are you sure that wasn't you doing the fire knife dance? I'm glad you're having fun and am living vicariously through you. On the surfing, you might want to stick with the equivalent of the bunny hill, we do want you to come back in one piece. Watch out for dingos in Australia. Take care and keep us posted.