Samoa Days 1,2,3

Our journey to Samoa started early Saturday morning, about 5:45, with a quick shower and breakfast in Auckland before catching our taxi to the airport at 6:30. Our taxi driver was late, as should be assumed, and rude as well. He asked lots of prying questions, which I never appreciate, but then followed up many of his questions by judging us for our answers. We somehow got onto the topic of dating customs in different cultures and Ana and I were saying that being in NZ is a big change for us for 2 main reasons, (1) the men here are much more shy than they are back home (USA and Peru), and (2) we are not used to paying for ourselves when we go on dates – at least not at the very beginning. He was telling as that because we feel that men should pay for the first set of dates we had no self worth and something else, I can’t even remember, I’ve blocked it out of my memory. I was really just stunned that he felt like he could talk to us that way, being that we are paying customers and that we weren’t insulting the character of NZ men, just saying that it was hard for us to get over the cultural differences in the dating scene, thus neither of us are dating a Kiwi man. 

Then, after all of this, he told us about a girl he went on a date with recently, who was a taxi customer of his. He gave her the ride for free and told her simply to pay him back with a cup of coffee later. Now if that isn’t sleazy I don’t know what is! Gross! I just did not like him!

Anyways, after that extremely unpleasant experience on our way to the airport we had an extremely pleasant one once we got there. While we were looking a bit lost trying to find an available Air NZ kiosk to check-in, a very nice ground agent, Antonio, swopped in (I’m sure after seeing our confusion and hesitation) and helped us through the whole process. Ana had problems with her ticket – being that she has so many names like so many Spanish speakers do – and then we needed to weigh and check our bags. He took care of the whole check-in process for us and agreed with us on the dating customs. He did, however, suggest we go to Fiji, not Samoa, as that’s where he was from. We told him we’d think about it for our next trip.

The plane ride was rather uneventful except for 2 things – I finally saw a NZ documentary I’ve wanted to see for a while, Hip Op-eration, and we flew over Tonga seeing the most beautiful islands ever! The movie first, Hip Op-eration is about the oldest dance troupe in the world, a group of senior citizens ranging from their 60s to 94, that performed at the Hip Hop World Championships in Las Vegas. They are from Waiheke Island, the big island in the Hauraki Gulf, sitting about a 30 minutes ferry ride from Auckland. It was a wonderful movie and I’m glad I got to see it without paying as well! As for Tonga, it looked like all those postcards/photos/national geographic specials you’ve ever seen of beautiful islands in the south pacific. The green island, surrounded by a thin band of sandy beach, with the light blue/turquoise water to surround that over the sand bars, and then the dark blue of the deep ocean. Just awesome! We got a few pictures but it was hard out the scratched and cloudy airplane windows. The camera kept trying to focus on the window, not what was on the other side.

Upon landing in Samoa we moved smoothly through customs, picked up our one small bag that we packed together, exchanged our money, got a rental car, and got on the road. The official NZD to Samoan Tala exchange rate online is 1 to 1.89. We asked at the airport in NZ where they told us they’d sell us Samoa Tala at a rate of 1 to 1.59 plus a $12 fee. I was NOT willing to accept this; it was just way too low. I told Ana we would wait an see what the rate was at the airport in Samoa and if that still didn’t look good we would simply withdraw money from an ATM as Ana is with Westpac bank and they have branches here in Samoa. When we got off the plane in Samoa they were exchanging it at a rate of 1 to 1.85 with no fee, can’t assume we’d get much better that, so we went for it! It’s just amazing to think of how much less money we would have gotten had we made the exchange in NZ.

It’s quite strange this whole exchanging money thing that people do in foreign countries. I’ve never really ever done this before, always being under the assumption that withdrawing money at an ATM is your best bet. I think this is true to an extent, unless you are buying a very cheap currency with your very valuable one, in which case you may do better exchanging at one of these places since they typically buy strong currencies at a very good rate.

After leaving the airport we had our first drive on the Samoa roads, through Samoan villages, seeing how Samoan people live. This was an experience! First for the roads – although there we no speed limit signs anywhere between the airport and Apia, the main town of Samoa, I quickly gathered that people here drive very slowly. We were going somewhere around 40-50 km/hr, this is roughly 25-32 mph, so very slow. And this is on the main road here in Samoa. On the first day this really bothered me, but I have come to really like it – you just don’t get anywhere very quickly. I later read that the speed limit is 40 km/hr in villages, in which case it seems you’re almost always in a village, and 56 km/hr outside of villages. So no matter where you are, you will be driving slowly. People pass, but even that happens very slowly.

I do appreciate the slower speed limit though because (1) the roads in places can we in very bad condition and if you’re gong much faster you wouldn’t be able to swerve out of the way to avoid the potholes, and (2) I always feel more relaxed when I’m driving slower. This is something I have always felt – like why I always prefer to drive on the side streets vs. the highway, especially in the morning. Who wants to wake up from a good night sleep to start rushing, rushing, rushing right away?! When I was living in Loring Park and working at Money Gram I almost never took the highway in the morning even though it would only take me about 7 minutes to get to work. Instead, I would take the slow route around Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake because what a better way to start your morning, and you don’t show up at work all stressed out because you were trying to keep up with traffic moving 60 mph while people are rushing around passing you and acting all crazy. Anyways, for this reason I appreciate the slower speed limit. (And as an afterthought, because most people walk here and they walk right along the main roads and if you were going to fast you’d be bound to hit one at some point!)

The Samoan villages are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.  Well I shouldn’t say the villages so much as the buildings. Near every house or group of houses there is a large outdoor building. It’s more like a raised concrete platform with columns lining the exterior holding up a roof. This appears to be where most people spend their waking hours –in here relaxing, working, socializing, etc.… Then there are houses built farther back from the road, generally behind this open-air building, and then each – of which there seem to be many in any given village – and then usually one church to serve the village to which almost everyone walks.  Outside of most houses there are gravestones as well. Based on the little that I have read about villages and such, I have come to imply by my own reasoning that houses/areas of land are likely passed down from generation to generation within one family. This is the only logical explanation I can come up with as to why they would bury their deceased outside their home and not in a more central location (like we do in a cemetery). Each village also generally has a small store/dairy where you can buy simple provisions, and from what I can tell, ice cream as well! We haven’t actually stopped at one of these yet but I’m sure we will soon.

Now, for the vegetation, it is just so tropical here. It looks like Hawaii or what I remember/imagine Hawaii to look like, but way less developed and groomed. In some villages it is clear they have done some organized planting for decoration along the road, but even this is not meticulously maintained like it would be in Hawaii. Basically its all the same plants but growing much more wild. There are some areas that could be like yards, but I’d be surprised to find someone with a lawn mower here. The land is covered in palm trees, amazing tropical plants I always remember selling when I worked at the garden store – but they grow naturally here – and so many exotic fruit trees – Papaya, Mango, Avocado, Banana. It’s just so beautiful and lush and wild.

After our roughly hour-long exploratory drive into Apia we then had to find our hotel. I didn’t have an address for it but had seen it on a map about 2 months ago and from that small memory I did find it, after not too much looking. The Annabelle Inn! If you’re wondering, this is not a coincidence – we stayed here on purpose because the hotel shares its name with me. We checked –in, got our room, and then quickly headed out to the local market to pick up something appropriate to wear to church the next day. I did not have a skirt with me long enough to wear, so Ana and I both picked up a new Sarong. Then we rushed off to the produce market as well to get some local fruit in case we got hungry over the next few days and needed a snack.

Returning back to the hotel, we walked down the road to a local restaurant, Paddle, that was apparently quite popular with the tourists based on the large number of white people in there that appeared to be on vacation, not locals. They put in a solid effort to make non-traditional non-Samoan food – food that white people eat - but the tuna tartar with soy sauce was too salty and the bruschetta with dry Parmesan cheese just wasn’t the same as with a nice fresh mozzarella. The wait staff was very helpful and friendly, and got to wear sandals/flip flops at work. Just imagine! Paradise!

After dinner it was back to the hotel where we me the Apia Harbor Master, Say. (You pronounce his name “say” but I honestly don’t know how you spell it. I’m just guessing.) Because the harbor as just across the road from the hotel I assumed the Say knew the area well and asked him about a guy from Samoa who is a friend of a friends and was supposed to work in the area. The man in question is named Damien and has a large stingray tattoo on his back. Say said his mother owned the restaurant two down from where we were staying so Ana and I went down there on a mission to find him. The ladies who were working there knew who he was but said he wouldn’t be in at the restaurant ever and they did not seem interested in connecting us with him via phone or any other method. Lesson in Samoan culture? Probably. I don’t know what to take from it but we left it at that.

Then it was off to bed for our first night trying to sleep in 90* humid weather, with no air con and a small fan that didn’t work well. We both slept on top of the sheets and tried not to be too hot. It was hard, but what an experience. And the place with only 70 tala a night, that’s about USD$30 for both of us so we found it worth it.

Now the lack of air con is not the only unique thing about our room. It luckily came with an attached shower and toilet, but there was no door on the toilet – encouraging us to use the hallway toilet at times. The room also had a fan, but it was quite old and rickety and we would joke that it would come flying off at night and slice our heads off. We also had a few friends in our room, small lizard/gecko things. They were cute and stayed away from us. I’m just happy I never saw a cockroach in our room! I hate cockroaches, which is surprising considering all the experience I have had with them.  All in all, we were very happy we stayed at this place, saved some money, and had this fabulous experience. It felt more like what I would imagine a place in Africa to be like 30 years ago, but now if I’m ever on vacation with my children and they’re complaining about the heat I can tell them about the time I stayed here – or really Samoa in general, since almost nothing in air-conditioned apart from our car and the one internet café we’ve been to so far. It’s miserable at first, and doesn’t get any cooler, but I feel like we’re finally getting a bit used to it.

Sunday started off very early, as we wanted to get to the fish market while it was still good, and according to everyone we talked to and everything we read this was as early as possible, not to be much later than 6:30am. After over sleeping out 5:45 alarm, likely because we had risen very early the day before and had a long day traveling, we finally headed out about 6:30. The market was packed! We almost couldn’t find a park, it was so amazingly crowded considering it was so early and on a Sunday.  But the market was just fabulous! So much fresh fish, so many fish I’d never seen before, and these just amazingly large tuna steaks. So delicious! In the end we bought 2 snapper that they were going to cook for our lunch later at the hotel.

After purchasing our fish and taking one last lap around to admire the daily fish supply, we wandered over to the outside part of the market where people we selling produce and ready-to-eat food. Here we bought many things to eat. I’m not sure what any of them are called but I will explain them to you as best I can. First Ana bought a slice of Pineapple cake – nothing too remarkable about this, just a nice crust with some pineapple filling, I didn’t try it but Ana liked it – for $2 tala, that is like USD$0.75. Can you believe that? They bought all the ingredients, made the cake, came to the market, sold the cake, and all for only 75 American cents. It’s just amazing how much cheaper things are in poorer countries. Make you wonder how much people get paid here – which I plan to find out before we leave.

After the pineapple cake we bought what turned out to be a beverage that I thought was rice pudding. They lady told us it was rice and coconut cream (probably the most popular ingredient in Samoa – coconut cream) so I assumed it would be quite sweet, but turned out to be rather bland. You apparently drink it hot, in place of coffee or tea, as your morning beverage. We had a few spoonfuls and that was it.

Next we bought the taro with coconut cream. Taro is a root vegetable, like a potato I guess, but with a really strange texture. I’m still not sure how to describe it even though I’ve eaten it many times. It’s quite dense but kind of crumbly as well. It has very little flavor, except whatever you flavor it with, which is why I think they cover everything here in coconut cream. This dish was all in all quite good, but rather filling. We bought one serving and couldn’t finish it over 2 days.

Lastly we bought a dish of coconut cream and taro leaves. The coconut cream/taro leaf mixture comes wrapped up in some other sort of leaf and looks like a beautiful present. You use it as a dip and eat it either with baked bananas or baked taro. We had it with baked bananas, and once again this dish tasted nothing like we thought it would. It was savory, not sweet, but tasty! I would definitely eat this again!

After the market we dropped our fish off at the hotel, ate our breakfast, and then headed up the Cross Island road to the Baha’i church to check it our. The service was at 10am and we were there quite early so we just looked around the grounds admiring the church and the beautiful manicured grounds it sat on. From what I gathered from the information at the church, their beliefs center on the fact that all faiths speak of the same god and that all religions are founded on the same basic and inclusive principles. You can be of any beliefs and attend a Baha’i church. Sounds like my kind of church! There are only 8 Baha’i churches in the world, one of them here in Samoa. They all have 9 sides – I’m not sure why this is. We left before the service started.

We went back to the hotel, got changed, and headed out to find a beach on the South Coast. We traveled across the Cross Island road towards with no specific destination in mind. We had a map that had many beaches marked on it, but finding these was much harder than it looks from the map. On the map it looks like there are roads that go near the beaches and from those you would assume there would be signs for the beach, but there are not. After driving around for quite a while looking for one of two beaches, we finally gave up and decided to drive farther down the South Coast road in search of a different beach. It was just then that we saw a sign on the side of the road for Beach Fales. You can’t have a beach fales without a beach, now can you?! We went down this back little track, found the fales, and found the beach. Beautiful! My first true south Pacific Beach.

We were at the Tafatafa beach fales on Tafatafa beach. Here we learned that most beaches are privately owned, either by resorts or towns or families. There is some fee the must be paid to use any beach, either by paying the accommodation fees to stay at a fale on the beach, eating in the resort restaurant, or just paying a fee as we did to use this beach, $10 tala to be exact. But it was worth it for a beach like that! The water was very calm, quite shallow quite a ways out, very clear water, beautiful blue/green water and palm trees lining the coast. We went for a swim, read, and took a nice beach walk.

(I just have to interrupt now to say that I am currently sitting on the deck at the restaurant of the Taufua Beach Fales where we spent Monday and Tuesday night and nothing ruins the wonder beach atmosphere like someone smoking. It’s just so gross! Please don’t ruin my vacation by blow carcinogens into the air and hacking up mucus from your smoker lungs!) 

Now that I’m done with that distraction… we spent 2 hours or so at the beach having a wonderful day I Paradise.

We returned to Apia after 3 where upon I had a wonderful nap followed by our fish “lunch” about 4:30pm. Ana wanted to check out the sliding rocks after this, but following a very long and confusing journey to get there they were closed. Well in all honesty they would have been closed even if we would have gone straight there, but the journey was long.

On map here in Samoa they do a funny thing, they put street names. This isn’t funny in other countries, but to have street names on a map and then no street markers on the roads is not helpful at all! What would work better would be to put pictures of buildings or landmarks on the map instead of street names as this is all we could find anywhere in Apia - churches, markets, stores. Put these things on the map and we probably would have found the sliding rock place we were looking for much quicker! Once we did finally stumble upon the place we were then able to make our way easily back into town and then had no trouble finding the sliding rocks again the next morning.

After a day of driving around with a couple hours in the sun in the middle, I was exhausted and had a nice headache by the evening. I was ready to ready for bed!

Monday morning we were once again up early, but thankfully not as early as the 2 previous days. We got up just after 7 and had a nice breakfast of Chirimoya (that’s the Spanish name at least)– some weird fibrous fruit with big black seeds and a really fruity taste. It’s sweet but tart. The flavor is very intense but pleasant. Not sure about the texture, however. Ana was well acquainted with this fruit from Peru and thus gave me a tutorial on how to eat it, although I didn’t do that great. It took all 3 utensils for me to be able to get any of the filling out. Plus my hands to remove the seeds. I was sticky but full by the end.

After our exotic breakfast we went back to the flea market to purchase some more things. The big days for the market are the weekdays so we knew the selection would be much greater on Monday, and it was! There was stall after stall selling all sorts of gifty things and more practical things. It was kind of like a Mexican market, each stand had pretty much the same things, some of them likely used by local people but much of it for tourists to buy and bring home as gifts. I picked up another Sarong that I am wearing now as I dress and that I love as well as a great little purse/beach bag. Probably will use it like once here in Samoa and maybe never again but it pretty and I’m happy I bought it. All in all, I spent $40 tala on Monday and $15 tala on Saturday. That’s $55 tala so about USD$25. Not bad! Ana got a little ceremonial mask thing for her father for $15 tala and a magnet and Christmas decoration later at the produce market for some price I don’t know.

Now that we were all set with our purchases we wandered over to the food part of the flea market to try something local for breakfast. I read somewhere that they had a lot of immigration from China at some point which would explain the prevalence of chicken and pork buns here in Samoa. We had a pork bun Saturday at the produce market and for breakfast Monday we had a deep fried Chicken bun. Inside the bun was not only shitty chicken meat but some Chinese noodle mixture as well. Wouldn’t get that again but glad we tried it. Was also had a slice of extremely sweet banana cake – didn’t finish my piece - and tried a local milk and vanilla drink, also too sweet to have. The milk and vanilla drink was quite interesting because it came in all sort of different colors making you think it was fruit juice. We saw it in yellow and pink but everyone kept telling us it was just milk and vanilla and sugar. No idea where the color came from – the sugar maybe? I’m glad someone let us sample it before we bought it because I would have regretted that purchase, although I’m sure it was dirt-cheap. Our banana cake and fried chicken bun together were only $2.5 tala, so like USD$1. Not bad for a meal, if you can eat it!

On Saturday when we were at the produce market, Ana had set a date for Monday at 10am with a local woman to learn how to make the local baskets they use to carry everything. It appears they make them from Palm leaves. They are beautiful and they can make them quite quickly. It was approaching 10am at this point so we went over to the produce market but could not find the woman. We did see another lady making the baskets so we watched her, but she didn’t want to show us how to make them. My assumption is that 10am Monday is not 10am Monday here since we’re on island time. It probably means something more like 3pm Wednesday, or next year. Who knows! We never found the woman but we had places to be anyways so it gave us more time for our other activities for that day.

Internet was our next priority, as we hadn’t told anyone we had made it to Samoa, although I like to think they assumed we made it since they didn’t hear about any plane crashed on the news. We both called home and check in with our families, wrote a few e-mails, and that was that. We checked out of the Annabelle Inn, begrudgingly, and headed for our next activity, the sliding rocks from the day before. We arrive around noon, paid our $10 tala fee, and headed down. I was nervous going into it and even more nervous once I actually saw the rocks. Thank god there were some people there doing it or I never would have gotten up the courage to try!

As you look at the rocks, you cannot tell how deep the pools are at the bottom and all you can see are places along the way where you are going to bounce off the rock, hit your tailbone, and not be able to walk for days. I watched the kids from the other family do it a few times, and then with lots of encouragement for the girls I went. Once you start sliding you totally lose control, there is no turning back. Plus once you do one of the segments you have to do a few to get to a place where you can actually climb out of the water and get back up to the top. I did the sequence 2 times in total. You thankfully do not bounce up and down hitting your tail bone, but you did hit the water with quite a lot of force, more than you would expect, which is a bit startling. I’m happy we went, and forever thankful that other family was there to show us the way!

After this we headed east towards our beach fale for the next 2 nights in Lalomanu on the Southeast corner of the island. Along the way we drove by beautiful sunny coastline, dense rainy forest, and many small villages. It took about 1.5 to 2 hours to get to the paradise where we now are. We have an open-air fale on the beach. From the railing of our fale to the waters of the South Pacific are maybe 15 steps. We are sleeping on little mattresses on the ground under mosquito nets with nothing to block out the wind or ocean sounds. Up until last night I never realized how loud the ocean really could be. I think the tide came in in the early morning hours as I was awoken multiple times by the loud waves. I’m not complaining about my open-air beach bedroom, just surprised.

After arrival we went for a quick swim followed by a nice long nap for me. Then dinner with all the people staying here and then off to bed early.

As for this morning, I have pretty much just been writing my blog. Up early with a short walk along the water and then for the last 3 hours or so I’ve been working on this blog post with only a short break for breakfast. The quantity of food here is good but the quality isn’t anything to write home about. I am happier about the a la carte lunch menu than about the buffet breakfast and dinner. Not much for fresh fruits or veggies, unfortunately, and a bit surprisingly since there are so many around everywhere you look. I’m glad we have a few star fruits and bananas still with us for a nice snack later. With that I’m signing off for now. 8 pages in word doubles spaced should keep you busy reading for a while and I now need to go and enjoy the amazing paradise in which I’m currently located.

Best!

One last note, Samos is one time zone ahead of NZ but not a day ahead. NZ is technically in the first time zone in the world, but Samoa in one hour ahead. Cool right?