Savaii, the big island

What can we say about Savaii?  In a word, Awesome.

We left Apai Somoa for Savaii, no wind, we motored, charged the batteries and made water.

We anchored in Matautu Bay, nicely positioned between two reefs.  This made for some good snorkelling.  We decided not to go ashore as we couldn’t really see a place to land the dinghy.  So we stayed aboard and snorkelled twice each day.  Some new fish identified, always a good thing.  The bad thing was our first siting of the crown of thorns, a member of the starfish family that is out of control and damaging the reefs.  We saw more than one!

Sonsie of Victoria (Jim and Isabel) joined us in the anchorage and snorkelled with us.  We went to their boat for drinks and appies, we got rowed over and back (we had not launched trouble), which was a treat.

Then we headed down the coast to Asua Bay.  We had the waypoints from the compendium and had read tooooo many guides as the entrance was a treaky one and the charts are wrong!  We followed Sonsie in, which always makes things easier, not more than a .5 knot current, but it is really the side on waves and swell before you are actually in the channel that is the issue.  But we got in with no problems and anchored in 7 meters.

We arranged a tour with a guide named Sam.  Unbelievable!  We started going counterclockwise around the island, the first stop was the canapy tour.  A walkway has been built between 2 bayon trees, and then kind of a tree house in the tallest so you can see to the coast.

  Next we stopped at the gaints foot print.  This is the right foot print, apparently the left is in Fiji! 

 

 

 The coast road is really very beautiful.  We long ago gave up counting the number of churches, as they are one, two or three, max 6, in each village!  (The good news is that they are also cyclone shelters.)  The fales and lands were very well kept, such flowers, such colours.  We went to the blow holes, now this is a calm day, but Sam timed it just right when he threw in a basket of coconut shells and they flew at least a hundred feet in the air! 

 

We skipped the waterfalls as a tour coming down said it was muddy, so we were onto lunch.  This was at a lovely place called Louisa’s cabins.  Very relaxed and lush setting.  After lunch we went to the local market and Frankie’s supermarket, something cruisers always need to do.  We carried on by the ferry dock and onto John Williams tomb.  He brought Christianity to Samoa and is well regarded.  Our next stop was the church and virgin’s grave.  The storey is that when the volcano erupted in 1905-1911 the lava flowed past the church and went in the front door.  As to the virgin’s grave, everything else was covered in lava, except her grave.  As we were passing villages Sam was saying this is a marine reserve, see the stakes.  Then the same thing at the next village, until we finally figured that they are voluntarily conserving their resources!  These people should be running the UN!  Our last stop was Sam’s home.  A major Fales in Avao, the town we had been anchored in front of when we were in Matautu Bay!  Beautifully kept grounds, they have a normal house lived in by the extended family and a round fales in front for the family gatherings and a place for guests to sleep.  We finished the circum navigation of the island just before sunset.  A long but very good day.

Cheryl got a year older!  This was celebrated with blueberry pancakes for breakfast and stuffed porkchops with callalou stuffed with coconut milk on the barbeque.  Not to mention the last bottle of Palo Alto!

We prepared a picnic lunch and took our snorkel gear to the moto beside the entrance to the Bay.  We walked around the moto (that didn’t take long) then went for a snorkel.  Very shallow water, so easy to see the fish.  Some lovely stag horn coral, hosting many fish, but we didn’t stay there long as the current seemed to want to pull us out the pass.  We had some picnic foods and our last bottle of rose for lunch!

We had to send a form off to Fiji and the local telephone company has such poor internet that we had to take a bus into town to send it off.  This was a lovely 3 hour bus ride!  We got to see the entire west, south and east coasts again.  And again on our trip back!  We also bought Noni and Somoan coffee, so not a wasted trip!

The resort we were anchored in front of Va-i-monoa Seaside Lodge was very accommodating.  They were happy to let us leave our dinghy on their dock or beach.  The staff was lovely!  And the food was good, the wine even better!  On our last Sunday they did an Umu demonstration, which is a traditional method of cooking. Cheryl got to help make a basket, we made packages of Callaloo, stuffed with coconut milk and onions, which is then wrapped in a banana leaf, then wrapped in a breadfruit leaf.  If you do it right, it all stays together and they it ‘thrown’ on the fire.  A variety of lamb pieces and taro where also put on the fire.  These things were then covered with layers of banana/palm fronds/breadfruit leaves and are left for say 45 minutes.  Then all the leaves are removed and the food is ready!  The taste of the fire is part of the food.  We put the callaloo on slices of taro, lovely.  And tried lamb flaps!  Tastely, but not much in the way of meat.

 

One evening we had some questions to ask Sale, the owner, he invited us to join him and a friend of his for a glass of wine and sashimi of yellow finned tuna caught that day!  We had a great conversation.  Turns out they know people in the cultural show in Apia and we went on from there!

We met a lovely lady, Jacqueline, a Kiwi doctor getting away for a bit.  We shared many fish stories, Jacqueline has tried to impart more knowledge to us.  She laughed when she heard how we were gaffing fish, then she explained how we should do it.  We don’t know if we will be any better as we didn’t catch any fish on the passage to Fiji, even though we spent probably an hour in a fish boil.  Jacqueline came on board for lunch one day, Callaloo Soup and rum punch.  Both were enjoyed by all of us. 

We have been watching the weather each day and it looks like we will leave for Fiji on Monday.  Until then we will continue decreasing our wine supply, it has NEVER been so low.  We get the shakes worrying about finding some in Fiji, but we are only allowed to take in 4 bottles of wine OR 2 liters of alcohol.  Hmmm.

Somoa means SMILE!

SAMOA really should change their name to smiles, or island of smiles, as it seems everywhere you go you get a smile.  The people here are the most friendly we have experienced in all of our travels this year.  Not to say that the islands have not been friendly, in fact the opposite, from the moment we entered French Polynesia we have been welcomed.  But Samoans really tops the bunch! Wow, you can be walking down the street and a teenager will ask “how is your day going” and he really wants to know and the big thing he just wants to walk and talk with you, nothing else, and as you part company he says ”have a great day” .  That was our experience everywhere from the market to the taxies.  The children on the roads wave and give you a big grin.  Yup SAMOA really means smile.

WE LOST A DAY.

Well we arrived thinking we had arrived on a Friday, but some time ago, who knows when, SAMOA decided to be more in tune with the trading partners New Zealand and Australia so they changed the date line to between American Samoa and Samoa (western, they don’t like to be called western Somoa anymore).  All of books and all the information we had said we would not cross the date line until we entered Fiji, but what do books know.  You cannot check into Custom and Immigration, not to mention health and quarantine after hours or on weekends.   So we sat out at anchor for 2 days in the bay with 4 other boats, not really such a bad thing as the passage from Suwarrow in the Cooks was 4 days, so we had time to clean and sleep.  On Monday morning the parade started, as we did not drop our dingy, we were lucky that the two Cats by us volunteered to ferry the officials out to the boats.  First on the list:  Biosecurity.  Yup a guy in a skirt (most men here were skirts) climbs on our boat!  Okay ladies, think about climbing on a boat wearing a below the knee skirt!  He did it, he even removed his flip flops, oh yeah, another thing, everyone wears flip flops.  (They even use the cut-out for the soles which there usually 20 cut out to a piece as a way of holding down their palm frond roofs).  Anyway we pass bio security, he even said we have a clean boat.  Then customs and immigration together, we are in the country, almost, the last group is quarantine.  Well the two ladies didn’t even get out of the dingy, they sat there too scared to climb up so they just handed the paper to sign and left.  Yeah we are now free to come ashore so we haul anchor and go into the marina.

Somoa is made up of two big islands, with some little islands between the two.  The two big islands are Upoulo, which has the capital and administrative centre, Apia and Savaii.  Savaii is called the big island.

As we haven’t had internet for a time we go to the ice cream shop, some excuse, eh!  But really that is the closest internet hotspot!  It is also the place for fire dancing, go figure.  On Tuesday nights they have a local dance show, showing dancing styles of various Polynesian Islands, including fire dancing, a local dance.  The ice cream shop is associated with a local charity that is teaching dancing to kids dancing to keep them off the street.  The youngest fire dancer that night was probably 8 or 10 at the most!

On the Thursday we went to a local hotel for a further display of dancing and culture, not to mention a buffet of local foods.  We went early to enjoy a day with Joni (from Dancing Walrus) and Di from (Matira), a girls day out with a fresh water pool!

Thursday was also an event at the cultural centre.  The Somoans thought that most people only venture to their island for a week and they wanted the tourists to leave with an understanding of Somoan culture.  So they put on a show, they:  make coconut cream, prepare an umu (local cooking using a fire pit) local dancing, making tapa from Mulberry bark, tattooing and wood working.  All the while you can ask any question you want, just lovely!  And at the end of the show you get to eat what you saw being made.  And this is free, although they do ask for a donation.  We went twice, as we missed the beginning the first time.  The second time, as we were there early, we got to make a hat and plates out of palm fronds.  On top of the plates they put a section of a banana leaf and there you go, an organic plate!

 

We toured the island with Dancing Walrus (Ken and Joni), which was great.  First we went around clockwise.  We saw a hydro plant, Ken said lets go there.  We checked out the dam, then a worker came to see what we were doing and we drove with him to walk the tunnels through a mountain that the water takes to the turbines, lovely.  Next we saw a sign for Treehouse resorts.

  While we didn’t stay in one, they would have been lovely. We finished the pass through the centre of the island, taking pictures of waterfalls and the shoreline.  We lunched on the beach at a small resort.  (Most of the resorts have Fales that they rent, often not much more than a roofed platform, with palm frond walls if you are lucky.  Usually with shared bathroom facilities.  This would be very much how most Samoan’s live.)

Once back at the boat we had time to shower before we went for indian food.

The next day we crossed the centre of the island and then carried on clockwise.  We went to the sliding rocks, which is a series of waterfalls, which are worn enough that you can slide down them.  As it was dry season, there was only one falls that Karen and Joni slid down, but it was fun!

 

 

Early one morning Karen, Joni and Di hiked up to Robert Louis Stevenson’s tombe.  A nice walk up and down.  Mating snails on the trail, many birds and bats flying around at the top!  The view of Apia from the tombe was lovely.  We made it back in time to get to the cultural centre for the show.

 

We went to the market and all we can say about that is that no one could eat as much Taro as they have Taro to sell!  (In the Caribbean it would be called Dasheen and here they eat the root and the leaf.  Can you say Callalou soup!)

We found a place were you could get a therapeutic massage, which turned out to be awesome.  So we went back two more times!  It was funny, an hour massage was 60 Tala (just less than 30 dollars) and a hair cut was 30 Tala, go figure!  We put all the other boats onto this place!

We took one last drive with Joni and Di.  Dancing Walrus and Matira had gone driving and ended up in a different place from where we did.  It was bugging Joni that she couldn’t connect the two roads in her mind.  So we went to see where the road went.  We drove to the end of the road they had been on before and then walked for 15-30 minutes to see if we could get to the road that we had been on.  If we walked another hour or so the two roads would probably have joined up.  In the end the issue is that the map was wrong.  What we walked was a hydro right of way, which was shown on the map as a sealed road.  At least that puzzle was solved.

And then it was time to move on.  So we went to the Prime Ministers office and got permission to go to Savaii, cleared out with immigration and customs and headed for Savaii.