Back from Savaii

I’m back from Savaii, and what a week it was! It’ll probably go down as one of my favorites of the entire program. It felt almost like we were on vacation except for the few assignments we had due while we were there. We toured around the island with a 75-year geologist from Australia. He reminded me a little bit of my grandfather, and I know that if he had been there they would have had some pretty intense rock discussions. I think Warren, our guide, was a little disappointed that none of us knew anything about rocks.

We visited the largest ancient known Polynesian rock mound. They have some idea of when it was build, but no clue as to why. Perhaps human sacrifice? Maybe for pigeon hunting? They just don’t know. A short hike away was a 45ftish tall waterfall with a beautiful clear water hole that was used as a swimming hole. Jumping through a waterfall is a lot of fun! We also visited some blowholes, did a cliff walk, hiked a mile through lava fields, and saw some other random touristy things.

Thursday we moved from the hotel where we’d been staying to some fales on the northern side of the island. Talk about amazing! We were right on a beautiful sandy beach, but without the swarms of tourists that we see so often in the states. It took thirty seconds to go from my fale to the water. Needless to say I spent quite a bit of my spare time snorkeling or just relaxing under a palm tree.

Saturday was possibly one of my favorite days. In the morning a small group of us hiked up to the dwarves cave. It’s a huge lava tube of undetermined length, but legend has it that a group of small people once inhabited it. A man found them while hunting and in return for keeping their location a secret granted him all his wished and made him a wealthy man. Unfortunately he did not keep his secret forever and several years later shared the location. When others from his village went to investigated they found no one there, and when they returned to the village all the man’s possessions have disappeared. Perhaps the magical dwarves are still down there, far far underground where no one else has explored. Going through this cave was something else! There was a very small, maybe 4 ft in diameter opening, but then once you got inside it was easily 9 ft high and fairly wide. We had three lights between the five of us and our guide so you can imagine how dark it was. We had no idea where we were going. At one point the path dropped into a pool of water and our guide told us we would be going down and then swimming across to get to the other side. We looked at each other and just went ummm…. It was unreal. You would never get to do something like that in the states. There would be all sorts of warnings and handrails and protections in place. But it was so much fun! We spent a few hours with our guide and afterwards he climbed a coconut tree and got us something to drink. The craziest part is that at the very end after we’d been invited to come back and spend a few days with his family we found out that he was our language teacher’s brother.

Later that evening, right before sunset I managed to get two of the people who hadn’t come on the hike to go kayaking in the ocean with me. Everyone else was too tired. Me? I was so pumped. We were out in the water for about an hour and let me just say that riding those waves was a blast! I would love to go again! I’ll admit I took a few tumbles and lost my kayak at one point but catching some of those bigger waves was such an adrenaline rush!

Sunday we came back to Alafua. This time the hour long ferry ride was full of people coming back for work and school on Monday. Samoans are generally laid back until it comes to transportation. I’ve never seen such a mad dash for a small opening. As several others mentioned- its worse than the subways of NYC if you can believe that. I’ll have to leave the full description of the ferry for later however as I have class very soon.