exploring savai'i

Me, Thomas and Michael rented a car on the third day on Savai'i. We thought we might be able to see all the tourist attractions in one day, and we did, but we had to hurry - a lot! Savai'i is a big island, and ideal would be to rent the car for a couple of days and spread the sightseeing out on several days, but poor as we were we only rented for one day...
But is was a day full fun and sightseeing, and the weather was good as well.
We started off by driving to the turtle sanctuary, where we dropped Michael off into the water to enjoy the company of the many sea turtles. I had the job of taking pictures of Michael and his kisses with the turtles. The price was the same for all of us, the lady with no English skills told us, while feeding the many hungry turtles with papaya. "Swim with turtle 5 taala, no swim with turtle 5 taala. Ok, 5 bucks it is then...
See, in Samoa you have to pay for everything. Everything is owned by someone and you always have to pay an entrance fee, even though the place is neglected, forgotten and not maintained at all. Easy money making I guess. But the turtle sanctuary is definitely worth the money.
After that we stopped at the lava fields and got our gangsta group photo taken. Then we drove off to find a waterfall, and after a drive back and forth we finally found it. It was beautiful and we had it all to our selves. We swam, took pictures and had "lunch". Lunch as in banana, papaya and coconut. We continued on to the blowholes, which are big holes in the lavafield, by the sea. The sea is pressed up under the lava landscape and up the holes, creating a big fountain of water spraying up in the air. A very cool experience, a stunning piece of natures art!
But by this time my fever had risen and I felt quite sick, so the rest of day was not as nice and adventurous for my part... We drove on for hours to try and find food, a task proved to be almost impossible. (Again, Samoa does not do restaurants apparently). We ended up finding it at our last stop, after we visited a church destroyed by a hurricane a couple of yeas back. We had dinner, and finished our day watching the sun set at the worlds most western point. And then we drove home of course:) all the culture of savai'i in one day. Super tourist FTW!

my fale

The view from my fale. Imagine waking up to this every morning. Not bad.

regina's fales

As mentioned, I stayed at a place called Regina's fales. Highly recommendable! It was 60WST, roughly 20€ a night for a fale, including three meals a day. That's a pretty sweet deal I'd say! The food was good and the atmosphere was family oriented and relaxed. You simply do not stress at Regina's. There's nothing to do but eat, read, take walks on the beach, watch turtles come up for air, sunbathe and nap. I got pretty good at napping :)
The first two nights I stayed there with two others. Thomas from Norway and young Michael form Germany. We spent almost all time together and had a blast. In the evenings we had some beers, Vailima to be exact, hung out in the fales, talked, watched the stars and listened to Thomas play some tunes on his guitar. Life was pretty good. And the weather was ok too! The only thing that could of course interrupt my inner peace was that bloody sandy wet disguising cat, that kept on creeping into my fale. The cherry on top was the constant ass liking ON my bed. Not cool cat! (and he knew it)
But defo a big thumbs up for Regina's!