Samoa was in the news the other week, after a very dramatic election.

Cue a VT post...

It's 17 years since we've been there. But of all our Pacific holidays -- and while we lived in New Zealand/Australia, we also visited Tonga, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Nouvelle Caledonie, and Vanuatu, and enjoyed every single experience -- this one stands out in my mind as the most idyllic and memorable. In my diary I wrote that the holiday had been like a big scoop of home-made coconut ice cream. I'm not sure there could be a higher accolade...

Of course, many things have changed in Samoa since then. In early September 2009, it became the first country in decades to shift from driving on the right to driving on the left. A little later that same month, Samoa was tragically struck by a powerful earthquake and tsunami, causing widespread damage and dozens of deaths. Faofao Beach, the first place we stayed after leaving the capital, Apia, was hit very hard.

Then in 2011, Samoa moved west across the dateline, skipping that year's version of 30 December entirely. (When we visited, we had two Friday 1 Octobers, and pretty much skipped Saturday 9 October altogether.)

Anyway, here are my top ten from this extraordinary place:

1. Hospitality, and fales right on the beach

We lodged in simple places. Twice we stayed in basic fales right on the beach by the lagoon, leaving our "door" tucked up at night to enjoy the fresh air and the soft lapping of the water. Such places provide all your meals, which are eaten communally at big tables, and they organize a bit of entertainment for the guests every few nights. The family's children wander around, as do cats, dogs, and the occasional pig. It's all very homely, and every time we left anywhere, it felt as though we were saying goodbye to family.


Home in Apia


Faofao Beach








Home on Savai'i







2. Snorkelling

Samoa's snorkelling is up there with our very best experiences. No bouncy boat trips -- you just walk down the beach to the lagoon, and then it's like swimming in an aquarium. No buffety big waves and scary currents -- you just drift in the warm, calm water. The fish are plentiful, colourful, and easy to see. It's magical. Snorkelling is the nearest I'll ever get to weightlessness, I suppose, and I loved just hanging on the surface of the water, gazing down into a totally different world with totally different rules.

3. Food

So much nice food... Of particular note:

-- Fried breadfruit
-- Fish with names like moonfish and wahoo; raw fish marinated in coconut
-- Taro leaves in coconut
-- What I describe in my diary as "ball-shaped doughnuts" -- I'm pretty sure I meant panikeke
-- Siamu popo, aka coconut jam. (But it's a bit different from kaya, this one, consisting -- I think -- just of coconut milk cooked with sugar, ie, no pandan, no egg. Incidentally, for the complete low-down on the coconut jam family, see here...)
-- Samoan coffee
-- Vailima beer
-- The little pile of green, slightly salty stuff which we'd taken to be taro leaves, but turned out to have an interesting back-story... That morning, very early, as I was taking my first steps along the beach, I met a guy who said he'd just witnessed the annual collection of the palolo worms that rise up from the coral. Hundreds of people were there, he said, very happy to have been present at this phenomenon, which happens a few days after the first full moon of October (I have no idea why). I thought no more about this strange story, and it was only the following morning that I found out that the green stuff we'd eaten the previous night was in fact palolo... It was slightly salty. It's supposed to be a great delicacy, like creamy caviar, and it certainly did taste OK, although I guess I'm glad I didn't know it was worms at the time... One young woman who'd eaten three helpings was quite upset by the morning's revelation...

4. Apia

This is Samoa's rather pretty capital. It boasts beautiful vegetation, interesting markets, a little museum, a clock-tower, breezy sea-wall walks, and good restaurants.

5. Bus travel

We found this to be a delightful way to get around Samoa. They're minibuses, more accurately, and they sound like giant walkmans (you can hear the che-ka-chaa of their stereos a long way off, gradually getting louder as they bear down on you). The music was eclectic: a Samoan type of Country and Western would give way to something gospelish, and then Leo Sayer maybe. Minibuses usually come decorated (in one I note movie posters, a collection of American flag stickers, a string of purple feathers all round the windscreen, and a picture of Jesus).

As more and more people pile on the bus, its occupants continually sort and resort themselves hierarchically. Foreigners are generally left to nurse their rucksacks wherever it has pleased them to sit, but the elderly get to sit at the front, children are stuffed on laps, and the agile may have to squat in the stairwells. Luggage ranges from smart briefcases to huge empty jerry cans and big banana-leaf baskets of produce. A la Thai, stops are made at places where people can bundle off the bus to buy sweets and cakes and fizzy drinks; once everyone is provisioned, we're away again.

6. Taking the ferry to Savai'i and back

For an island-born person, the only thing that's better than visiting an island is visiting an island off an island. Apia is on Upolu island, and Savai'i island, easily reachable by ferry, is about 50% bigger, and definitely worth a few days of your time.

On the way out, we caught the regular passenger ferry. But on the way back they put us on the freight and vehicle ferry. We sat right up under the bridge, and as we advanced across the inter-island space, the Apolima Strait, we had spectacular views of the water (turquoise in the shallows, glossy indigo in the deep water) and the two weather systems competing over Upolu (dark and menacing to the right, bright and sparkling to the left). Tawny gannets played around the boat for a while, catching the updrafts. Magical.



7. Savai'i

Savai'i is very pretty. As well as beaches and lagoons, we visited a canopy walkway, blowholes, and lava tubes.






Blowholes with incredibly squiffy horizon...



8. Music and dance

If you arrive from New Zealand on any Pacific island, you'll land in the wee small hours of the morning. It's just how the plane schedules work. Or worked. Maybe it changed. But however unsociable the hour, you can be fairly confident you'll be greeted by some musicians. Which I just love... In Apia, we had three, clad in bright cotton shirts, lava-lavas, and flip-flops, variously playing a guitar, a mini-guitar, and a bass consisting of a broom handle, a string, and a white plastic bucket that acted as a resonator. What better welcome can there be?

I've already mentioned the traditional entertainment, which is called fiafia. I loved the family atmosphere of the ones we experienced. The spontaneity, the naturalness, the lack of any showy, sleek commercialism, and the generous desire to please guests and give them a good time, were all very genuine, somehow, far removed from the rather brassy shows you see featured in other places.







9. Colours

No words necessary really...











10. Villa Vailima

We ended our trip in Apia again, to be ready for the plane back to Auckland.

The centre was very crowded, as White Sunday was approaching, and everybody obviously buys in loads for the festival.

So we took a taxi to the Villa Vailima, a little out of town. This was the home of Robert Louis Stevenson in the final few years of his life. Elevated above the town, it's a gorgeous house, with huge decks, and cool, gracious, high-ceilinged rooms, containing numerous interesting photos. He built some fireplaces (surely purely decorative in this climate) to help him feel closer to his native Scotland, but the tapa wallpaper also attested to an appreciation of local culture.





The house is surrounded by lawns and beautiful trees and shrubs, and you can climb the hill, via the long (but not too steep) track, to the graves at the top. It was pleasant to walk in the woods, hearing and sometimes seeing the skinks scurrying out of the way through the fallen leaves, and spotting the occasional brilliantly red and black bird flitting among the trees. Just when it felt like the track would never get there, but would carry on winding round the hill for ever, we arrived. It was worth it. It is indeed a tranquil, breezy, pleasant spot, with great views out over Apia.

I don't really know Stevenson's work at all. I don't remember reading any of the ones generally offered to children. But, as "an early writer of embryonic anti-colonial literary responses to the imperial world", he sounds as though he would be worth a bit of an excursion one day.

I'll close with the lines that appear on his grave:

Requiem

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you 'grave for me:
Here he lies where he long'd to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.