Samoa! Weeekkk 1! lava fields, food, traveling terrors

(i figured week one was so long i'd split it up)
Hey I’m back from Samoa! (side note: I was in Western Samoa just so ya know, not American Samoa, we did have weather warnings, but yea most of you looked at American…and American is more modern than western)
ANYWAYS! We experienced so much so you best believe this blog is gonna be beastly long!
Sooo I was really nervous for Samoa, packing, leaving etc. more nervous than excited, like I usually am when I travel. We drove two hours to Christchurch, took a flight to Auckland for an hour seemed like a breeze, 3 hours with movies! Finally finished watching the Proposal, I had like a half hour left of that movie. We arrived in Samoa in the early early am and had to go through security and stuff and man as soon as we got off that plane and walked down those steps it was like ‘yup…this is humidity…this is Samoa” (90 degrees, 90% humidity most of the trip) We got there at like 4am and drove to our hotel and people were awake, we were like uhh..wow people are up early in Samoa. We got to our hotel and they said there was a tsunami warning so we had to go to a different one at higher ground. Surprisingly I wasn’t nervous…possibly because I was really tired and just wanted to sleep, and cuz I knew God would keep us safe..i just didn’t have any fear. So we got to sleep at a crappy hotel…but not in a room but in the lobby..on the concrete floor..It was GREAT! Jk not really and I barely slept. We were supposed to “wake up” at 9 but that didn’t happen cuz well…there was a warning and I was up from the time we left Kaikoura til that moment. Now that I think of it, I really didn’t get much sleep the entire time in Samoa.

So we finally got to our sketch “hotel” we were supposed to stay at the first time, Tatiana. It wasn’t so great cuz it was hot, cement walls which wasn’t very ‘cool’ and when I went into the room I kinda felt like it was this NYC sketch place where the light flickers, flickers, flickers, til it comes on and makes a buzzy noise and then you hear someone say “oh don’t mind the blood on the floor…no one was killed” and “don’t mind the cockroaches and they won’t mind you lol. Jk. It wasn’t like that but reminded me of that…sketchy and uncomfortable. Stinky, one fan, two beds, one table and a small clothes line. Window for ‘circulation’ that led out to the hallway…not outside. Lol.
Um I couldn’t wait to get out of that place :P It all sounds very negative cuz well it is. I didn’t enjoy that place, and I wasn’t feeling well and I was over exhausted. And well that night i had just about one of the very lowest times in my entire life, i was up for 48 hours and laid onto a bed that was lodging its springs into my back, i was over heated, over exhausted, over tired and breaking down...i wrote a very depressing journal entry that night...i can semi chuckle about it now...but i was sad. i wanted to call my mom...however that was impossible. I prayed a bit and cried a bit. Jody came in later and switched beds with me cuz he got me lost, and i was so so thankful, and then she prayed and we drifted off...

The next full day in Apia at Tatiana hotel we were supposed to go around the ‘city’ and explore to buy a lava lava which is like a wrap, but you have to keep it below the knee and we’d wear them with shorts…every day. And you could only take em off for swimming or in the privacy of your room, and when we swam we had to wear a tshirt and shorts, after a while I really got used to it, I didn’t even care the very last day when they said you could take them off, I was comfortable. Lol. The first day we had to split off into pairs and Jody and I were together. We had fun, got out lava lavas, and hunted for a lunch place which basically took us forever cuz Saturday there wasn’t a lot open and we kept being pointed to other places and walked farther and farther….so we decided to finally turn around and found a place to get kebabs and we were happy to sit down. BUT the adventure began when we tried to head back to the hotel, I don’t know what we were thinking. I was following Jody cuz she seemed to have a good sense of direction and she claimed she knew where she was going, I just followed her and I would say out loud occasionally, this doesn’t look familiar, and at other points I’d say it inside…being more visual as I am…nothing looked familiar from the past two days. We asked a few people, one person led us very astray and one man was like “oh you’re very far” we’re like oh crap…great…according to the map we got with street names…but no actually physical street signs in samoa…not helpful…lol. We were very very far. So we tried to ask someone for a phone they didn’t have one. And we asked a lady how to get back and she may or may not have helped out a lot lol.

A few days later we went to Safua Hotel, which was in Savaii. Apia is on Upolu which is a different island. So we had to take a ferry and then drive to Safua. It was much much nicer than Tatiana. The girls all stayed in a fala (pronounced fa-lay) that was closed, and fit all of us, 7! Two bunks, one double, two singles. I made the mistake of sleeping in the room not directly under the fan and did not sleep at all, so I moved my bed and felt much better the next day.

The first day in Savaii we went to lava fields, which were basically hardened lava that stretched for miles til it got to the coast. And God provided a nice breeze during the whole walk  and the coast was absolutely beautiful, I’ve never seen waves so big and GORGEOUS crystal blue. We also saw ocean arches and blowholes that day, very sweet. Ocean arches are well…the ocean wears and tears on the coast and creates a natural arch and the water flows underneath, its quite pretty. The blowholes not sure how they are formed but water shoots up from the ground like old faithful but its by the coast and is determined by the waves comin in. The guys that came along threw coconuts and we saw how ridiculously high they shot up. Warren, an 80 year old man who retired in Samoa, was our guide this first week. And in the lava fields he was describing how people degredate the lava fields and tear it up, someone asked ‘how do we stop the degradation’ he quickly replied ‘machine gun’ and walked away nonchalantly lol. We were all like…wow…can’t believe he just said that lol. We also got to hike up the second largest volcano in Savaii.

In Savaii we also got to swim in front of a beautiful waterfall in this cool blue pool, we saw how they prepared their food and traditional mats and handmade stuff. It was amazing! Just to make coconut cream is such a huge task, its crazy, I definitely appreciated my food after that…although I wasn’t too faithful eating it all the first week.

The Food! So if you were wondering what I was eating for two weeks it consisted of taro, breadfruit, bananas, rice, veggies, fish, tinfish and coconut and something else wrapped in taro leaves, lots of curry chicken, pork, bread lots of bread. That was at Safua. My stomach really had a lot of trouble adjusting, I couldn’t always eat it all. Taro is like a thick thick potato, it was only good in my opinion if you cooked it right or had coconut cream with it. Breadfruit actually comes from the tree and has the consistency of bread in a sense, but is only good in my opinion if its hot and baked. Curry was not how I excepted, but it was decent. I ate a lot of rice when I couldn’t eat the other things, and the fish and coconut wrapped in leaves was really oober strong, I liked it depending on how the host cooked it. But after my stomach adjusted a bit more I was so surprised how much I was able to eat. I feel like I’m definitely becoming a world traveler. I am able to tolerate pretty nasty situations now, I'm getting tolerate of low accomodations and little comfort and little comfort food.

Week two: part two: homestays and hurricane warnings coming soon!