Towards the end of July and into early August 2018, me and Fran sojourned on the Island of Upolu in the Independent State of Samoa to escape a particularly harsh, bitter Sydney winter for warmer more tropical climes and to perhaps find a slice of that most elusive concept 'Paradise'.
This is not a travelogue. It's only some of the things I saw and heard and was shown and told.
Everything they say about the "Heart of Polynesia" is true - insanely beautiful, languid, sublime, sensuous, with a people who are so laid back they've almost fallen over, in one of the most complex societies on Earth.
1910 German topographical map, Upolu, Samoa, showing approximate location of 172 villages
"That I should thus have reversed the verdict of Lord Tennyson’s hero is less eccentric than appears. Few men who come to the islands leave them; they grow grey where they alighted; the palm shades and the trade-wind fans them till they die, perhaps cherishing to the last the fancy of a visit home, which is rarely made, more rarely enjoyed, and yet more rarely repeated. No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore".
Robert Louis Stevenson.
2018 basic road map, Upolu, Samoa
Let sleeping dogs lie...
Not guilty...
HIGH TIDE AT LAFAGA BAY
THE DOGS OF UPOLU
Any canine fancier would love the dogs of Upolu. And I'm with them.
Apart from the occasional out-of-place Labrador-looking sort of thing, they all have Dingo in them. Every one of them. The face, the pointy little ears, the chops and the gait of a Dingo are unmistakable. They come in all shapes and sizes, but they're generally a mottled shade of a tan or dunn colour -- they are living, breathing proof that the Dingo breed is of Indo-Pacific origin.
By most accounts, dogs came to Samoa with the Lapita people about 3,500 years ago, and they were almost certainly the progenitor of the Dingo. The Lapita had come from southern China, and had migrated all the way down to the Indonesian archipelago, then across PNG and Melanesia, before fanning out across the rest of the South Pacific, then somehow they did a loop back and landed on the shores of far north Queensland in ancient times, and their primitive Dingo-like dogs followed.
Apia town in chock full of strays, there are literally thousands of them [no one could possibly afford to have them de-sexed even if there were any vets to be found. The Govt. apparently does do a cull from time-to-time, but they're obviously fighting a losing battle. They must breed like rabbits]. The mongrels work in packs along the sea wall, but mostly you see them just languidly wandering the streets or stretched out fast asleep under some palm tree, or creeping up on people who they suspect might have some food about them.
They are mostly pretty mangy flea-bitten creatures, but none of them are bags of bones - they do pretty well on human waste and scraps and there are puddles of water everywhere and numerous little creeks and one big river that runs through town even in the dry season. Everywhere, people put their garbage on little platforms mounted on wooden stilts about four feet off the ground to prevent the dogs from ripping into it. And everyone also seems to keep at least one guard dog - talk turned to the subject dogs with a local we met, and he admitted to owning four.
They sound and look worse than they really are; being Samoan canines, they are far from aggressive, unless they suspect you are holding foods you're not willing to part with. But I expect visiting folk who are afraid of dogs - and we saw a few - would have a very hard time in Samoa, being terrified most of the time. I just stuck with the sensible advice I was given that it's unwise to try to touch or pat them. I was vaguely confronted [it was more like an amusing Mexican stand-off] by a stray looking at me menacingly only once, so I asked him very politely to go away, to no avail, then stupidly waved my walking stick at him, no use, then told him to fuck off, no response, then finally I somehow remembered the Samoan word to yell at dogs to get rid of them..."HALU!", and he instantly turned on his toes, scarpered and disappeared.
In the bush, dogs dart in and out of the gorgeous beautifully maintained lush tropical garden displays that line the road in and out of all the villages everywhere, lounge around in one of the large oval-shaped open-air fale tele ['meeting house'] that are in every village, you even see them wandering into churches with impunity. They also like to curl up in piles of dead leaves that have been swept up under trees, or are just sniffing and lazily working foraging for scraps or wild foods.
They wouldn't do much damage, as there are no native land mammals in Samoa [unless the dogs themselves count, or why not throw in the pigs, they're everywhere too]. The pretty and ubiquitous buff-banded rails - a prolific almost flightless bird that can run like the wind - would be far too quick on their long legs for dogs, and the pooches also couldn't get through the sturdy wood-picket pig fences that are built around all the taro gardens to prevent the porkers from digging up the staple crop of Samoa.
They all have a very smart road sense, otherwise they wouldn't survive [only stoopid puppies are afforded the same favours as pigs and chooks, who are always given right of way when they're crossing the road]. The Samoans are the least sentimental of people. I never saw one pat or scratch a dog - in the country side and in town they are all there for a reason - working guard dogs to keep other animals and people out of their particular patch. If there were too many puppies in a litter, or there was a "bad apple" in the village, I am sure they would have no compunction at all in dispatching them with one of the very heavy hardwood war-clubs, or one of their most peculiar cricket bats, which are like lengths of four by two.
When we turned up at out beach hut at Lepa village on the south coast of Upulo, the first thing I heard our affable, charming host Carmelsita say was HALU! HALU! at a bitch who had full teats and was obviously nursing puppies somewhere. Fran asked her if the dog was hers and she said "oh no, no, it's one of the neighbours...I think".
Her dog [the only one with a collar on I saw in all of Upolu] was a handsome battle-scarred kind of fella. We heard him get into a scrap late one night - he came off second best and was a bit lame and proppy the next day with a few new minor flesh wounds. He gave us a barking welcome, but as soon as he saw us move into our faleo'o ['little house'] and knew we were there to stay, he just hung around, either sniffing our stuff, lying alert alongside the road near our hut, or just scratching himself in a desultory fashion, but usually biting his own arse. One time I saw him on the beach [and he was very protective of his beach, chasing away any other dog he didn't like] furiously digging a big hole in the sand, and then rolling around and over and over in it, then digging some more, and doing some more barrel rolling in a vain bid to rid himself of the maddening fleas. As the Samoans like to say "the beach is your friend!".
Some of the few other tourista who were around from time to time would cautiously give him a pat on the head which was his cue to immediately roll on his back for a tummy rub, all the time pawing the patter with both front paws, but as soon as something more interesting altered him, there was the prospect of food to be had, or he had guard dog duties to perform, he'd be off in a flash.
One day we were driving along the Main South Coast road at the national speed limit of 35 mph [25 mph through the villages], and a dog appeared out of nowhere and chased our 4WD right alongside the passenger side window at full pelt for a good couple of hundred yards, furiously barking at us all the way before we managed to drop him off the chase. Not many cars that go along that road, but you'd reckon he'd do it to everyone driving on his side of the village - he looked like a very fit Kelpie impersonator indeed.
There are also bloody cats everywhere too, and they were constantly trying to get into our cottage, fale, room...they don't respond to HALU!, so my walking stick got a good workout. I suppose wherever there's rats, there's cats, and they seem to do a good job as I didn't see a single rodent on all of Upolu. One cat ran in through the patio door to our room at the Samoan Outrigger Hotel in Apia, ran around like a mad thing, and then promptly hid under the bed. Fran shooed it out from underneath the cot, and I got it with a good wack of the stick on its arse as it shot out of the room. A perfectly timed hit! It never came back.
There is one place in Samoa that has no dogs. The island Manono in the Apolima Straight between Upolu and the "Big Island" of Sava'ii. The story goes that a dog once bit a high ranking matai ['chief'] and she later died. All dogs were banished from the island forthwith. We never went there, but we heard that at the place where it happened many moons ago, there is no memorial to the poor unfortunate matai, but there is a small bronze statue of the canine responsible. Go figure.
Apart from the occasional out-of-place Labrador-looking sort of thing, they all have Dingo in them. Every one of them. The face, the pointy little ears, the chops and the gait of a Dingo are unmistakable. They come in all shapes and sizes, but they're generally a mottled shade of a tan or dunn colour -- they are living, breathing proof that the Dingo breed is of Indo-Pacific origin.
By most accounts, dogs came to Samoa with the Lapita people about 3,500 years ago, and they were almost certainly the progenitor of the Dingo. The Lapita had come from southern China, and had migrated all the way down to the Indonesian archipelago, then across PNG and Melanesia, before fanning out across the rest of the South Pacific, then somehow they did a loop back and landed on the shores of far north Queensland in ancient times, and their primitive Dingo-like dogs followed.
Apia town in chock full of strays, there are literally thousands of them [no one could possibly afford to have them de-sexed even if there were any vets to be found. The Govt. apparently does do a cull from time-to-time, but they're obviously fighting a losing battle. They must breed like rabbits]. The mongrels work in packs along the sea wall, but mostly you see them just languidly wandering the streets or stretched out fast asleep under some palm tree, or creeping up on people who they suspect might have some food about them.
They are mostly pretty mangy flea-bitten creatures, but none of them are bags of bones - they do pretty well on human waste and scraps and there are puddles of water everywhere and numerous little creeks and one big river that runs through town even in the dry season. Everywhere, people put their garbage on little platforms mounted on wooden stilts about four feet off the ground to prevent the dogs from ripping into it. And everyone also seems to keep at least one guard dog - talk turned to the subject dogs with a local we met, and he admitted to owning four.
They sound and look worse than they really are; being Samoan canines, they are far from aggressive, unless they suspect you are holding foods you're not willing to part with. But I expect visiting folk who are afraid of dogs - and we saw a few - would have a very hard time in Samoa, being terrified most of the time. I just stuck with the sensible advice I was given that it's unwise to try to touch or pat them. I was vaguely confronted [it was more like an amusing Mexican stand-off] by a stray looking at me menacingly only once, so I asked him very politely to go away, to no avail, then stupidly waved my walking stick at him, no use, then told him to fuck off, no response, then finally I somehow remembered the Samoan word to yell at dogs to get rid of them..."HALU!", and he instantly turned on his toes, scarpered and disappeared.
In the bush, dogs dart in and out of the gorgeous beautifully maintained lush tropical garden displays that line the road in and out of all the villages everywhere, lounge around in one of the large oval-shaped open-air fale tele ['meeting house'] that are in every village, you even see them wandering into churches with impunity. They also like to curl up in piles of dead leaves that have been swept up under trees, or are just sniffing and lazily working foraging for scraps or wild foods.
They wouldn't do much damage, as there are no native land mammals in Samoa [unless the dogs themselves count, or why not throw in the pigs, they're everywhere too]. The pretty and ubiquitous buff-banded rails - a prolific almost flightless bird that can run like the wind - would be far too quick on their long legs for dogs, and the pooches also couldn't get through the sturdy wood-picket pig fences that are built around all the taro gardens to prevent the porkers from digging up the staple crop of Samoa.
They all have a very smart road sense, otherwise they wouldn't survive [only stoopid puppies are afforded the same favours as pigs and chooks, who are always given right of way when they're crossing the road]. The Samoans are the least sentimental of people. I never saw one pat or scratch a dog - in the country side and in town they are all there for a reason - working guard dogs to keep other animals and people out of their particular patch. If there were too many puppies in a litter, or there was a "bad apple" in the village, I am sure they would have no compunction at all in dispatching them with one of the very heavy hardwood war-clubs, or one of their most peculiar cricket bats, which are like lengths of four by two.
When we turned up at out beach hut at Lepa village on the south coast of Upulo, the first thing I heard our affable, charming host Carmelsita say was HALU! HALU! at a bitch who had full teats and was obviously nursing puppies somewhere. Fran asked her if the dog was hers and she said "oh no, no, it's one of the neighbours...I think".
Her dog [the only one with a collar on I saw in all of Upolu] was a handsome battle-scarred kind of fella. We heard him get into a scrap late one night - he came off second best and was a bit lame and proppy the next day with a few new minor flesh wounds. He gave us a barking welcome, but as soon as he saw us move into our faleo'o ['little house'] and knew we were there to stay, he just hung around, either sniffing our stuff, lying alert alongside the road near our hut, or just scratching himself in a desultory fashion, but usually biting his own arse. One time I saw him on the beach [and he was very protective of his beach, chasing away any other dog he didn't like] furiously digging a big hole in the sand, and then rolling around and over and over in it, then digging some more, and doing some more barrel rolling in a vain bid to rid himself of the maddening fleas. As the Samoans like to say "the beach is your friend!".
Some of the few other tourista who were around from time to time would cautiously give him a pat on the head which was his cue to immediately roll on his back for a tummy rub, all the time pawing the patter with both front paws, but as soon as something more interesting altered him, there was the prospect of food to be had, or he had guard dog duties to perform, he'd be off in a flash.
One day we were driving along the Main South Coast road at the national speed limit of 35 mph [25 mph through the villages], and a dog appeared out of nowhere and chased our 4WD right alongside the passenger side window at full pelt for a good couple of hundred yards, furiously barking at us all the way before we managed to drop him off the chase. Not many cars that go along that road, but you'd reckon he'd do it to everyone driving on his side of the village - he looked like a very fit Kelpie impersonator indeed.
There are also bloody cats everywhere too, and they were constantly trying to get into our cottage, fale, room...they don't respond to HALU!, so my walking stick got a good workout. I suppose wherever there's rats, there's cats, and they seem to do a good job as I didn't see a single rodent on all of Upolu. One cat ran in through the patio door to our room at the Samoan Outrigger Hotel in Apia, ran around like a mad thing, and then promptly hid under the bed. Fran shooed it out from underneath the cot, and I got it with a good wack of the stick on its arse as it shot out of the room. A perfectly timed hit! It never came back.
There is one place in Samoa that has no dogs. The island Manono in the Apolima Straight between Upolu and the "Big Island" of Sava'ii. The story goes that a dog once bit a high ranking matai ['chief'] and she later died. All dogs were banished from the island forthwith. We never went there, but we heard that at the place where it happened many moons ago, there is no memorial to the poor unfortunate matai, but there is a small bronze statue of the canine responsible. Go figure.
THE ISLAND OF CHURCHES
Immaculate Conception of Mary Catholic Cathedral, Apia, Upolu, Samoa. Interior of main cupola. Ava Maria
They might as well re-name Upolu as the Island of Churches.
Christianity is all pervasive and has taken a 99% hold on the joint, and has since the 1830's. Every village has at least one church, so that's every few miles. There's shitloads of them everywhere you go; large and small, grand and humble, ornate and plain, all with the cross of Jesus and with all the denominations you could possibly imagine.
Samoa reputedly has 265 villages, most of them on Upolu [the capital Apia is a conglomeration of more than 40 villages alone], Sava'ii - the "Big Island" - is more sparsely populated. So there must be close to three hundred churches in the country. The coast of Upolu is thick with people, and there's a village at almost every bend in the coastal ring road. You'd be hard pressed not to be within walking distance of a church almost anywhere on the approximately 150km of coastline.
There's a particularly panoramic view from Cape Fatuosophia of the sparkling coral lagoon and the brightly pastel painted houses dotted all along the far east coast, with two or three quite stately large three storey churches sticking out above the fale. Rolling down the hill from there we saw a curious billboard that read STIGMATA. We pulled the jalopy over onto the gravel and stopped for a look, and saw a photo of a woman, Toaipuapuaga Opapo Soana'i, apparently bleeding from the hands and forehead, with the notation in English "Stigmata. At this place. Good Friday 2016". The event took hold of the Samoan imagination - by all reports half the population believed way beyond reasonable doubt and without question that it was miracle, while the other half thought it a hoax. Respect.
The Congregational Church of Samoa has the biggest following, closely followed by the Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Seventh Day Adventists, Mormons, Assembly of God tongue-speaking folk, Jehovah's Witnesses, a couple of pretty weird sects and a mountain top Baha'i temple and graveyard...but, all other religions might as well not exist for them. No Muslims, no Hindus, no Buddhists, nor anyone else. Not for Samoa, not with the nation's motto "Founded on God". At the last census, less than 1% of Samoans identified as non-believers.
The Roman Catholic Immaculate Conception of Mary Cathedral is the most impressive building in central Apia by a long shot. Built relatively recently at tremendous cost, after the old cathedral was damaged beyond repair in the 2009 earthquake, it's a genuine cathedral, with spectacular internal beams of local hardwoods and some fantastically intricate parquetry work on the floors and walls, stained glass windows showing The Way of The Cross, and a rather curious main cupola depicting the Immaculate Conception as if it were taking place in a fono ['council of Chiefs']. It seats about 1500 people.
Sunday, oh blessed Sunday is the biggest day of the week in Samoa. Full stop. If only it was every day. Go get the fish from market or catch it yourself and kill the piglet and get the umu oven going well before dawn, then on to Church in your finest, morning tea, and then home to change, open up the umu to the huge Sunday feed [to'onai], before spending the rest of the day playing, yarning, or sleeping. Yes, yes please. So of course, like everyone else, we had to go to church [a first for me in decades, apart from weddings and funerals! I've been a confirmed atheist for as long as I can remember, but paradoxically have always had a fascination with the rituals of religion].
I'd been intrigued by the modest little Protestant Church of Apia we'd seen on the Beach Road - [of course, there's no such denomination as "protestant", so what is this? A catch all place for those who don't fit in elsewhere? Yup.] - and you had to love it. The singing was beautiful, the pianist had a charming flair with his hands and never dropped a single note, the reading was the Loaves & Fishes yarn according to John, and the walking on water scare from Matthew's gospel, and the guest preacher spoke of the need to "beware of shiny things" in the sermon, which ended with a rousing cry "Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Just the name. Jesus! It makes you want to believe!" The whole service was in English, signed for some deaf mutes sitting in the front pews, and the bible stories were projected onto a screen in the simple English of the Samoan bible. We were told that up until a few years ago at this church, the pastor was always European, but not now.
I had miscalculated the start of Church at 10am, so after donning the best we could manage as our Sunday Best, us white strangers rolled up at 9:45am to find more than 50 people in the congregation and proceedings obviously well underway. Oh no! Late for church! We've never been much good at mornings. No sooner than we had found a pew, than the reverend announced on his microphone "it seems we have some guests among us today. Welcome! Now I don't want to put you on the spot..." and we could see the said microphone coming for us, so we agreed I would take it, and..put on the spot, thanks...said something entirely inoffensive like "hello, my name is Ian, and this is my wife Fran, and we are here on holiday in beautiful Samoa. Thank you very much for having us in your church". Beads of sweat rolled from my forehead. The heat was stifling in church, and everyone had their ili, the ubiquitous fan that is Samoa's personal air conditioning system.
After a ripple of polite applause for us [us? yikes!] it was back to the list of rosters for this week's community work, choir practice, pre-school, play groups, and the deaf car wash. There was a long list of people who needed prayers for the help of The Lord, headed by a Samoan rugby league player currently in custody in San Francisco, after being arrested in a nightclub fracas. Several in the congregation were congratulated on their good work at training for the local edition of the Special Olympics.
At morning tea in the Church hall we were led to the high table and sat with the clergy and other dignitaries and treated like royalty at tea for plenty. And what a spread it was. Scones and cream, party pies and sausages rolls, tiny little toasted cheese and ham sandwiches, sets of plastic-film wrapped tuna white sandwiches made a minute ago with lashings of butter and the crusts cut off, cocktail franks on toothpicks with tomato sauce, cheesecake, and Lamingtons - thank the Good Lord Jesus for chocolate and strawberry Lamingtons rolled in fresh desiccated coconut! - hot tea, coffee and tepid orange cordial to the whir of ceiling fans.
Boy oh boy, what an old fashioned repast. It was put on by the Church's Women's Auxiliary. It reminded me of something served at family gatherings in Australia in the 60's. As the kids ran around under our feet the talk was wide ranging, and they spoke of life as "the noble struggle". They were frank and plain speaking, gossiped and had faith by the bucket load. There was a Japanese woman among them who had lived in Apia for a "very long time" after marrying a Samoan man whose grown daughters worked office jobs in the Sydney CBD. She said she was constantly worried about them even though she said she kicked herself "at my age it's time to let them go - life now should be about you, for a change!".They didn't mind at all having a well-lapsed Catholic and a long-time non-believer in their midst. The preaching was done.
It was only after our sojourn to Upolu that I worked out why Christianity had taken such a strong hold. One of the ancient female Gods, Nafanua, had predicted that a new "force" would sweep over the islands one day and supplant the Gods, so when the first missionaries turned up in 1830, the three Samoan 'kings' at the time realised instantly that the prophesy of the Gods had indeed come true. So they all immediately signed up for Christianity, followed shortly afterwards by the entire population. The missionaries couldn't possibly have dreamed of having better luck. They'd converted a whole nation at the drop of a hat. After Romanising the Samoan language, the London Missionary Society had both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible translated into Samoan by 1855, and it was plain sailing from there on in.
But instead of the ancient Gods being supplanted, they gained even more traction and respect as their prophecy had materialised out of the blue as predicted. The spirits of the ancestors got even stronger, while they also carried on with having blind faith in the Bible stories. For decades now, I have been hoping to have a Road to Damascus Experience, but I am still waiting! Lord, save me!
While Christianity is in the blood, it doesn't go without scrutiny. While we were there, there was a raging debate in the colourful letters-to-the-editor pages of the popular local tabloid newspaper the Samoan Observer on the Govt. plan to impose income tax on the clergy for the first time, with heated arguments on both sides of the ledger. There were also letters condemning the high cost of funerals, with family's expected by tradition to provide gifts for everyone attending, and the "extortionate" rates charged by the clergy, to the extent that it impoverished some families. What's Christian about that! they cried.
There's also a very nice touch in the villages in the evening, just as the sun begins to set like clockwork at 6:15pm.
The church bell will ring just once - a couple of times I also heard a conch shell being blown, for Christ' sake - and that's the signal for everybody to just stop what they are doing, drop everything, sit down where they are, and pray for about 15 minutes until the church bell rings again, then life resumes as normal, and communal dinner is served in due course...but it is just so quiet, all you can hear is fading birdsong, the gentle sou'easterly trade wind rustling the leaves on the trees and the sound of distant surf breaking on the reef, but everything appears to be in suspended animation. It's a very good time of day to stop, and contemplate one's navel for a while. You are not meant to do or say anything, just think, or pray, or not if you like. There's an old Samoan saying, that all you need to do to put everything right with yourself is find some time and "eat the breeze".
Twilight in the tropics is short, and then night falls.
LDS Mormon Temple & Mission House, Pesega, Apia, Upolu, Samoa
HIGH TIDE AT LAFAGA BAY
Morning high tide and hot springs, Lafaga Bay, Upolu, Samoa
I was standing at the top of a brand new flight of about twelve
concrete stairs - some form-work was still there - going down the
three metre black volcanic boulder seawall, with the water lapping
over the bottom step at absolute high tide, gaping at the sight of
the sheer beauty of Lafaga Bay at Sāvaia
village on the south-west coast of Upolu in a lifting morning
mist; the coast disappearing up the bay into mountains and then
coming around in a peninsula of low hills stretching out a couple
of miles or so away, when a young woman from the village appeared
as if out nowhere.
I heard just behind me "Talofa! Nice day!"
"Yes it is. It's beautiful here. Is this where the Giants Clams are?"
"Oh yes. Sit down".
So I sat down.
I've been a travelling man for thirty years now, hobbling along on a "walking-stick palm" walking stick. Only a few weeks before, I restored the damn thing that I picked up from a rack in a second hand shop near the Balmain Hospital for a tenner back in '87, with a thorough sand down using two grades of sandpaper and three coats of clear gloss Estapol. It glistened in the sun.
As I perched on the steps and leaned the walking stick on a pair of stairs, and looking forward to getting the new snorkeling gear on again, she sat down beside me and said, without any introduction, straight out..."how old are you?"
Taken aback, and before I could think of anything, I blurted out correctly "61".
"Oh, you look young and strong for your age".
Me? Is she trying to flatter me? So, pointing at my stick, I said "No, not really", but she insisted "No, no. You do look young".
Fearing that the conversation was going to go no-where, and fully aware of the taboo of asking a woman her age in Australia, I took a risk and stupidly asked "So, how old are you?".
She shot back as quick as a flash "Guess".
Oh fuck, I thought, I'm done here, I hate that, and without taking a closer look at her face or looking her up and down, I took a wild stab at the question.
"mmm...22?"
"28", she replied.
We both laughed as I said something completely inane like "oh, all Samoan women look younger than they are" then I said, knowing life expectancy in Samoa is short [71 for men and from what I'd seen] "There's not many old people here in Samoa, are there?"
"No there's not" she said emphatically "and the problem is that most of them just stay at home, out of sight".
"How so?"
"Well, you see, they're old and they need help and crutches and sometimes they need wheelchairs and things and they don't have them, they can't afford them, so they just stay in their houses all the time, people come to take care of them, but then they die. It's very sad".
I am a lucky man, so could only nod my head in agreement.
She told me about the Giant Clam Reserve, and how the village had cordoned off a few acres of lagoon in an oval shape with a rope with buoys. She said the village is "in a special place here" and they were trying their best to protect the clams, and maybe make some money from the scant number of tourists around. There was no one else there but us. She pointed to what looked like two small rectangular dams jutting out into the bay and said they were hot springs. "Get in, if you want, test it out, it's nice". They had pooled them in some time ago, and she went though the hydraulics of the tides, and how the warm water diffused over the clams during the run out through a small channel. It was good for them, she said, and the place had long been locally renowned... "this is Clam City!"
"You will also see some of the baby ones we have put in little cages so they are protected". Intrigued, and without thinking, I asked, "do you know how the clams survived the tsunami when the rest of the reef didn't?" and I was promptly met with musu. She fell silent.
Musu is the term for a well-known peculiar Polynesian habit of sudden sullenness, that can come on at any time for no particular reason - it can be anything at all - she looked out to sea, and as I knew that musu is something that you are never to be offended by - it is what it is - I followed suit and said nothing more.
After a couple of minutes of gazing at "all this useless beauty" with the sea mist gone and the sun highlighting a tropical shower on the distant peninsular, she suddenly said "the toilet block is over there and you can park your car in the shade there under that palm tree over there too, if you like. Please stay as long as you like".
Fran had already found the amenities; three dunnies in a concrete block connected to a septic system [a small sign said it was courtesy of the Japan Poverty Reduction Program], but one had canoes and paddles in it and wasn't working. Knowing that there would be freight to pay as there is everywhere on Upolu for the use of a village beach [appropriate gifts must be exchanged - the drill is, I will give you money in return for the use of your beach and a swim in your water] I said "So, it's ten tala each, right?" She replied "Yes, and $10 to park your car". I gave her three tens, she smiled and said again "Stay for a long time if you like. You are very welcome. There is no time limit! But please, don't touch the clams," "oh no, won't be touching any clams, that's for sure", and we laughed again.
And then she vanished without another word, just as quickly as she had appeared, and we never saw her again.
So, it was on with our brand-new whiz-bang top-notch silicone snorkels and fins for the 300m swim out to the reserve. I had made the mistake of failing to listen closely enough to the village woman's instructions. "See that double buoy, over there?". I thought she said that was where you entered the sanctuary, but it was in fact the rough location of the clams.
We must have swam right over the top of them without noticing and then spent the best part of an hour snorkelling around looking for these crazy damn clams without success. There was a kelp forest on dead, broken coral with all kinds of fish swimming lazily, but no clams. It was like sweeping away with our hands through a seaweed jungle. Then, as we were just about to give up in disappointment and return to shore the same way we came in thinking that we'd been short-changed or it was all some kind of ruse, I spotted them, and motioned Fran over.
And giant they were - and feeding with their monstrous multi-coloured purple tinged muscle pulsating in the huge wide open shell. Jesus, Joseph & Mary! I thought. Man Eaters! You wouldn't want to be here at low tide and mistakenly put your foot in one of them. It would have gone chomp! and you would have been stuck fast; there would be no way of extricating your leg, and you would drown as the tide rose. Something you'd find in one of those cheap South Seas made-up adventure stories for boys.
And that'd be the end of the section. Game over.
I heard just behind me "Talofa! Nice day!"
"Yes it is. It's beautiful here. Is this where the Giants Clams are?"
"Oh yes. Sit down".
So I sat down.
I've been a travelling man for thirty years now, hobbling along on a "walking-stick palm" walking stick. Only a few weeks before, I restored the damn thing that I picked up from a rack in a second hand shop near the Balmain Hospital for a tenner back in '87, with a thorough sand down using two grades of sandpaper and three coats of clear gloss Estapol. It glistened in the sun.
As I perched on the steps and leaned the walking stick on a pair of stairs, and looking forward to getting the new snorkeling gear on again, she sat down beside me and said, without any introduction, straight out..."how old are you?"
Taken aback, and before I could think of anything, I blurted out correctly "61".
"Oh, you look young and strong for your age".
Me? Is she trying to flatter me? So, pointing at my stick, I said "No, not really", but she insisted "No, no. You do look young".
Fearing that the conversation was going to go no-where, and fully aware of the taboo of asking a woman her age in Australia, I took a risk and stupidly asked "So, how old are you?".
She shot back as quick as a flash "Guess".
Oh fuck, I thought, I'm done here, I hate that, and without taking a closer look at her face or looking her up and down, I took a wild stab at the question.
"mmm...22?"
"28", she replied.
We both laughed as I said something completely inane like "oh, all Samoan women look younger than they are" then I said, knowing life expectancy in Samoa is short [71 for men and from what I'd seen] "There's not many old people here in Samoa, are there?"
"No there's not" she said emphatically "and the problem is that most of them just stay at home, out of sight".
"How so?"
"Well, you see, they're old and they need help and crutches and sometimes they need wheelchairs and things and they don't have them, they can't afford them, so they just stay in their houses all the time, people come to take care of them, but then they die. It's very sad".
I am a lucky man, so could only nod my head in agreement.
She told me about the Giant Clam Reserve, and how the village had cordoned off a few acres of lagoon in an oval shape with a rope with buoys. She said the village is "in a special place here" and they were trying their best to protect the clams, and maybe make some money from the scant number of tourists around. There was no one else there but us. She pointed to what looked like two small rectangular dams jutting out into the bay and said they were hot springs. "Get in, if you want, test it out, it's nice". They had pooled them in some time ago, and she went though the hydraulics of the tides, and how the warm water diffused over the clams during the run out through a small channel. It was good for them, she said, and the place had long been locally renowned... "this is Clam City!"
"You will also see some of the baby ones we have put in little cages so they are protected". Intrigued, and without thinking, I asked, "do you know how the clams survived the tsunami when the rest of the reef didn't?" and I was promptly met with musu. She fell silent.
Musu is the term for a well-known peculiar Polynesian habit of sudden sullenness, that can come on at any time for no particular reason - it can be anything at all - she looked out to sea, and as I knew that musu is something that you are never to be offended by - it is what it is - I followed suit and said nothing more.
After a couple of minutes of gazing at "all this useless beauty" with the sea mist gone and the sun highlighting a tropical shower on the distant peninsular, she suddenly said "the toilet block is over there and you can park your car in the shade there under that palm tree over there too, if you like. Please stay as long as you like".
Fran had already found the amenities; three dunnies in a concrete block connected to a septic system [a small sign said it was courtesy of the Japan Poverty Reduction Program], but one had canoes and paddles in it and wasn't working. Knowing that there would be freight to pay as there is everywhere on Upolu for the use of a village beach [appropriate gifts must be exchanged - the drill is, I will give you money in return for the use of your beach and a swim in your water] I said "So, it's ten tala each, right?" She replied "Yes, and $10 to park your car". I gave her three tens, she smiled and said again "Stay for a long time if you like. You are very welcome. There is no time limit! But please, don't touch the clams," "oh no, won't be touching any clams, that's for sure", and we laughed again.
And then she vanished without another word, just as quickly as she had appeared, and we never saw her again.
So, it was on with our brand-new whiz-bang top-notch silicone snorkels and fins for the 300m swim out to the reserve. I had made the mistake of failing to listen closely enough to the village woman's instructions. "See that double buoy, over there?". I thought she said that was where you entered the sanctuary, but it was in fact the rough location of the clams.
We must have swam right over the top of them without noticing and then spent the best part of an hour snorkelling around looking for these crazy damn clams without success. There was a kelp forest on dead, broken coral with all kinds of fish swimming lazily, but no clams. It was like sweeping away with our hands through a seaweed jungle. Then, as we were just about to give up in disappointment and return to shore the same way we came in thinking that we'd been short-changed or it was all some kind of ruse, I spotted them, and motioned Fran over.
And giant they were - and feeding with their monstrous multi-coloured purple tinged muscle pulsating in the huge wide open shell. Jesus, Joseph & Mary! I thought. Man Eaters! You wouldn't want to be here at low tide and mistakenly put your foot in one of them. It would have gone chomp! and you would have been stuck fast; there would be no way of extricating your leg, and you would drown as the tide rose. Something you'd find in one of those cheap South Seas made-up adventure stories for boys.
And that'd be the end of the section. Game over.
Togitogiga waterfalls and ancient lava swimming hole, O Le Puo-PueNational Park, Upolu, Samoa
Memorial Stone, Winchester Cathedral, UK.
"THE MANSUETUDE OF THE SAMOAN"
Samoan fale tele ['meeting house']. Every village has at least one, all different, but of the same design.
Whenever I go anywhere, I like to know the back story.
Guide books have never been much use to me, and Google Maps has only been a recent innovation in my lifetime. I remember 12 years ago, long before mobile phones and apps were ubiquitous, traipsing around looking for the main market in Luang Prabang in Laos, as located in Lonely Planet, only to eventually realise that it'd been demolished, fenced in and moved to somewhere else in town. That's the problem with tour guides - the moment they are published, they're out-of-date and redundant. Get on the ground and go look for yourself. Ask for help. While the stories can be told very differently, history never changes.
I once read Baker & Phonggpaichit's A History of Thailand on a nine hour overnight flight KSA → Bangkok. After going to Lao PDR, I read Grant Evans' A Short History of Laos - The Land in Between - a rattling good yarn about a country that's so complicated as fuck, I went back again, twice. I've read more histories of the French and American wars in Vietnam than I care to remember. The post-colonial history of East Timor is well covered in James Dunne's Timor: A People Betrayed, and Jeremy MacClancy's To Kill Two Birds with One Stone - A Short History of Vanuatu is a valiant attempt to explain one of the most diverse and scattered of the world's island nations. There are six bookcases in our house, and Fran would kill me if I got another one.
But, as far as I can work out, no one has even come close to writing a Short History of Samoa.
I'm sure the timelines would be taught in Samoan schools; the pre-history arrival of Polynesians in the islands about 3,500 years ago, John Williams bowling in from the London Missionary Society in 1830 [there is a decrepit barely legible memorial to him near The Clocktower in Apia], the Samoan Civil War [1887-94] is little understood, but the cyclone of March 1889, which sank all seven of the German, British, and American gun boats in Apia Harbour with tremendous loss of life [with the sole exception of the HMS Calliope, which managed by a mere whisker to escape the reef to ride out the storm sea] effectively ended the battle of the colonial powers and it all finished up with the formal partition of Samoa, with the Germans taking the west and the Americans the east in 1900 - [the English got Fiji & Tonga] - the generally benign 14 year German rule, until the un-opposed New Zealand invasion of Apia on orders from London in 1914, followed by almost ten years of brutal martial law, before becoming a League of Nations "protectorate" under Kiwi administration, the Black Saturday Massacre [28 Dec 1928] when the New Zealanders turned a Gatling machine gun on the 'natives' [apparently there is a memorial to it somewhere - but do you think I could find it?], the post WWII Mau Independence movement led by prominent matai, and finally the realisation at the UN that Samoans were perfectly capable of running their own affairs, leading to the earliest example of independence in the South Pacific in 1962, in a part of the world where vast swathes are still under the colonial rule of France, and the American's of course still have American Samoa, and neither are willing to give them up in a hurry.
There you go - that's a very brief history lesson, for you.
That's all there in black and white on Wikipedia for anyone to read, but to write a nuanced English language Short History of Samoa would be an enormous undertaking, involving many many years of research. It would have to be a labour of love and it will, in all likelihood, never be written; the complexity is too difficult, the documentary evidence too scant, and everything pre-1830 has now fallen into myth and legend.
I even read Simon Winchester's 497 page door-stopper, Pacific - The Ocean of the Future I found on a remainder table, to try to get a grip on the vast expanse of blue lapping at our doorstep, but, as good as it is, it wasn't much use to me either as he takes his starting point at New Year's Day 1950, when conventional Carbon-dating became redundant because of atmospheric nuclear explosions in the Pacific, and nowhere in it is Samoa even mentioned, but Winchester did put me onto "The Bumstead Map", which is a total revelation.
The Bumstead Map is the only hand drawn, large scale [1:35,000,000] entirely precise map on the Mercator Projection of the unimaginably largely vacant vastness of the Pacific Ocean at its the centre. It was drawn by Alfred H. Bumstead in 1936 for the National Geographic Magazine, and is surrounded by 76 smaller maps on larger scales of all the most important islands. It is a work of art and a cartographic masterpiece. On the big map [and it is big 763mm x 965mm...or in the old money 30" x 38"] the islands are mere dots of land in all the staggering emptiness. Samoa is hard to see without a magnifying glass. Next to it is a tiny red stamp that directs you to the larger maps of the Samoan islands on the margin. I bought a beautifully printed copy from the map held in the Daisy Bates collection at the Australian National Library on-line and it now hangs on the wall at home in the Map Room, along with 12 others collected in places yonder. It's just another thing I do. Standing back and staring at it though, you realise that the mighty continent of Australia is literally dwarfed by the sheer enormity of the Pacific. But at least I knew where I was.
Before we went to Samoa, I saw the documentary film on the late Australian artist, Brett Whiteley. In it, he is interviewed about being deported when he was arrested for possessing marijuana after spending a year in Fiji, which he said he loved and could have easily lived there for the rest of his life. He enormously regretted being unceremoniously tossed out of the country overnight with his wife and young child, into the waiting glare of the media at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport in November 1969. But in all his comments on his time in Fiji, the one line that stood out for me was..."I will never understand the Polynesian mind".
I thought to myself, mmm, righty oh then, I've never been to Polynesia, so better go and have a look for myself.
And having done so, I've come to realise that the concepts of fa'a samoa ["the Samoan Way"] and fa'a matai ["the way of the Chiefs"] which underpin every aspect of life in Samoa, and has done un-changed for centuries, if not millennia, are so utterly complex as to be beyond the comprehension of a mere outsider. No shit.
I will never pretend to come even close to understanding the Samoan way, based as it is entirely on village life, and the extraordinary tangle of interdependent set-in-stone obligations and responsibilities everyone lives by - the obtuse, and often disputed, seniority ranking system of the matai, highly regulated relationships between families, the village, the set of extended villages, and ultimately your loyalty to one [or more] of the three 'aiga, who can be considered as the Samoan "aristocracy" led by extremely high ranking matai. And that's not even accounting for the nexus between Upolu and Sava'ii [the "Big Island"] in the west, and Eastern [American] Samoa, a hundred nautical miles away.
Frustrated that no one has even come close to writing a Short History of Samoa, by pure luck, I found my London bookseller had a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's obscure book A Footnote to History - Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa [1892]; his account of the Samoan Civil War, which was still on-going at the time he wrote it. Stevenson only lived in Samoa for four years from 1890 until he dropped dead with an apoplexy at age 44. He apologises straight up that it was hastily written because if he didn't do it the story would be lost in short order, and he also says sorry to any of his Samoan friends who he might offend by the telling of his version of the truth. And he doesn't pull any punches.
I read it before going....two warring Samoan 'kings' with well armed infantry were at each other's throats mainly over misunderstandings and perceived slights, and a third 'king' deported out of the picture, as the Germans and Americans tried to take over the joint on the sly and plant it to copra, while the British loitered on the sidelines minding their own South Seas exploitation businesses. Stevenson stood firmly in the Samoan camp, but sensibly didn't take sides; he thought the British fools, the Americans blatant opportunists and gun-runners, and he hated the Germans with a passion for siding with one 'king' over the other, shelling 'rebel' villages from their gunboats, and getting into gun fights that were no business of theirs.
Stevenson never achieved fluency in Samoan despite his best efforts, noting that there are in fact two Samoan languages, one informal used in every day speech, and another formal - which contains many more adjectives - which is used by the tulafale matai ['speaking chief'] but is understood by everyone. Every important chief has a tulafale, who speaks for them in the council of chiefs, the fono [or as Stevenson called them "the little parliaments"], as high ranking matai are considered too dignified and important to speak. Orator matai are much admired and revered throughout the islands, and Stevenson invokes the joys of hearing Samoan oratory, and it was/is not uncommon for people to sit around and listen to an orator speak in formal Samoan for literally hours on end, invoking the spirits of the ancestors and using myth, legend, and poetry to make their points on behalf of the matai for whom they are speaking. Informal Samoan is a wonderfully lilting lyrical language as it is. After the speeches, decisions in the fono are always made by acclamation and consensus, with the strongest of traditional arguments prevailing. A stark contrast to the "first world", where politics and public policy are conducted in three second 'sound bites'.
Politically, Govt. in Samoa is run on the Westminster system, but it's democracy in name only. It's been a one-party state for a very long time - the leader of the Human Rights Protection Party, Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Neioti Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, [who's universally known by his main chiefly title Tuilaepa] has been Prime Minister for 20 years, and holds 48 of the 50 seats in the Parliament after last year's election. All MP's must be matai, including the 25% quota for women.There are reputedly about 16,000 matai in Samoa [so that's about one chief for every 12 people] and another six or so thousand living in the Samoan diaspora, mainly in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai'i. Commoners are barred from standing as political candidates. There is no great appetite for change. You only have to read the fiercely independent daily tabloid the Samoan Observer to know that corruption flourishes, and even obvious social problems are all very much kept in-house, but that's another story.
Stevenson, like me, never fully understood Samoan society, and was under some glaring misapprehensions in A Footnote to History. But he constantly expresses his frustration at also not being able to "get it", and the realisation that he most likely never would bedeviled him, in a place he loved like no other in the world, and he'd been around. Even though he had made a very good life for himself living handsomely off his book royalties and was, and still is, highly regarded by the locals as Tusitala ['the teller of tales'], he well knew he was condemned to be always the alien, the outsider looking in.
On our last day on Upolu, we decided to drop in at Stevenson's old gaff, the now magnificently restored Villa Vailima in the hills behind Apia. It had suffered in cyclones and earthquakes over the years, and had been left derelict. But now, under the auspices of some wealthy American philanthropist, it's like stepping into a colonial time-warp. But you'd be hard pressed to find it on the Cross Island Road by signage alone - it is very small, and just reads "RLS Museum →". It's the finest example of a two story Victorian Plantation House, a mansion really, you could ever hope to see, built from a variety of local hardwoods. We had a quietly spoken, almost reverant and very knowledgeable personalised guide who took us slowly around every room in the joint, which still has a lot of the original furniture and even more replica's.
Man oh man, did Stevenson pick his spot and go for it, or what? It's set on 400 acres of meticulously maintained grounds. Tropical rain showers were sweeping over the mountains when we were there, but it would have the most magnificent view of Apia harbour and the vastness of the Pacific beyond in clear weather. He was a weirdo Scot though, married to a feisty American named Fanny, after they'd met in Paris. He had his elderly mother there with him too, and his young adult step-children by Fanny. What the? He had a chimneyless fireplace installed in the Smoking Room that was never lit in the tropics, to remind him of home back in Scotland, and his wife's bedroom is floored and paneled in Californian redwood for the same reason. A very strange couple. They had imported more than 90 tonnes of furniture and fixtures and fittings, including a grand piano, to put in the villa. On a wall hangs a huge much larger-than-life oil portrait; our man asked if we knew who it was, and after some futile scratching of heads trying to put a time-frame on it, he said "Christopher Columbus".
Stevenson is buried on a mountain top on the estate, but we were warned off by people who had attempted the trek, as the two long tracks to the grave are narrow, jungle covered, steep and slippery. Not for a couple of crips! He remains an enigma in the islands. In a Footnote to History, Stevenson used an archaic word I had never heard of before while excoriating some German official for his complete and utter inability or unwillingness to "understand the mansuetude of the Samoan".
"Mansuetude"??...what a nice word...I just had to look it up...it's dictionary definition is "of habitual mildness or gentleness, meekness, modestness" &etc.
Sums up the people of Samoa perfectly in a single word.
Guide books have never been much use to me, and Google Maps has only been a recent innovation in my lifetime. I remember 12 years ago, long before mobile phones and apps were ubiquitous, traipsing around looking for the main market in Luang Prabang in Laos, as located in Lonely Planet, only to eventually realise that it'd been demolished, fenced in and moved to somewhere else in town. That's the problem with tour guides - the moment they are published, they're out-of-date and redundant. Get on the ground and go look for yourself. Ask for help. While the stories can be told very differently, history never changes.
I once read Baker & Phonggpaichit's A History of Thailand on a nine hour overnight flight KSA → Bangkok. After going to Lao PDR, I read Grant Evans' A Short History of Laos - The Land in Between - a rattling good yarn about a country that's so complicated as fuck, I went back again, twice. I've read more histories of the French and American wars in Vietnam than I care to remember. The post-colonial history of East Timor is well covered in James Dunne's Timor: A People Betrayed, and Jeremy MacClancy's To Kill Two Birds with One Stone - A Short History of Vanuatu is a valiant attempt to explain one of the most diverse and scattered of the world's island nations. There are six bookcases in our house, and Fran would kill me if I got another one.
But, as far as I can work out, no one has even come close to writing a Short History of Samoa.
I'm sure the timelines would be taught in Samoan schools; the pre-history arrival of Polynesians in the islands about 3,500 years ago, John Williams bowling in from the London Missionary Society in 1830 [there is a decrepit barely legible memorial to him near The Clocktower in Apia], the Samoan Civil War [1887-94] is little understood, but the cyclone of March 1889, which sank all seven of the German, British, and American gun boats in Apia Harbour with tremendous loss of life [with the sole exception of the HMS Calliope, which managed by a mere whisker to escape the reef to ride out the storm sea] effectively ended the battle of the colonial powers and it all finished up with the formal partition of Samoa, with the Germans taking the west and the Americans the east in 1900 - [the English got Fiji & Tonga] - the generally benign 14 year German rule, until the un-opposed New Zealand invasion of Apia on orders from London in 1914, followed by almost ten years of brutal martial law, before becoming a League of Nations "protectorate" under Kiwi administration, the Black Saturday Massacre [28 Dec 1928] when the New Zealanders turned a Gatling machine gun on the 'natives' [apparently there is a memorial to it somewhere - but do you think I could find it?], the post WWII Mau Independence movement led by prominent matai, and finally the realisation at the UN that Samoans were perfectly capable of running their own affairs, leading to the earliest example of independence in the South Pacific in 1962, in a part of the world where vast swathes are still under the colonial rule of France, and the American's of course still have American Samoa, and neither are willing to give them up in a hurry.
There you go - that's a very brief history lesson, for you.
That's all there in black and white on Wikipedia for anyone to read, but to write a nuanced English language Short History of Samoa would be an enormous undertaking, involving many many years of research. It would have to be a labour of love and it will, in all likelihood, never be written; the complexity is too difficult, the documentary evidence too scant, and everything pre-1830 has now fallen into myth and legend.
I even read Simon Winchester's 497 page door-stopper, Pacific - The Ocean of the Future I found on a remainder table, to try to get a grip on the vast expanse of blue lapping at our doorstep, but, as good as it is, it wasn't much use to me either as he takes his starting point at New Year's Day 1950, when conventional Carbon-dating became redundant because of atmospheric nuclear explosions in the Pacific, and nowhere in it is Samoa even mentioned, but Winchester did put me onto "The Bumstead Map", which is a total revelation.
The Bumstead Map is the only hand drawn, large scale [1:35,000,000] entirely precise map on the Mercator Projection of the unimaginably largely vacant vastness of the Pacific Ocean at its the centre. It was drawn by Alfred H. Bumstead in 1936 for the National Geographic Magazine, and is surrounded by 76 smaller maps on larger scales of all the most important islands. It is a work of art and a cartographic masterpiece. On the big map [and it is big 763mm x 965mm...or in the old money 30" x 38"] the islands are mere dots of land in all the staggering emptiness. Samoa is hard to see without a magnifying glass. Next to it is a tiny red stamp that directs you to the larger maps of the Samoan islands on the margin. I bought a beautifully printed copy from the map held in the Daisy Bates collection at the Australian National Library on-line and it now hangs on the wall at home in the Map Room, along with 12 others collected in places yonder. It's just another thing I do. Standing back and staring at it though, you realise that the mighty continent of Australia is literally dwarfed by the sheer enormity of the Pacific. But at least I knew where I was.
Before we went to Samoa, I saw the documentary film on the late Australian artist, Brett Whiteley. In it, he is interviewed about being deported when he was arrested for possessing marijuana after spending a year in Fiji, which he said he loved and could have easily lived there for the rest of his life. He enormously regretted being unceremoniously tossed out of the country overnight with his wife and young child, into the waiting glare of the media at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport in November 1969. But in all his comments on his time in Fiji, the one line that stood out for me was..."I will never understand the Polynesian mind".
I thought to myself, mmm, righty oh then, I've never been to Polynesia, so better go and have a look for myself.
And having done so, I've come to realise that the concepts of fa'a samoa ["the Samoan Way"] and fa'a matai ["the way of the Chiefs"] which underpin every aspect of life in Samoa, and has done un-changed for centuries, if not millennia, are so utterly complex as to be beyond the comprehension of a mere outsider. No shit.
I will never pretend to come even close to understanding the Samoan way, based as it is entirely on village life, and the extraordinary tangle of interdependent set-in-stone obligations and responsibilities everyone lives by - the obtuse, and often disputed, seniority ranking system of the matai, highly regulated relationships between families, the village, the set of extended villages, and ultimately your loyalty to one [or more] of the three 'aiga, who can be considered as the Samoan "aristocracy" led by extremely high ranking matai. And that's not even accounting for the nexus between Upolu and Sava'ii [the "Big Island"] in the west, and Eastern [American] Samoa, a hundred nautical miles away.
Frustrated that no one has even come close to writing a Short History of Samoa, by pure luck, I found my London bookseller had a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's obscure book A Footnote to History - Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa [1892]; his account of the Samoan Civil War, which was still on-going at the time he wrote it. Stevenson only lived in Samoa for four years from 1890 until he dropped dead with an apoplexy at age 44. He apologises straight up that it was hastily written because if he didn't do it the story would be lost in short order, and he also says sorry to any of his Samoan friends who he might offend by the telling of his version of the truth. And he doesn't pull any punches.
I read it before going....two warring Samoan 'kings' with well armed infantry were at each other's throats mainly over misunderstandings and perceived slights, and a third 'king' deported out of the picture, as the Germans and Americans tried to take over the joint on the sly and plant it to copra, while the British loitered on the sidelines minding their own South Seas exploitation businesses. Stevenson stood firmly in the Samoan camp, but sensibly didn't take sides; he thought the British fools, the Americans blatant opportunists and gun-runners, and he hated the Germans with a passion for siding with one 'king' over the other, shelling 'rebel' villages from their gunboats, and getting into gun fights that were no business of theirs.
Stevenson never achieved fluency in Samoan despite his best efforts, noting that there are in fact two Samoan languages, one informal used in every day speech, and another formal - which contains many more adjectives - which is used by the tulafale matai ['speaking chief'] but is understood by everyone. Every important chief has a tulafale, who speaks for them in the council of chiefs, the fono [or as Stevenson called them "the little parliaments"], as high ranking matai are considered too dignified and important to speak. Orator matai are much admired and revered throughout the islands, and Stevenson invokes the joys of hearing Samoan oratory, and it was/is not uncommon for people to sit around and listen to an orator speak in formal Samoan for literally hours on end, invoking the spirits of the ancestors and using myth, legend, and poetry to make their points on behalf of the matai for whom they are speaking. Informal Samoan is a wonderfully lilting lyrical language as it is. After the speeches, decisions in the fono are always made by acclamation and consensus, with the strongest of traditional arguments prevailing. A stark contrast to the "first world", where politics and public policy are conducted in three second 'sound bites'.
Politically, Govt. in Samoa is run on the Westminster system, but it's democracy in name only. It's been a one-party state for a very long time - the leader of the Human Rights Protection Party, Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Neioti Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi, [who's universally known by his main chiefly title Tuilaepa] has been Prime Minister for 20 years, and holds 48 of the 50 seats in the Parliament after last year's election. All MP's must be matai, including the 25% quota for women.There are reputedly about 16,000 matai in Samoa [so that's about one chief for every 12 people] and another six or so thousand living in the Samoan diaspora, mainly in New Zealand, Australia and Hawai'i. Commoners are barred from standing as political candidates. There is no great appetite for change. You only have to read the fiercely independent daily tabloid the Samoan Observer to know that corruption flourishes, and even obvious social problems are all very much kept in-house, but that's another story.
Stevenson, like me, never fully understood Samoan society, and was under some glaring misapprehensions in A Footnote to History. But he constantly expresses his frustration at also not being able to "get it", and the realisation that he most likely never would bedeviled him, in a place he loved like no other in the world, and he'd been around. Even though he had made a very good life for himself living handsomely off his book royalties and was, and still is, highly regarded by the locals as Tusitala ['the teller of tales'], he well knew he was condemned to be always the alien, the outsider looking in.
On our last day on Upolu, we decided to drop in at Stevenson's old gaff, the now magnificently restored Villa Vailima in the hills behind Apia. It had suffered in cyclones and earthquakes over the years, and had been left derelict. But now, under the auspices of some wealthy American philanthropist, it's like stepping into a colonial time-warp. But you'd be hard pressed to find it on the Cross Island Road by signage alone - it is very small, and just reads "RLS Museum →". It's the finest example of a two story Victorian Plantation House, a mansion really, you could ever hope to see, built from a variety of local hardwoods. We had a quietly spoken, almost reverant and very knowledgeable personalised guide who took us slowly around every room in the joint, which still has a lot of the original furniture and even more replica's.
Man oh man, did Stevenson pick his spot and go for it, or what? It's set on 400 acres of meticulously maintained grounds. Tropical rain showers were sweeping over the mountains when we were there, but it would have the most magnificent view of Apia harbour and the vastness of the Pacific beyond in clear weather. He was a weirdo Scot though, married to a feisty American named Fanny, after they'd met in Paris. He had his elderly mother there with him too, and his young adult step-children by Fanny. What the? He had a chimneyless fireplace installed in the Smoking Room that was never lit in the tropics, to remind him of home back in Scotland, and his wife's bedroom is floored and paneled in Californian redwood for the same reason. A very strange couple. They had imported more than 90 tonnes of furniture and fixtures and fittings, including a grand piano, to put in the villa. On a wall hangs a huge much larger-than-life oil portrait; our man asked if we knew who it was, and after some futile scratching of heads trying to put a time-frame on it, he said "Christopher Columbus".
Stevenson is buried on a mountain top on the estate, but we were warned off by people who had attempted the trek, as the two long tracks to the grave are narrow, jungle covered, steep and slippery. Not for a couple of crips! He remains an enigma in the islands. In a Footnote to History, Stevenson used an archaic word I had never heard of before while excoriating some German official for his complete and utter inability or unwillingness to "understand the mansuetude of the Samoan".
"Mansuetude"??...what a nice word...I just had to look it up...it's dictionary definition is "of habitual mildness or gentleness, meekness, modestness" &etc.
Sums up the people of Samoa perfectly in a single word.
1936 "Bumstead" Map of Pacific Ocean for National Geographic Magazine.
Detail, Samoan Islands, 1936 "Bumstead" Map of Pacific Ocean for National Geographic Magazine
Vila Vailima, Vailima, Upolu, Samoa
LANDSLIDE!
Landslide! Cape Tapaga, south coast, Upolu, Samoa
Sitting on the tail gate of the 4WD having a quiet ciggy on Monday morning as we prepared to leave after a few days at Vaiala Beach Cottages in Apia [well, that is something of a misnomer, there is no "beach", but a three metre sea wall made of black volcanic rock boulders to protect the low-lying area from king tides and storm surges during cyclones] and the bloke who appeared to be the place's Boss Cocky came over for a chat.
[The joint is in a very quiet, and by the looks of the adjacent village, a rather poor neighbourhood of Apia...on a couple of acres, with seven little run-down self-contained cottages arranged Samoa style in a semi-circle around a central green with a huge mulberry tree in the middle and a couple of kayaks leaning up against it, coconut palms and banana trees, and a profusion of lush tropical foliage including dozens of big clumps of fragrant lemongrass.]
After asking me if everything was OK during our stay..."perfect" I said "just what we wanted, out of the way but close to town, we'll be back!"...I mentioned that we'd been down to the south coast the day before for a quiet Sunday lunch and swim at Siumu village.
He said "Have you seen the landslide?
"What landslide?"
"Oh it's huge. It's down there by the Aleipata Islands. The whole mountain side just fell away, cut the road and the whole thing went right across the lagoon and ended up on the other side of the reef! Massive, bru."
"Bloody hell!"
"Yeah, it's pretty huge." stretching his log-like arms out as long as they could go. "You've got to see it".
I asked if anyone knew why it had happened and he said it collapsed just after Cyclone Gita had moved through in March and dumped so much rain that down town Apia was fully flooded as it's at the confluence of two rivers and numerous small creeks [we saw some major flood mitigation works going on at the mouth of the Vasigano River just down the track from the container terminal, as the locals had become sick and bloody tired of "AP City", as it's jocularly known, continually flooding during the wet season].
He continued...."but the most amazing thing about the landslide was that within half an hour of it happening, local people had scrambled all over the rocks and rubble right out to the end with their fishing rods and nets and were hauling in big fat tuna's! It was amazing."
Later that day we swung the 4WD around in the extreme south-eastern corner of Upolu and came across a sign that said "Detour ahead. Follow Road" and there it was.
The whole mountainside cliff face near Cape Tapaga had indeed collapsed - the 200+ metre high sheer jungle covered escarpment is very close to the coast there - and it had given way right on the point, sending millions of tons of rock and mud a good half kilometre across the lagoon. Most of the boulders of grey-to-black volcanic rock were the size of small cars, but some were as big as trucks, and someone had come along with a can of black paint and sprayed on one boulder about seven feet high the words SIGN OF END TIME.
The Main South Coast Road was buried deep under the avalanche, and the Govt. had gone in with heavy duty earth movers and did a massive job in pushing the debris back from the reef and most of the lagoon, and ramming it down to a solid flat platform an extraordinary 10-15 meters above sea level. A very narrow dirt track skirted around the landslide to connect it to the two stretches of bitumen on either side. The original road and electricity and telephone lines remain buried under the landslide. You can see the wires go under water and come up the other side - no attempt had been made to string up a new set of poles and wires across the slip.
The unstoppable power of nature right there; but we were not at all prepared for what was to come.
As we drove across the land slide and then slowly along the coast through Vailoa, Lalomanu, Saleapaga, Lepa, and Aufaga villages through to Vavau, a distance of about 13 kilometres, we were surrounded by tsunami ruins.
I had known about the 2009 Samoan tsunami disaster before were arrived on Upolu, but I never expected to see so much damage nine years later.
Everywhere the ruins of houses and fale tele, all now roofless with maybe only a few concrete columns left standing or just snapped in half, a couple of ruined churches here and there with maybe a wall of glass-less windows left to be overgrown with jungle, but mostly all that remained were raised flat concrete slabs with nothing on them, where buildings used to be.
I was fascinated that the villagers had decided to re-build right next to the ruins - new churches, meeting houses and homes sit side-by-side with devastation that's still crumbling - but I never did manage to find out why. Was it all too hard and costly to repair the ruins, or did they just leave them there as silent sentinels to the tragedy? I don't know. In most villages, people are not buried in the church-yard, tombs of formal masonry line the path to the front door of many houses. The ancestors rest at home. People used to live in those shattered places, so maybe it was a good idea to leave them well alone?
123 people along that stretch if coast died, many of them children who were swept out to sea, their bloated bodies floating back to shore days, weeks after the catastrophe. 16 people went missing and were never found. Hundreds were badly injured. The village of Lepa was completely flattened, and while there's a new sign post on higher ground, nothing of the original village remains, apart from the ruins. The Samoan PM's family came from Lepa. One of his nieces died. He happened to be in Auckland at the time.
It happened right on dawn on September 29, 2009, when the whole place shook and rolled with a truly tremendous earthquake that was measured at an extremely rare staggeringly powerful 8.3 on the opened ended logarithmic Richter Scale, but no one there had ever experienced a tsunami before so they had no idea what was coming at them.
By some estimates the stupendous wall of water arrived just nine minutes after the earthquake; what sheer terror there must have been when already panicked people saw the thing looming up at them out of the ocean after they'd just had the livin' shit rattled right out of them - the sound is beyond imagining as the monster broke on the reef...and these people had no-where to run, absolutely no-where to hide, they had to ride it - the coastal plain is no more than 150 meters wide there at best and the escarpment cliffs behind are sheer - it just goes straight up, with very few, if any tracks [we saw a tsunami escape route that had since been built where the escarpment is at it's most vertical, and it's a tight zig-zag of railed steps going up about 50 metres]. Everywhere you go there are now dozens of new tsunami warning signposts with the symbol of the "running man" pointing in the direction of any higher ground.
After the tsunami, some survey teams came along and calculated the height of the tsunami wave at an astonishing 15 metres - that's higher than a three-storey building - they calculated that rocks has been scoured out of the cliff face at Manulamo village [near where the recent landslide is] at a height of 49 feet above the normal high tide sea level.
We snorkelled extensively in the lagoon where we stayed at the Fao Fao Beach Fales in Lepa, and you could see in the bright sun how the fringing reef had been utterly smashed by the tsunami, the lagoon was chock full of dead broken coral [which by and large is still not regenerating even after nine years], and mingled among the piles of ghostly white marine remnants there were hundreds of bricks, bessar building blocks, chunks of concrete and twisted concrete re-enforcing rods, that had been washed back into the lagoon by the force of water as the tsunami receded. All very eerie. No attempt, it seems, has been made to remove the debris from the lagoon.
The tourism industry, once the lifeblood of the area, also died instantly as you could clearly see what would once have been beautiful coral gardens reduced to underwater wastelands.
I was reminded of being so lucky to experience snorkelling the reef on the south side of Atauro Island in East Timor back in 2012, where it was like swimming in the most perfect tropical aquarium, the brilliance of the diversity of the corals was breath-taking [not a great idea while snorkelling] and teeming with fish and technicolour marine life. But those days have now most likely gone away. The Great Barrier Reef used to be beyond belief, but is now a shadow of its former self. I've seen the photographs of it taken with the first high-def under-water colour camera's in the 60's, but now its allegedly completely rooted. I haven't been to see for myself in a while. But here - on a tiny speck in the sheer vastness of the Pacific - how terrible is our vulnerability, how insignificant are we?
You could sit on the beach there with one of the very finest views in the world; a picture postcard of paradise gazing along the striking coral coast and the rocky little islands that rise straight out of the ocean just offshore teeming with sea-birds, and never know what lies beneath the water's edge.
The building and repair work still goes on, and even in the amenities block at Fao Fao you could see some original tiles on the concrete slab floor had been cracked, crazed and ripped by the tsunami and had been mortared back in place; they had just filled in the gaps with some random new tiles, whacked up a few new mortared volcanic rock walls around the the slab, put in a couple of new dunny bowls connected to a new septic system, the showers were no more than a single cold water tap on the end of a pipe. Exactly what you need, for the moment, and nothing more.
After the tsunami, the recovery effort was all done by locals after villagers from villages on higher ground that escaped the devastation poured into the area on foot to help; the Main South Coast Road was gone and all power and communications were down. It took days for the news to reach the outside world, and the New Zealand Air force were first on the scene with air-drops, but it took weeks for the New Zealand and Australian Navy's to turn up with any kind of substantial aid. And then they were gone, leaving the survivors to their own devices.
Most people who survived the tsunami are deeply psychologically scarred by the event - no-one will talk about it - if you ever mentioned that you knew that a tsunami had hit the area back in '09, they would simply say "oh yes" and then...no more. What is done is done, and it is what it is.
A Peruvian woman we met at a mountain-top art gallery over lunch one day near the strange Baha'i temple outside Apia who has lived in Samoa for more than 25 years said "everyone on Upolu was affected by it. Everybody knew someone, whether through their own family, or through clan affiliations or through inter-marriage, or just friends, everybody knew someone who knew someone who had died or been badly injured. Many of the survivors went mad - yes, literally IN-SANE - and that was the end of it for them. Their families are ashamed. So very very sad".
The Samoan Observer, reported that only a week before we arrived in Samoa, some Adventist missionaries has sent some teams of mental health workers into the affected villages to try to get them to talk about dealing with post-traumatic stress, and they were impressed by the number of people who had attended the workshops...they tried six months earlier and failed - no one turned up - but this time some did, and one of the mental health workers deemed it a success because "it is very difficult for the villagers to 'open up' about this".
Only now.
Our host at Fao Fao was at home at the time of the landslide and didn't like it one little bit. Fran asked her if she heard it seven kilometres away "It was like an explosion! Nobody knew what happened. Everyone was very scared for a while. Oh yes. It was a miracle no-one was killed or hurt, no-one was driving by. Praise be. It happened in the middle of the day, just like that".
A week after the tsunami disaster the Govt. announced that the bodies of the victims that had been found "who have not already been buried in their villages" [that's hard to do when there is simply no village left] would be interred in a mass grave in Apia at the Tafaigata Cemetery.
A brief ecumenical service was held before the mass internment, and the Govt. promised at the time that a wall listing the names of all who died or were lost in the tsunami, whether they were buried there or not, would be constructed in memorium at the cemetery.
It was never built.
Fauatapu Island seen from Amaile village, far east coast, Upolu, Samoa
WEIRD CELESTIAL SHIT
Dawn, Vaiala sea wall, Apia, Upolu, Samoa
It was that perfect tropical Saturday evening out on the front deck of the Amanaki Hotel on the Mulinu'u Peninsular in Apia. It had been a fairly humid day but the cloud had cleared and there was a most brilliant spectacle of the fullest of full moons that you will ever want to see.
As it happens, there had been an unusual astronomical phenomenon that day - the longest total eclipse of the moon in the 21st Century at 103 minutes. At 6:14 that morning the full moon sat just above the western horizon when it began eclipsing, and 33 minutes later the moon dipped entirely below the horizon and disappeared, and exactly one minute after that, the first ray of sun was to be seen on the eastern horizon. We had a view of neither; the moonset was obscured by the hills grading to mountains that surround Apia, and while sunrise certainly came into view, we had no direct line of sight with the eastern horizon. But that one minute switch back from west to east would have been fantastic to watch at sea on a clear night. Also, five planets were all be visible at one time or another in the night sky - for the first time in yonks - in a place that might as well have been a million miles from anywhere.
We'd dropped in for dinner, and the moon was front and centre having risen a couple of hours earlier and it threw a golden silvery light clean across Apia harbour, with millions of moonbeams reflecting on the ripples of small waves, and the only other lights visible were those of the container terminal in the distance. It was drop dead gorgeous. A rare moment.
As it happens, there had been an unusual astronomical phenomenon that day - the longest total eclipse of the moon in the 21st Century at 103 minutes. At 6:14 that morning the full moon sat just above the western horizon when it began eclipsing, and 33 minutes later the moon dipped entirely below the horizon and disappeared, and exactly one minute after that, the first ray of sun was to be seen on the eastern horizon. We had a view of neither; the moonset was obscured by the hills grading to mountains that surround Apia, and while sunrise certainly came into view, we had no direct line of sight with the eastern horizon. But that one minute switch back from west to east would have been fantastic to watch at sea on a clear night. Also, five planets were all be visible at one time or another in the night sky - for the first time in yonks - in a place that might as well have been a million miles from anywhere.
We'd dropped in for dinner, and the moon was front and centre having risen a couple of hours earlier and it threw a golden silvery light clean across Apia harbour, with millions of moonbeams reflecting on the ripples of small waves, and the only other lights visible were those of the container terminal in the distance. It was drop dead gorgeous. A rare moment.
The moon also had a stunning corona around it; a perfect circle of bright white light shaded in hues of purples and blues and greens and reds - simply spectacular. I casually said to Fran "isn't that corona around the moon an absolute corker?"
"What corona?" she replied.
"The corona around the moon, there it is".
"No, can't see it".
"What do you mean? The corona around the moon, see. I don't understand. You can't see it?".
"Yes, I know what a corona looks like, I've seen them before, and I'm here to tell you it's not there".
I hadn't been drinking, and here I was thinking I was having my long awaited bona fide Road to Damascus Experience, but now there was real doubt that it even existed - no question. Fran peered at the moon more intently, took her glasses off. No. Tried my glasses. Nothing. Tried another pair she'd found fishing around in her handbag, but again, no result. No corona. I was mildly shocked, but about what? That I could see something that wasn't there? Or that she couldn't see something that was?
I will swear black and blue that it was a most enchanting corona, and no matter which way you moved your head it would stay still, framing the moon perfectly. I didn't take a photograph and it never occurred to either of us that a simple solution was simply to ask someone, anyone in the busy local crowd at the bar whether they could see it or not. Somehow, in that time & place, it just didn't matter. The idea never arose, as there seemed little to no point in saying 'There! Told you so', on it being confirmed, which I was entirely sure would have been my smug reaction
We were happy enough to just let it slide and enjoy the view. It will remain 'one of life's little mysteries', but it was farkin' weird. Little wonder. There had been some crazy astronomicals going down, in one of the finest, and certainly most idyllic viewing spots on earth - can't get better than a remote island in the South Pacific - and luckily we knew about it so it didn't randomly come out of the blue to spook the living bejesus out of us. You know what they say about howling at full moons &.
On leaving the hotel, the security bloke who's main job appeared to be to try to sort out the jumble of cars in the car park caught us having a quiet chug on a ciggy and looking skyward. He pointed and said "Is that Mars?" "Yep, that's Mars, the Red Planet". "Oh, I thought so", he said with a broad smile. So I pointed too, and being a smart arse, added "and that one's Saturn almost straight overhead, and that bright one over the hills there is Jupiter".
As the days wore on, the moon rose later and later.
A few days after the "corona incident", I stumbled onto the Lepa village beach after communal dinner at Fao Fao and saw an awe inspiring Milky Way, the likes of which I have never seen before, not even in the crystal clear outback of South Australia. The night was so dark as the moon was yet to rise, pitch black, with barely a single light bulb to be seen anywhere.The Milk Way stretched out its stupendous canvas from horizon to horizon with staggering clarity revealing that unimaginably huge universe, yes, if you were ever in any doubt, there are billions and billions of stars in it. The galaxies from one of the most remote places on the planet wasn't lost on me. An hour or so later, looking out from the fale, the moon had risen and all the detail in the Milky Way had disappeared, almost entirely - flooded by moonlight.
While I was stone cold sober on that beach that night and entirely without the influence of any kind of brain-altering snakey substances, my mind drifted to kava, something I had never seen nor heard talked about in Samoa, where it is reserved strictly for ceremonial purposes unlike in Vanuatu where there are kava bars everywhere, but oh for a shell or two now! Made for it.
Weird celestial shit.
Morning high tide at the lagoon, Lepa, Upolu, Samoa
NOTES
Click on images to enlarge
Money:
The currency of Samoa is the Tala [International Currency Code $WST] At the time of visiting, $A1 = approx $WST2.
The currency of Samoa is the Tala [International Currency Code $WST] At the time of visiting, $A1 = approx $WST2.
Travel:
Samoa Airways. Direct flights Sydney KSA → Apia twice a week, Thursday and Saturday. Boeing 737-800. 5.5 hours out, 6.5 hours return.
Samoa Airways. Direct flights Sydney KSA → Apia twice a week, Thursday and Saturday. Boeing 737-800. 5.5 hours out, 6.5 hours return.
Accommodations:
Vaiala Beach Cottages, Vaiala, Apia. Ph:
Fao Fao Beach Fales, Lepa, South Coast. Ph:
Samoan Outrigger Hotel, Moto'otua, Apia. Ph:
Attractions:
See 44 short 'reviews' on Google Maps of places we visited:
Recommended Reading:
Robert Louis Stevenson, A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa {1892}, [Reprint. Dodo Press, London], 138pp.
Richard A.Bermann, Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa - Home from Sea {1939}, [Mutual Publishing, Honolulu, 2010], 280pp.
Simon Winchester, Pacific - The Ocean of the Future, [William Collins, London, 2015], 492pp.
Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of the South Pacific, [Penguin Books, London, 1992], 733pp. Ch 16. In the Backwaters of Western Samoa.
Simon Winchester, Pacific - The Ocean of the Future, [William Collins, London, 2015], 492pp.
Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of the South Pacific, [Penguin Books, London, 1992], 733pp. Ch 16. In the Backwaters of Western Samoa.