apia to faofao -and back

As I mentioned in the earlier post, I stayed some nights at Faofao. To get to Faofao, I first of all had to get to Upolu, the main island of Samoa. From Regina's it's quite easy. You either take a taxi or the local bus to the ferry terminal on Savai'i, but being sick made the task a wee bit more challenging. Luckily a car of adventurous half Samoan New Zealanders gave me and (my) nurse Michael a ride to the ferry terminal, so I didn't have to be piled up with others in a wooden bus while having a pretty heavy fever. On, and from the ferry, the road got more challenging for whimpering me, but thank the lord I had Michael to look after me:) We arrived in Apia, after the ride from Regina's to the ferry, the warm ferryride, and a bus ride into town, around 4 something PM. Next on the agenda was to find a doctor, a pharmacy, a cheap place to spend the night and find something to call dinner. I was not feeling up for any of this. But not wanting to just sit down in the gutters of Apia, I found a taxi driver willing to help me and drive me around for 2 hours back and forth, and for a reasonable price. So a doctors verdict of a serious throat infection, zigzags in the city between pharmacies, accomodation hunting and buying sick supplies from various supermarkets, I finally passed out in a room at Valentines Motel in Apia. Overdosing on the superstrong antibiotics worked miracles on me during the night, so the next day I was up for finding another place to stay, OUTSIDE Apia. Recommendations lead my decicion to Faofao. I had some time to stroll around the uninspiring markets in Apia before I took a local bus to the beautiful beach fales of Fao Fao. The busride was long and hard (it was a bus made of wood...?!?), but it rode through stunning mountain landscape and small villages, and this made my butt feel much less numb. A man sitting behind me in the bus with no teeth, very eager to talk, told me all kinds of interesting and uninteresting things about what we saw while driving, and he even let me in on some info about he tsunami a couple of tears back, and the destruction it had had on faofao and all the land around it. Sad news, but faofao seemed to have recovered ok, so defo worth a visit for any kind of sun loving hippie of hipster.
Here are some pictures I took while getting to and from Fao Fao.