Samoa 2

Another hot day:

The computer says it’s Thursday but I’m not sure if that’s NZ time or not. I think it’s Wednesday here! We are now in the Aleipata area of Samoa, on the south east corner of Upoulu Island, one of the country’s 2 main islands. The beaches here are stunning, real Bounty advert stuff as you can see. This photo is taken from exactly where I’m sitting. and the second one is taken looking up the beach to the left from the fence you can see (that's Eric on the beach).

We hired a car from the Outrigger (with a huge, but usual Tala 2,000 excess, about NZ$1,400). It is little and spanking new, or looks it. It is parked alongside the road (which about 1 car every 2 hours passes) and this morning Eric noticed that someone has hit the rear bumper!!! We will have to wait and see what the cost is but it will almost double the cost of our holiday. We were told the car would be ready for 9am. That obviously meant 9am Samoan time because it was closer to 10.30am when we got it. We then drove down here on the only road that comes this way. Samoa is typical tropical island with gorgeous beaches (this side of the island anyway) and lush, hilly hinterland. There are coconut trees everywhere. As you drive around you see small piles of coconuts long the roadside which I gather are collected for the industry. Many of the houses are fales, that’s roof structures with no walls. Very few possessions evident and the poverty is glaring. Everything looks incredibly run down, but brightly painted originally. A pleasant thing is that children do not accost you every 2 minutes and tourists are advised not to give money to them. Such a contrast to S.Africa where, when you drive through poor areas, the children run in their tens, if not hundreds, after you begging for sweets and money.
Today, whatever day that might be, we went to To Sua Trench. It’s about a 20 min drive from here. Mind you driving at 30mph feels fast and I told Eric to slow down twice. Yes, this is Michelle typing!!! We entered some well kept and very pretty gardens and walked down towards the trench. This turned out to be a hole in the ground developed from a blow hole originally I would guess. You looked down to a stunning green-blue pool about 60 – 80 foot down with a diameter of about 50 foot. I don't think you can really appreciate the depth from these pics but you get the idea.

Stunning eh! Of course, no barriers to stop you tumbling in but, the preferred route was a very long wooden ladder. Eric managed it but when asking him just now how far down the water was (I'm not bery good at judging height) he said “My eyes tell me 20-25m but my leg tells me 500m!!” Poor guy, his injured thigh has been put through its paces this week. A very long walk uphill to Robert Louis Stevenson's last home and then climbing this ladder. That's us swimming in the last piccie!(Writing interrupted by the arrival of Janet and Ken, a S.African couple living in NZ whom we met last night).

The way people live here is real subsistence culture but then the waiters all seem to have ipods and cell phones and the cars are all newish and shiny. I can’t quite get my head round it. One waiter here does a guided walk which I did yesterday. The walk was on his property which extends up the mountain behind his house. We had a talk on the medicinal properties of the various plants he grows and roasted some beans in the kitchen, which comprised of a thatched cover over a small stone fire using one old frying pan. We sat on the ricketiest of seats and watched him husk, open and desiccate coconut. He then wrapped the desiccated coconut in what looked like a loose ball of string (the fibre being stripped leaf that is cobbled together). He then literally wrang it out into a coconut half and gave us the coconut cream to drink. It was delicious! Luckily there were only 3 of us on this walk (as opposed to 19 the previous day) so we got a real drink, not just a taste. In fact he went and found some more coconuts and did it for us again. This first piccie taken on the walk with the roofs of our fales just visable in the distance. (Is the plural of roof roofs or rooves Carol??) Note the fire behind the coconut squeezing, this is what they cook on!