Samoa: 3 1/2 months later
I am a bit late to finally write and reflect on my travels, but perhaps it suits a purpose.
From June to early November of this past year, I studied abroad in New Zealand (yes, it was great and the time of my life). During that time, I traveled a lot, with trips throughout nearly all of New Zealand, Melbourne and Sydney, Thailand, and Samoa. Perhaps completely engaged in the moment, I never took the time to reflect on my travels and write about them.
I think, however, that this may be a positive, as the amount of time since I was in each of these places — 2 months to over half a year — allows for the objective distance afforded by the passage of time but is not so much time that I do not still have a lingering sense of my tangible experiences.
Hence, the piece I plan to write below: Samoa 3 1/2 months later.
In late October, me and two friends, Ewelina and Ben, both of whom incidentally attend Northwestern University in Chicago, traveled to Samoa for a week that was open on our schedules between the end of classes for the semester and the beginning of the exam period.
As many of you fellow travelers have probably come to know, the drama surrounding travel is not limited to the trip itself. As fellow study abroad students at Victoria University in Wellington, me and Ben had been discussing for awhile, mostly casually, about a possible trip to Samoa. Roughly considered part of the Pacific, New Zealand is proximate to many of the Pacific tourist destinations (Apia, Samoa is a mere four-hour flight away, which is a drive to the grocery store compared to flight times from the middle of the US), meaning a trip to a Pacific island was high on our list of travel priorities. After hearing rave reviews from not only our program director who sold Samoa as a less touristy Fiji, but also from students we knew from Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand who spent their spring break there, the question was not if we would go to Samoa, but when.
So, of course, we did the whole dance and jig of looking at our schedules to see when we were free. It turned out that there was both a week in late September in which we could go, and the week in late October between classes and exams. We chose to go in late October and, by that point, Ewelina was on board.
A few weeks later on September 25, much to our shock, we wake to urgent emails telling us to avoid coastlines in New Zealand because there has been a 8.1 tsunami-creating earthquake near….Samoa! I remember my mind quickly pursuing two lines of thought simultaneously: ‘wait, isn’t this the week we could have been there!?’ and ‘shit, can we still go?’ The interest of a dramatic story aside, we never seriously came close to scheduling a trip for the week of the tsunami, but it was a sobering thought that I could have been sitting in a fale just before 7 AM and had to run upland from a tsunami–as many tourists and locals had to do–and perhaps been overtaken by a tsunami.
Naturally, the state of the small Pacific islands (Samoa is actually two islands, Upolo and Savai’i) was our immediate concern. Could we still go? If we went, should we help Red Cross efforts? For a week we closely watched the news reports and tourism updates on Samoa. Many focused on the destruction, painting a grim portrait of strewn debris, destroyed resorts, grieving families, and missing Western tourists. Such reports were hardly encouraging, and made us to inquire after alternative plans of travel.
Ultimately, we found out that Savai’i, as would later be confirmed by our experience, nearly completed avoided the impact of the tsunami because it lies to the northwest of Upolo and avoided the brunt of the tsunami from the south. Additionally, Apia, the capital, lying to the north of Upolo, received sparse damage. Tentatively encouraged, but if memory serves, me less so than my companions, we decided to go ahead and visit Samoa roughly three weeks after the tsunami hit.
Something happens when you travel. A new place, a new culture can be so unfamiliar, it hits you viscerally. It’s immediate. The minute you step off the plane, you feel in a daze as if encountering the world anew for the first time. Sure, the objects–chairs, trees, people–are familiar, but somehow the feeling of the place as a general whole is new.
I distinctly remember feeling this way as we landed in Samoa and went through the customs and baggage claim that seemed more like a casual buffet meal than the imposing, strictly enforced process of security that is customary to Western airports. After months in New Zealand, a cultural offshoot of the West, Samoa was definitely a new world. Through the whole process of finding a taxi (informal, a shoddy van) to sitting around waiting to take the ferry to Savai’i with the locals, I recall feeling myself and observing my friends in a kind of daze. We tried to fill in the vague threat of this emptiness of the never-encountered by engaging in familiar activities like getting food, casual denigrating humor, and sifting through travel oddities like an IQ game.
Through this–to let me abuse an already abused term–metaphysical daze, physical effects became manifest, and I drifted into a half-slumber on our last taxi ride to thumping Akon beats. We arrived finally at our first stop, Tanu fales, in Savai’i. It is strange how places familiarly grouped together, in this case the airport/ferry in Samoa and a casual beach fale resort, can seem so distant.
As soon as we arrived, I felt as I had been transported into an altogether new place. The hosts were welcoming, had snacks to eat, and the Samoa of google image fame was there. Beachfront straw fales (huts, basically), clear blue water and a seemingly endless blue ocean to look out on, golden sand, a bright sun, and coconut trees. It was stunning. These moments are fleeting, but such contentment is nearly unspeakable.
After the first several hours that seemed so distinct, time began to unroll again in its familiar fashion. We lay on the beach, we swam, we took walks, we ate, we conversed with strangers, we aimlessly explored, and vainly searched for internet. Just in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
The coming days would bear several revelations. Samoa was extremely pretty and peaceful. This would be realized repeatedly. Oka, a raw fish dish, is fine, fine cuisine. The night sky, free of light pollution, is exceedingly rich and opulent. As we moved along between different fales, we got to compare the fare (in Samoa, it is standard to pay about $25 for the oceanfront fale, including breakfast and dinner).
We hiked the tourist trail, latching onto an Australian couple who had spent the past year in Tonga and were stopping by Samoa on their way back. We got a ride in their rental car and go around to the sites — the lava flow that didn’t reflect sunlight (it was hot), the stunningly crisp pool of the waterfall where we jumped off rocks into the pool with style, the supposedly ancient mounds that required an hour hike through the jungle but were not clearly man-made.
Nothing beat our quixotic attempt to go to some local caves. The three of us had already been blackwater rafting through caves in New Zealand, so had already experienced a very professional, regulated version of cave exploration. This was different. We nearly drove past the ‘tourist center,’ which consisted of men napping in an empty fale. Our guide, without any obvious English skills, squeezed into our already full sedan and guided us down the bumpy path to the caves.
Our short drive seemed to take us into a long-past agricultural era separate from the Samoa we had found on beach fronts. Where we stopped, there was a man holding a machete and guiding a horse, apparently ignoring us and unrelated to the caves, but also RIGHT there. Queries as to proper attire were left open-ended, as our guide quickly established his trusty technique of nodding yes to all questions, even those directly contradictory to each other. We all got swimwear of some kind on, but only the women from the Australian couple had footwear. The cave turned out to be dark and our only resource were some flashlights and headlights of dubious quality. We had to make dicey climbs up and down slippy rock faces. We had to tiptoe through rocky, pebble-strewn muddy terrain, much to the dismay of our soles. We had to step into large pools, often sinking our feet a few feet into gooey mud. All of this with a guide that we could not communicate with. While surely not glamorous nor what we expected, the caves gave us a sense of achievement (for getting out alive) and a good story for posterity.
We got to appreciate the more mundane, yet finer, aspects of Samoan life. The local beer is Vailima. Kids are incredibly, even oddly, friendly, and by all accounts appeared to say “bye” when it made a lot more sense to say “hi.” Samoans are deeply religious (Catholic) people that are genuinely kind.
Some resorts we stopped at (we went to Savai’i for a week) stood out more than others. At Va-i-Moana, a newly-opened resort, we had the run of the place and were treated like royalty, eating incredible meals, swimming in the crisp ocean water at night under the stars, and, because we were there when the owner’s brothers came to visit, were treated to a night of free pina coladas.
Troubles did present themselves. The island had one ATM, and we passed that the minute we got to Savai’i, as the ATM is near to the ferry. I ran out of money and had to rely on the help of my friends. Our collective money became so stretched that we nearly ran out of it collectively, but were saved thanks to the good will of a Western Union who filled in the role of bank (strange, I know).
Our trip around Savai’i was true to the description of little damage that we had heard. We never saw any destruction, but only could not stay in one place that had several of its fales knocked down. The closest encounter we had to the destruction was when we visited the blowholes near Situiatua. The man who informally stands in as guide (the jobs being: take pictures, throw coconut rinds into the blowholes, watch them blow back out in a fit of giggles and demand money for the gig, clearly against anybody’s understanding of contractual agreements) had apparently lost his fale in the tsunami.
Savai’i left many ideal photo moments: the waterfall, the cave nightmare, lava flows, pristine beaches and clear water, the last sunset in the world, and the smiling school kids in their starkly-colored lava lavas (Samoan kilts). To risk a cliche, I would venture to say that it is not necessarily these moments that stand out.
It can often be the moments attached to the photo op. When we went to walk up a wooden staircase to a tree canopy overlooking the sea from several miles away, the photo was certainly memorable. More distinct however, is my memory of Ben, on his supposed intuitive calculation of the instability of the structure, refused to go up; more distinct is my memory of us weighing the pros and cons of sleeping at the top of the canopy, as many people do in search of a unique experience (I thought it was a must-do; stern, negative nods and impassioned rhetoric proclaiming the foolishness of such a decision seemed to come from the direction of my companions).
It is more often memories of the people that you meet. We had the fortune to travel with the Australian couple (the man was actually a Frenchman who moved to Australia for work) who were in their late 20s by appearances, and had many a lengthy night-time discussion and got to know them pretty well. We met another Australian man in his 50s that spent his adult life teaching English in Thailand (interesting for me as I later took a two-week trip to Thailand) and had made it his commitment to travel the world, in part due to his apparent distaste for the “rat race” of contemporary Australia.
The hosts of the fales we stayed at were incredibly friendly and hospitable, and many a casual conversation was struck up. Many countries are handed the label of “friendliest people” but Samoa stands a world apart. Thailand is also often gifted this label, which, after experiencing both, I can testify is nonsense. Thai people are fascinating, but compared to the easy-going demeanor of Samoans, they hardly seem “friendly.”
Something that especially struck me when I was in Savai’i was the effect environment has on behavior (sociologists would have a field day with this). I brought my iPod with me, presumably to help fill much of the down time.But I never listened to it, not once. This is compared to my iPod use at home, which can be several hours a day. It is hard to pinpoint why, but something about the environment isn’t conducive to technology and never creates the motivation for use of technology. I tried to check email for the sake of the sanity of close ones, but never particularly felt the urge to check the computer, either. The place is so pretty and peaceful and it can be easy to feel totally immersed in the place itself.
It makes me wonder about the plans to modernize or industrialize less economically developed parts of the world. I do not think all places are amenable to ‘modernity,’ nor should it ever be imposed on them. It is obviously traditional, despite the many cultural criticisms of it, to associate economic progress with happiness, but Samoans present a clear paradigm that may challenge that. Their lives are relatively simple, but they seem very content and happy. I wonder if they lack the sense of fulfillment that can come from ambition and achievement, but then again maybe their ambitions are smaller and localized and built into the structure of their modest daily lives. Perhaps the idea of ambition isn’t culturally relevant.
It is a bit of a devil to summarize, a 9-day trip to a type of place, a Pacific island, that I have never seen, complete with adventure, people, culture, natural beauty, and a host of thoughts on the actual experience on these things. Samoa was wonderful–beautiful, truly relaxing and laid-back, hospitable–yet I remember thinking that a week, or two at the most is the ideal amount of time to visit there. As much as I touted my non-interest in technology or stressful, goal-oriented days, the lack of such objects central to our lives becomes apparent after awhile. Stress and frustration and even despair often comes with our frenetic lives, but such a life can also feel more meaningful and more stimulating, and I think I missed this while in Samoa. It was an experience I will surely never forget. By contrast, it helped clarify the nature of my life back home. But a return home, by time’s end in Samoa, was clearly what was needed.
