Day 334, Year 1: Website Overload
Date: Saturday, September 16, 2006
Weather: Beautiful Day; Rain in the Evening
Location: Apia Harbor, Upolu Island, Samoa
Evidently I have been writing and sending logs for the past few days, but they have not been posted on the website. We exceeded our site capacity and have been in contact with the webhost to pay for more space, but it is taking a longer than we hoped to get his accomplished. The overload happened when pictures from French Polynesia were in the process of being posted. I was not able to send those pictures to Justin via e-mail, so I sent them on a CD. I didn’t shrink the size as I would have if they had been sent by e-mail, and the full size pictures caused the overload. All of this is complicated by the fact that Justin is here and doesn’t have round the clock access to the internet. He goes in once a day to check on things, but with time differences, this is a slow process. We are hoping that things will be fixed early next week. In the meantime, I will continue to write and post logs daily and hope that you will have time to catch up once the logs are on the site.
Today we toured the eastern end of this island. There were 18 of us in two van taxis-cruisers from Quantum Leap, Aqua Magic, Noa, Kika, Jade, and Windbird. We headed east from Apia along the northern coast. Our first stop was at an old Methodist church that has fresh water pools beneath it. The pools are in caves and you can swim underwater between the two pools. The braver among us tried this. Since you had to climb down slippery rocks to get into the pools, I passed on this one. We had a great time and then continued our trip. We stopped to see a waterfall and then drove to the beaches on the east and south side of the island. We stopped at a small restaurant that caters to the visitor’s staying in the beach fales. Here you can pay the equivalent of about $25US to stay overnight in a fale right on the beach, and the price includes breakfast and dinner. Once we say the beauty of the beach, we were all ready to abandon ship and stay in a beach fale for the rest of our lives. Truly, the beaches on the southern part of this island are the most beautiful we have seen in the South Pacific. And the snorkeling is great. We had lunch, swam, snorkeled, and just sat on the beach for about three hours total before resuming our island tour. The villages on this island are much more traditional than those in American Samoa, and we saw many traditional fales along the way. Our next stop was another waterfall, but this one came with a little “education package” included. We learned all about the importance and uses of the coconut in this culture and finally learned the name of some of the plants and trees we have been seeing. The waterfall was spectacular and the coconut education most informative.
When we got about half way around the island, it was time to head home on the Cross Island road. We made one more waterfall stop and then we were back in Apia. It was a wonderful day, and now we just need to figure out how to get back to those southern beaches. This really is a beautiful island.
We had a few fatalities today. Tom on Quantum Leap got a nasty scrape on his forehead when entering the caves at Piula and Patrick on Aqua Magic also got a head scrape on the same rock. Arnie from Jade wasn’t feeling great when we started, but got really sick as the day progressed. It seems like it is probably the result of an infection from a cut, and hopefully getting home and starting a course of antibiotics should solve his problem. Otherwise, we had a healthy and happy day.
Tomorrow is Sunday and will be a day of rest for us. Justin and Lynn are having a great time, but they expressed a need to have a vacation from their vacation. They’ll get that tomorrow and then we’ll continue our exploring on Monday.
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| 060916 Day 334a Samoa–Upolu East Tour |
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| 060916 Day 334b Samoa–Sopo'aga Falls Garden |
