Seek and you shall find solitude in American Samoa
| • | The other Samoa takes pride in independence |
By Robert Cross
Chicago Tribune
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| On the island of Ofu, the national park has a magnificent beach and extends over coral reefs teeming with sea life.
Knight Ridder News Service |
Diana pressed the point: "I talked to somebody at the tourism office and she said, 'Why do you want to go to Ofu? There's nothing there.' She was right. There aren't any resorts, no music, no golf courses, no native dancing girls ..."
Of course, Diana wanted the place to herself. Please, she begged, don't encourage more travelers to explore the vividly colored coral reefs, skim the bright blue surf, or wander through the little villages with their pastel-tinted houses and gentle people.
Diana, who is from Kaua'i, had hopped a six-hour flight from Honolulu to Pago Pago, the big city on the island of Tutuila, with no problem. From there, it's a 60-mile, 30-minute flight to Ofu.
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American Samoa National Park Established as a national park: Sept. 9, 1993 (authorized Oct. 31, 1988). Area: 9,097 acres (all nonfederal), with portions on three islands. Visitors: 1,938 in 2002. Flora and fauna: Old World (Asian/African) rain forest includes many species of trees, vines, lichens, ferns and air plants. Coral reefs support 900 species of fish. Birds include sea birds, shore birds, water birds, forest birds. Fruit bats (flying foxes) are the only native mammals. Entrance fee: None. |
This is the only national park not at least partially owned by the Department of the Interior. The land in the territory of American Samoa belongs to the people in perpetuity, handed down from family to family. The Interior Department signed a 50-year lease in 1993.
During my walk, I met Diana and her friend from O'ahu, Kirk Miyake. They offered a ride in the bed of a battered gray pickup truck borrowed from Va'oto Lodge, where they were staying.
"Isn't this something? Isn't this magnificent?" Diana said when we paused at an inlet and took in the ocean panorama — a crescent of deep green, a border of sandy beige and a deep blue infinity. "Don't tell anyone," she added.
Diana told me she first learned about American Samoa while reading a book on national parks. Ofu sounded like a perfectly isolated island where she could escape for a while from Kaua'i, an island she considers overrun. "We had a million visitors last year. Imagine — on an island of 60,000 residents!"
Kirk and Diana took me over the bridge to Olosega and on to the end of the road, just beyond Olosega, the town. They planned to hike the jagged, coral-strewn path to Maga Point. I said I would make my way back to Ofu and Va'oto Lodge, about four miles from there. "You won't have to walk all the way," Diana assured me. "The people are very friendly, and anyone driving along the road will stop and offer a ride."
Over the bridge
I wandered through the town, admiring the neat if sparsely planted yards and carefully painted houses. At a tiny grocery I bought a bottle of water for 50 cents and continued walking to the bridge that connects the islands. It unobtrusively links two beautiful clumps of pointed peaks covered with vegetation.
On the other side of the bridge, a pack of four small dogs took me on — yapping, lunging at my ankles. I stopped and confronted them, and they backed off. Of course, as soon as I resumed walking, they figured the merry chase was on again. That lasted for half an hour, until the dogs decided to straggle home.
No vehicles in sight. I walked some more, drinking water and taking in the pristine Polynesian vistas. In the heat of the day, soon I was out of water with two more miles to go.
I walked into Va'oto Lodge's main room — a combination lounging and dining area with well-worn furniture — and drank glass after glass of water from a jug placed on a table. After awhile, Kirk and Diana returned from their hike and we sat around chatting with Madeline, a visitor from Amsterdam and the only other guest, and Marjorie Malae, who runs the lodge with her husband, Tito.
"Those dogs are very bad," Madeline said after I described my recent adventure. "The ones by the bridge have a ball chasing people." That led to a discussion of the even less domesticated wildlife on American Samoa. The most notable creatures are two types of flying fox — or bat — one of which is unique to Samoa, but very rare.
After a lull in the conversation, Diana piped up: "You're in the heart of the action right now. This is it. And once we leave ... I hope you're going to tell people that if they're going to come here for a hot time, they've picked the wrong spot."
The hot times — at least relatively speaking — might be found on the island of Tutuila, site of the bustling town of Pago Pago (pronounced Pango Pango) and several villages, home to most of American Samoa's 60,000 residents. The main national park area there is a wooded and rocky stretch of land above a ridge overlooking Pago Pago Harbor with cliffs that plunge straight into the sea.
I found the park headquarters in a strip mall where Pago Pago's downtown ends and the main road begins to lead out to a section on the harbor's north side dominated by two huge, stinking tuna canneries. Thousands of workers put up Starkist or Chicken of the Sea and, during breaks, mingle alongside the highway.
Bats in the rain
Past the canneries and up onto the jagged cliffs, the scenery improves considerably, as the residential areas spread out and wild landscape appears.
In the park, from an overlook with a simple shelter, or fale, I watched two flying foxes soar from tree to tree. I could tell those bats weren't birds only through binoculars. Their perch was so high up on the slopes, they might have been crows. Soon they rendered themselves distinctly bat-like, swinging upside down from their branch, blowing in the wind kicked up by an approaching storm.
I saw a nearly pitch-black sky descending like a curtain while the coconut palms and that verdant blanket of ferns, broadleaf evergreens and grasses rippled with the breeze. In a few minutes, the rain came down as if someone had turned on fire hoses. All the while, I was the only visitor. The few vehicles that passed by the overlook never stopped. I retreated to the car and drove back into town.
The park has not been set aside for recreationists or sightseers so much as to protect its coral reefs, giant clams, sea turtles, fisheries, plant life, mammals, reptiles and birds.
"We haven't matured to the stage where this park would meet your expectations for the kinds of amenities that a national park back in the States would," said Peter Craig, the staff biologist. "People who come here thinking they're going to have a terrific national park experience would find out they're going to have to do most stuff on their own. The whole territory is not geared for tourism."
The island of Tutuila, about 20 miles long and 5 miles wide at its widest point, seems to be geared more toward canning tuna and serving as a port. At one section of the Pago Pago Harbor, containers soar higher than most of the downtown buildings. Near the airport, the Army Reserve Training Center serves as a reminder that this part of Samoa became a U.S. territory partly because of its strategic position in the South Pacific.
Busy growing
In some ways, Tutuila, largest of the seven islands, looks like America. Traffic leans heavily toward pickup trucks and SUVs. Most of the newer buildings are plain and functional. The population is growing — 60,000 people now but expanding at an annual rate of nearly 4 percent. Efforts to preserve a little land as pristine beach, coral reef and rain forest take on a sense of urgency.
Because the park is spread over parts of three islands, each has its own characteristics. Tutuila's combines rugged peaks and rain forest with glimpses of village life and a view down on the congestion of Pago Pago. "Ta'u is the youngest of our islands," Craig said, "more of a volcanic dome that's all vegetated. It's much more remote and doesn't have much in the way of amenities for tourists. It's just a gorgeous place. Ofu's most spectacular point is that coastal lagoon. You can walk off the sandy beach right into a protected water area and enjoy looking at the colorful coral reef fish or the corals themselves."
The three major islands were previously served by Samoa Air, which is no longer in business. Beginning this week, Aloha Airlines will offer service to Pago Pago three times weekly.
On my day trip to Ofu with a stop in Ta'u, the passengers were mostly Samoans.
On my Tutuila stay at the Ta'alolo Lodge & Golf Resort, two fellow guests said they were making a television documentary about Samoa as a source of players for the NFL.
On Tutuila, people get around via pickup-truck buses called 'aiga. The buses gather at the expansive apron of a shopping mall, across from the police station. All day, the buses compete in a beauty contest of old sheet metal painted bright colors and festooned with signs, banners, decals and whimsical nameplates like the jeepneys of the Philippines.
Craig had been correct. This wasn't the carefree idyll some outsiders might imagine.
Pago Pago would appear to be in the throes of cheerful urban chaos, but there are rules — mostly unwritten — that cover almost all aspects of human behavior.
Visitors are warned not to visit small villages on a Sunday, as being too disruptive. Dress modestly even when swimming if the beach is near a village. Remove shoes when entering a fale. Ask permission before swimming at a village beach. Almost anyone will do, because it's felt that the beach belongs to the village as a whole. Also get permission before taking someone's picture or climbing a mountain close to a settlement. The list goes on.
At the western end of the national park on Tutuila, near the village of Fagasa, I took photographs of the bay that laps against the park's beach and the surrounding green cliffs. A group of girls came strolling toward me on the main road. I didn't need to ask their permission, because when they saw the camera, they immediately arranged themselves into a jaunty pose. As they walked on, laughing and chatting with a friendly dog at their heels, I felt, for the moment, this was paradise enough.
• • •
The other Samoa takes pride in independence
APIA, Samoa — This country used to be called the Independent State of Western Samoa, then simply independent Samoa, but now, residents insist, this is the Samoa — two large islands and two small ones about 60 miles west of American Samoa, a U.S. territory.
As far as these Samoans are concerned, American Samoa is another place, a distant and somewhat estranged relative. "We have to get a permit to visit American Samoa," one resident informed me. "We don't do that to them."
I saw only a small portion of Samoa's main island, 'Upolo. I missed Savai'i, the other big island, and the small ones — Manono and Apolima — that lie in between. But there was enough national pride on 'Upolo to make up for the rest. Besides, 'Upolo holds 122,000 of Samoa's 177,000 population.
My base was Aggie Grey's, a sprawling hotel combining tropical thatch and fale huts with modern amenities. It seemed to be an expat kind of place. I heard British accents at the bar and admired the way those lava-lava-wearing staff members bustled about, unsmiling but efficient. Polynesian music wafted through the lush gardens.
Lava-lavas (pareus wrapped at the waist) are the country's uniform. The strange sights, sartorially speaking, were those people wearing shorts, or bikinis at the beach: Tolerated but frowned upon, since revealing the lower body is considered immodest by traditional Samoan custom.
In Apia, travelers and locals milled along the main streets, where there is a wide choice of restaurants, stores, bars and lodging, Aggie Grey's being the most famous.
The place has a story behind it. Aggie Grey started out by selling hamburgers and coffee to U.S. service men in 1942, because her husband, Charlie Grey, had gambled away everything they had and she needed the dough.
It grew from there — from a hangout for tired military personnel to a fancy tropical hotel known all over the South Pacific, a glamorous stopover for island-hoppers of means.
For me, Samoa necessarily served as a stop for material and physical replenishment. My flight from Los Angeles landed on 'Upolo, and a week later, my next flight, to Auckland, New Zealand, would take off from here.
At Aggie Grey's, I could get laundry done, fire up the laptop and book a whirlwind tour of 'Upolo, a place I had seen only at night, the week before, while waiting for a morning flight to Pago Pago in American Samoa.
There were three of us who got into the gray van on the day of our tour. The young man and older woman had little to say. They sat in the back. I sat up front with our driver/guide, Tali. Last name? "Tali," he said. "It's sort of like saying Tali Jr."
We began a clockwise circuit of 'Upolo, weaving through the traffic of downtown Apia and moving on to a countryside of neat houses constituting little villages.
After taking a right turn into the interior, Tali stopped long enough to let us gaze at a big beige house, where Robert Louis Stevenson lived out his twilight years.
The wandering Scottish poet and author spent most of his adult life fighting off tuberculosis and other ailments.
Around 1890 he and his wife, Fanny Osborne, decided that Samoa had the most salubrious climate of any place in all their travels.
They built the big house and called it Vailima. In the four remaining years of his life, Stevenson became a champion of Samoan independence and a hero to the people of his adopted land.
"Would you like to look inside the house?" Tali asked us. I had heard the imported European furnishings and decor were superb. But my van mates outvoted me 2-1, and we moved on.
The skies darkened, but the van took us through a fair sampling of what a long stay in Samoa might have in store — broad, empty beaches, rain forest, palms, green mountains, villages where chiefs still hold sway, resorts that diffidently blend in with the scenery.
We stopped at the impressive Papapapai-tai Falls, where a strong, narrow stream of water plunges 330 feet into a lush, green gorge. "There's a car down in there," Tali said. "But we can't see it."
A brochure had promised a "surprise beach" and that turned out to be Matareva, down the road from the more famous but virtually unswimmable Return to Paradise Beach, known for its role in the 1951 Gary Cooper film based on the James Michener novel "Return to Paradise."
After receiving permission from the group of men who hung around the road to Matareva Beach, we went swimming and then ate lunch. And soon the rain came down. Tali cut some large palm fronds and put them in the van. "Now we have umbrellas," he said.
On our way back to town, we swung past Faleolo airport. My international flight would depart from there the next day. In daytime, Faleolo looked open and friendly, nothing like the crowded, steamy, confusing place that it becomes when the planes begin disgorging passengers and taking them on.
Back in Apia, I walked for a while — through the flea market and its goods, from belts to baskets to dolls, past the government buildings, consulates, banks, bars and drugstores. Everywhere, I heard the scuff-scuff-scuff of slippers and the occasional snarl of automobiles with their defiant windshield decals: "Fear This," "Street Cool," "You Are Despicable," "Samoa Pride."
At a booth in the flea market, a young couple sold me some black T-shirts that said, "There are only 2 kinds of people in this world: SAMOANS and those who wanna be." Even after a short stay, I could see how that kind of declaration, if true, could lead to a profound identity crisis.
Correction: Aloha Airlines will offer service to Pago Pago, American Samoa, three times weekly beginning this week. Samoa Air, which had offered service between the islands of American Samoa, is no longer in business. A previous version of this story contained outdated information.
