Samoa

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In June, 2025, I flew to Samoa.  It’s about two-thirds of the way from Hawaii to New Zealand.  Pretty remote.  There’s one flight weekly from Hawaii–that’s it–and there’s nothing from the American mainland, so I used Fiji Airways, which operates nonstops between Fiji and Los Angeles.  It also runs nonstops to San Francisco and Dallas and Vancouver.  That’s an ambitious airline for a country with fewer than a million people. I took the Dallas flight, then connected at Fiji to another Fiji Airways flight and backtracked 750 miles northeasterly to Apia.  

Apia is Samoa’s capital.  With about 35,000 people, it’s probably not a city, but it’s crowded enough that cops at rush hour stand at intersections and impatiently wave hesitant drivers, like me, through red lights.

I had a reservation for a rental car.  The agent told me that her office was open from eight to five every day, but when I returned a week later, just before noon, the office was closed.  There was no key box or slot.  

A security guard suggested that I park the car and leave the key at the airport’s information desk.  This made me uneasy, but I did as he said and then went looking for the check-in counter for Talofa Airlines, whose business consists almost entirely of running several flights daily between Apia and Pago Pago, the international airport for American Samoa.  Pago Pago is about 70 miles east of Apia.  

I couldn’t find the Talofa desk, so I went back to the information lady.  She told me that Talofa used a satellite terminal about two miles away.  There was no shuttle, there were no taxis, and I had to be there in half an hour.  The lady at the information desk did have a solution.  She suggested that we go together in the car whose key I had just given her.  She’d drop me off and then drive the car back, park it, and give the key to the lady at the car-rental agency whenever it opened.  Again I hesitated but went ahead.  

The Talofa plane, with one crew member and eight passengers, was full.  We landed in about half an hour.  Pan American in the 1930s came to Pago Pago with flying boats.  Much later, after an airfield was built during World War II, it came with Boeing 707s.  So did American Airlines and Continental, but Transpacific flights no longer need to refuel midway, so Pan Am and the others quit, and the only flights from the States to American Samoa today are three flights weekly from Honolulu.  That’s it.  The flights take almost six hours and are run by Hawaiian Airlines on 737s.  I’m not wild about long flights on single-aisle planes, but passengers have no choice if they want to go straight to the land of the free and the home of the brave.  

Parenthetically, it’s good to remember that American Samoa is part of the United States.  I met a young man in a quiet village about 15 miles from the airport, and I ignorantly assumed that he was anchored to this island.  It’s called Tutuila.  Then he mentioned he would soon be returning to college in California.  I met someone else who said that she annually visited her daughter in Arizona.  They both were regular customers for Hawaiian Airlines.

Again I had a reservation for a car, and my itinerary said that the company–you’d recognize the name if I told you–had a counter at the Pago Pago airport.   This proved to be false.  The itinerary did have a phone number.  A man answered and said he was just leaving church and would come over and take me the mile or so to the office.

Half an hour later, I was sitting in that office as he worked diligently on the contract.  I said I’d return the car in four days.  He told me to bring it here.  He’d give me a ride back to the terminal.  Four days later, in the middle of a Monday, the office was locked tight.  I phoned but got a recording saying that the mailbox was full.  Fortunately, I at least sometimes learn fast.   I went to the airport, parked the car, and found a car-rental company I had never heard of but which had a counter and a friendly agent named Rachel. I left the key with her.  

Twice lucky, you may say–and I was lucky, because there was no problem either here or earlier in Apia–but I’m not talking about luck.  I’m talking about the Samoan personality.  

I flew back to Apia and rented another car from the same lady I had met before.  I said I’d return in a week.  We chatted a bit, and I said I had a flight back to Fiji just before five in the morning on the eighth day. The agent asked me where I was staying that last night.  I told her I would be at a hotel a couple of miles away.  She said that instead of returning the car to the airport that last night I should just park the car at the hotel.  The next morning I could take the hotel’s shuttle bus to the airport.  No muss, no fuss.  “Leave the key at the hotel’s front desk,” she said.  “I’ll come by later and pick it up.”  I don’t know how or when she did this.  More important, I don’t know why she did it.  It’s not the behavior I expect.

One more anecdote.  Foreigners who rent cars in Samoa are required to get a temporary Samoan driver’s licence.  The rental-car agent at Apia filled out the form for me while I sat in her office that first time.  I tucked the paper into my wallet and assumed I’d never need it, but twice in the coming weeks I was stopped by police at roadblocks.  Sure enough, they asked for my Samoan license.  I showed it.  With a smile they let me carry on.  

Then, two or three days before I flew back to Fiji, I went to a beach called Tiavea.  It’s on the rugged northeast coast of Upolu.  That’s the island Apia’s on.  There’s a coastal road around most of the island but not here, where the road instead runs inland along the island’s mountain crest or spine.

Google says there is a branch road running north to Tiavea Beach, but it doesn’t say that no sensible person would attempt the last mile or two with an ordinary car.  I parked when I lost my nerve.  Then I walked down the badly gullied track and found a beach tourist-ready except for seaweed that at this time of year breaks free from its coral reef and washes ashore.  It didn’t stink, but it did spoil the perfect sand that hotels need when they’re advertising a tropical paradise.  Fortunately, there was no hotel.  There was nothing except a deserted beach 4,000 feet long, framed at both ends by nearly vertical mountains buried under almost impenetrably dense tropical rainforest.  Somebody had planted bananas just inland from the beach, but otherwise I saw no sign of human activity other than the ruined road.

Sweating my way back uphill, I was surprised to see an old car lumbering downhill towards me.  I was too tired to say more than a few words, and I’m not sure who was more surprised, the driver or me.  I suppose he had been this way many times and knew where to get help if he needed it.

I continued uphill, leaning on a stick I had found.  Then I heard a voice.  I turned and realized that I had seen this young man as I had walked down to the beach.  He had been walking down there too, along with a boy on a donkey, but they walked fast, and I hadn’t seen them once I got down there. I have no idea what they were doing down there–maybe tending some of the bananas.   

Now alone, the young man came running up to me and handed me a piece of paper.  I was surprised and then I was really surprised to see that it was my temporary driver’s licence.  It had somehow wriggled out of my wallet and then out of the bag in which I was carrying the wallet.  I don’t know how those things happened, but I was evidently more tired than I knew.  I thanked him profusely, and he turned to leave.  A few seconds later I woke up and said “Wait.”  I reached into my bag and gave him some money.  The local currency is the tala, a name derived either from the dollar or the old German thaler.  It’s worth about 35 cents.

Tipping is not customary in Samoa.  That’s what I read, at least, and it doesn’t surprise me.  The young man seemed a bit taken aback, and I wonder now if giving him that money might have come across as another palagi, or foreigner, tossing coins to the peasants.  I say this because on another day, back in Apia, I was walking around when someone asked me what I was doing.  I said I was just looking.  He said, “Looking at how poor people live.”  Per capita income in Samoa is about $5,000 annually, so in a sense he was right, but his voice was as calm and amicable as if he had said “no worries.”

I like that phrase, and it’s as common in Samoa as it is in Australia and New Zealand..  It’s also a reminder that Air New Zealand flies an Airbus 321 to Apia every day.  It’s about a four-hour flight from Auckland.  That’s a couple of hours shorter than the once-a-week flight from Honolulu.  Distance is important, but in this case so is history, because Samoa was a German colony in 1914.  With the outbreak of war, New Zealand took over and soon administered Samoa under a League of Nations mandate and then as a United Nations trustee.  

The Samoans were about as grateful as you’d expect.  They began pushing for independence in the 1920s, and New Zealand finally left in 1962.  Still, go into an Apia supermarket and you’ll see that most of the food comes from Auckland. There’s lots of junk food, including a specially formulated, extra-high-fat corned beef.  For a price, there is also excellent, excellent yogurt from a small dairy north of Auckland. 

The New Zealand connection is strong in another way, too.  The last New Zealand census counted over 50,000 residents born in Samoa–that’s about a quarter of the entire population of Samoa–and there are many more than 50,000 New Zealanders who speak Samoan because they’re descendants of Samoans.  

I volunteered to take a photo of one such family, stopped to look at a waterfall.  I was a bit surprised when the wife spoke. I said, “Do I hear an Australian accent?”  She corrected me quickly: “New Zealand.”  I said I had trouble telling the accents apart, and she corrected me with a wink in her voice, “The New Zealand accent is much better.”  I conclude that she liked being from New Zealand, but I also think that she and her husband had brought their kids on that Airbus 321 to make sure the kids knew who they were.

I’ll squeak in just one more story. A day before I arrived in American Samoa, thousands of people across the United States were protesting against the Trump Administration.  There was a fatal shooting at one of these demonstrations.  It was in Salt Lake City.  The victim was a bystander: wrong place, wrong time.  

It didn’t get much attention in the American press–another day, another bullet–and I only learned about it from a woman in Apia.  I asked her how she knew about it, and she made me squirm by saying that the victim was Samoan.  A day later I checked into a very small waterfront hotel only to have the owner of the property say that the victim was a personal friend who had recently stayed here.  The owner said that the man had been the kindest and gentlest person.  The owner was upset but spoke in sadness rather than anger or disgust.   I don’t know how.

If you’re thinking that I must be paid by the Samoan tourist industry, I should introduce you to two real boosters.  The year was 1890, and two old friends were travelling together.  I mean “old” both ways, because they were in their 50s and had known each other a long time.

One was Henry Adams, grandson of one American president and great-grandson of another.  He had just finished writing a multi-volume history of the early United States, and he wanted a rest.  The friend was John La Farge, conveniently wealthy by inheritance but in his own right a successful artist well-known now as then for murals and stained glass.    

The two of them stayed at Vaiale, a waterfront village now swallowed up in Apia.  It’s about half a mile east of Samoa’s small container port.  They were guests of the Vaiale chief, and they spent a lot of time socializing with him and his peers.  La Farge writes that after meeting one chief, Adams said, “La Farge, we have met a gentleman.”

Now if I spent five minutes with Henry Adams I’d find him insufferably arrogant.  He’d have his own none-too-flattering reciprocal opinion, but in a letter home he wrote that “the great Samoan chiefs, and for that matter, the little ones too, make me feel as though I were the son of a camel driver degraded to the position of stable-boy….”  

And it wasn’t just the Samoan aristocracy that impressed Adams.  Dancing was central to Samoan culture, and Adams and La Farge saw a lot of it.  It astonished them.  Adams wrote: “the whole scene and association gave so much freshness to our fancy that no future experience, short of being eaten, will ever make us feel so new again.  La Farge’s spectacles quivered with emotion.”  La Farge himself was more sober, “What use is it to say that it was beautiful, and extraordinary, and that no motion of a western dancer but would seem stiff beside such an ownership of the body.”

Adams and La Farge circled Upolu in an outrigger canoe provided by their host, who thoughtfully provided men to row it.  Here’s Adams: “I felt as though I had got back to Homer’s time, and were cruising about the Aegean with Ajax.”  He continues, “I have no thought of trying to instruct the world any more, but want only to become Polynesian…  You can imagine me living in a model archaic world such as I studied in books, and lectured about as Professor, where everything is thousands of years old, yet to me new.…”

All the while, La Farge painted, chiefly in blues and greens and the copper of Polynesian skin.  I have seen none of his work, but I find even reproductions mesmerizing, partly because the figures are graceful but even more because they fit perfectly into their world. They do it all the time.  There’s no friction or opposition or resistance.  

Samoans today generally wear Western clothes, so there’s not much copper to be seen, but La Farge’s blues and greens are there, sometimes in coastal waters but also in the freshwater pools that Samoans, almost always living next to the sea, built so they could bathe in fresh water.  

Most Samoans today bathe indoors, but many old pools survive, a few even in Apia.  The first one I saw was hidden there behind a fence made of sheetmetal tacked up on the side of a road.  The other side of the street had a laundromat.  Not promising, but for some reason I parked and peeked over the fence.  To my surprise I saw a shimmering pool of La Farge’s blues and greens, the light broken up by ripples.  The pool was perhaps 40 feet across and rimmed with wide, shallow steps of stone.  There was nobody in the water or around it, but this was probably my second day in Samoa and I thought that this pool was the first beautiful thing I had seen.  I began hoping for other surprises.

Adams and La Farge spent a lot of time lolling about in the afternoon heat.  Mostly they did it in a Samoan house provided by their host.  Adams describes it as “nearly circular, with a diameter of some forty feet…  Its thatched roof, beautifully built up, came within about five feet of the ground, ending there in posts, and leaving the whole house open to the air.  Within, mats covered a floor of white corals, smooth and almost soft like coarse sand.”

La Farge adds a few details.  He writes that the house was “set upon a foundation of stones, and its flooring is of fine pebbles.  It is made of a series of high posts… connected at the top by a series of double beams, which receive great rafters running from every set of posts to the peaked centre.  At the centre they are supported by two more great pillars….  Walls there are none in the true Samoan house.”

Such houses weren’t to every visitor’s taste.  A dozen years before Adams and La Farge, a very elevated British diplomat arrived from Fiji.  He was Alfred Maudslay, who in an earlier life was an important archaeologist in Mexico.  Of the Samoan house, Maudslay wrote: “the house I do not like at all; no walls at all” (those last words in italics).  Yet even Maudslay admitted that “the work in the roof is sometimes beautiful–a sort of lattice-work made of bread-fruit tree wood and tied with sinnet.”  Sinnet is braided cord.  The houses were built without a single nail.

I wanted to find such a house,and since almost everyone in Samoa lives near the sea, I began by circling Upolu.  It’s about 100 miles around, and you can do it in three hours if you think fast is good and faster is better. Today, nobody does it by outrigger canoe.

I did pass many structures of a traditional size and shape, but they were made with sheet-metal roofs sitting atop a metal frame resting on concrete posts and a concrete floor.  And that wasn’t the half of it, because nobody lived in these places.  They were like Victorian parlors, occupied only when there was company.  The owners lived next door in what I suppose I can call an imported house, a house with walls and windows and doors, mostly paid for, I suspect, with money earned in New Zealand.

I went to Apia’s Samoa Museum, a spectacular new building funded and built by–you have one guess–you’re right, China.  The building had only one small room for exhibits, and most of what it had came from other Pacific islands.   

I explained to a young man working alone in a very quiet office that I was looking for a traditional Samoan house.  He said I should go to Savai’i, Upolu’s bigger but less populous neighbor.  That’s where he was from.  Now that I’ve been there, I don’t know why he told me to go there, but it’s probably connected to the fact that he was planning a career as a highway engineer.

With high hopes–and unaware that I was about to prove that there’s one born every minute–I took the ferry to Savai’i.  It’s about 90 minutes, and the water is rough enough that anyone walking while the ferry is underway holds onto something.  Most passengers manage to sleep, many lying outside on a deck, others, foolishly, in their cars on the deck below.

Very few roads penetrate the interior of Savai’i, which is a gently sloped volcano, but again there’s a circumferential road of about 100 miles.  The top tourist attraction is the Alofaga Blowholes, spectacular geysers erupting when waves surge into caves with holes in the roof.  I was impressed but I was more impressed by houses built directly on top of almost flat and very clean lava flows.  It was like building a house in the middle of an asphalt parking lot.  That sounds terrible, but between their houses and the road many homeowners found or made depressions in the rock deep enough for planting what looked like bouquets on a black table.    

I admire this affection for beauty, but circling the island I saw only imported houses and Victorian parlors.  I did find several hotels, most in poor shape and still recovering from the tourist crash of COVID-19.   I ventured inland on one of the few roads that leave the coast, and I found old coconut groves with a few grazing cattle.  I passed a prison, and I stopped briefly at a residential college run by a Catholic order.  A sign on a wall read, “Please speak in English.”

Obstinately, I tried house hunting in American Samoa.  I should have known better, because per capita income here is four times greater than in Samoa. There are only about 50,000 people on Tutuila, but this is America, and there’s a warehouse store with shelves 20-feet high and loaded with pallets of soda pop, cookies and chips, canned stuff, and tons of bottled Starbucks coffee.  There was a lady checking receipts at the door, and I commented on the height of the shelving.  She said she never walked down the aisles.  I said, “Really?”  She replied, “You never can tell.”

I went up a narrow and winding road that crosses Tutuila’s mountainous spine, and I dropped down to an isolated beach in a setting so spectacular that it’s part of the National Park of American Samoa, yet along that beach I found a dozen or more houses, and they were all modern.  They stood next to concrete and sheet-metal parlors.

About this time I remembered Karl May, the all-time best-selling novelist in the German language.  Without ever setting foot west of New York State, May wrote novels about the American West evocative enough that Germans today occasionally come to the Great Plains hoping to see Indians in teepees.  That was me looking for thatch in Samoa.

When did it happen, this transition?  Margery Perham, a historian of the British Empire, passed through Samoa in 1929 and wrote in her diary that she saw houses with metal roofs.  A photograph taken by a New Zealand official in 1933 shows a half-dozen thatched houses in a village east of Apia but one house with a rectangular footprint and a peaked or gabled roof covered with sheet metal.

Still, Gavin Young in the 1980s and Gavin Bell about 1990 visited Samoa.  Both of them found lots of thatched houses.  Between then and now, something happened.  I suspect that Hurricane Val in 1991 may have been a tipping point.  The New York Times reported that 95 percent of the houses on Savaii and 70 to 80 percent of the houses on Upolu had been damaged.  By then, I suspect, it was cheaper to build with concrete and sheet metal than with traditional thatch, which sounds as though it should be free for the taking but which requires expert labor.  

The only thatch I found in Samoa in 2025 was in a few buildings built for tourists.  One was Apia’s Sheraton hotel.  It has some history, going back to World War II and a woman named Aggie Grey who built a hamburger business around American soldiers.  Her hotel’s rooms were thatched huts, but she died in 1988, and the hotel has been completely rebuilt in modern materials around a courtyard with a dining pavilion that, you got it, is thatched, though thatched on top of metal.

As for the real thing, the closest I came was on the shore of Fagaloa Bay.  It’s about 25 miles east of Apia.  Adams and La Farge came by outrigger canoe, but I came by a road that climbed over a ridge and suddenly offered, from a height of about 700  feet, a view of a bay about three miles long and one mile across.  It’s the most pronounced indentation anywhere along Upolu’s coast, but the water is shallow and the entrance is blocked by a coral reef, so it’s useless as a harbor.  The surrounding hills are thickly forested, and I was told they were of no use to anyone except people hunting feral pigs.  Still, Henry Adams loved the place.  He wrote: “Altogether it is the finest scenery I have seen in these islands…  I have enjoyed nothing in my travel so much as these last days.”  

The road dropped down to the water’s edge and offered a choice of right or left.  It wasn’t cheek-to-jowl settlement, but there were a few dozen imported houses, some Victorian parlors, a couple of tiny shops, and enough churches that every family could enjoy its own denomination.  There was a new school, which I caught at the end of the day, with excited students going home.  They all wore school uniforms: light blue tops, dark blue bottoms, the girls in skirts, the boys in lavalavas, a traditional wraparound like a sarong or kilt.

On the left side of the bay, I passed what looked like another  parlor, the usual metal and concrete.  I stopped because I noticed some rolled-up mats at the rafters.  Mats were a part of the traditional house.  When a storm approached, the mats were unrolled to offer some protection. 

I backed up.  Someone called out.  Who are you?  Where are you from?  Why are you here?  But like the man saying I was looking at how poor people live, this speaker too was relaxed, and he reciprocated.  Within five minutes I knew that he had just retired from a career as a machinist in Pago Pago.  He had come home.  He was building a house nearby and was getting ready to drive to Apia to get the necessary permit.  I was surprised that permits were needed, and I’m still processing the fact that he drove a Lexus.  

He asked me what I’d like to drink, and in response he picked up a long pole with a hook at one end.  No climbing for him.  He put his machinist’s skill to work, pulled down two coconuts and pounded them on a massive spike that prised off the green shell and the fibrous stuff called coir.  He got down to the hard nut, broke a small hole in it and handed it to me.  He did one for himself, too.  Full disclosure:  I did momentarily look for a straw.

We walked up to the structure that had caught my eye.  Yes, it was made of concrete and metal, but it was a home, not a parlor.  It had electricity and a gas cooker, still in a cardboard box.  It also had an older woman sitting quietly at one side and keeping an eye on a baby who, under netting,  was sleeping on the floor in the center of the room.  It was so close to a nativity scene and so quiet –there were no cars on the road, and the  bay’s calm water was maybe 100 feet away–that I realized I had found what I wanted.

Adams and La Farge were old enough to be pessimistic about the direction of history.  La Farge wrote, “there will soon come a day… when nowhere on earth or at sea will there be any living proof that Greek art is not all the invention of the poet.”  Adams was angrier.  He wrote: “I am inclined to profanity when I think that religion, political economy, and civilization so-called will certainly work their atrocities here within another generation.”  He added that the Samoans “work little, and show their superiority over our idiotic cant about work, by proving how much happier an idle community can be, than any community of laborers ever was…”  

It’s a good thing that Adams and La Farge are dead, because I wouldn’t want them to see the hydroelectric power station on the road down to the bay.  It was fed by a mercifully hidden penstock from a reservoir on the other side of the mountain.

It’s called progress, of course, and we love it and we hate it.  Forty years after the visit of Adams and La Farge, a young British historian visited Samoa. She would later be famous, modestly famous–let’s say well-known in certain academic circles–as an expert on the British Empire in Africa, but now, in 1929, she was a young woman in her early thirties travelling on her first trip across the Pacific, alone and on a fellowship funded by the Rhodes Trust.  I mentioned her a few minutes ago in connection with early metal roofs.  Her name, once again, was Margery Perham, and it probably helped that she was six feet tall.

She came via the United States, which is why she landed first in American Samoa.  By chance, the ship she was on, a Matson liner called the S.S. Sierra, also carried Lincoln Gatewood, a captain in the U.S Navy.  He was an electrical engineer by training and had been head of the naval academy’s department of engineering and physics.  He was here to take up a position as the 19th governor of American Samoa.

To Perham’s surprise, the two of them got along well, both aboard ship and later, when Perham visited Gatewood and his wife at the Governor’s Mansion.  It was, and is, a two-story wooden building on a hill above the Pago Pago harbor.  Perham wrote that the house was in “a position in which no human being is quite good enough to live.”  

Perham and the governor understood that the Samoans were, as she wrote in her diary, “long isolated in their islands, with the coconut palm to give shelter, meat, drink, thatch–almost all they need–with fish easily caught on the reef… with taro in return for scratching the earth and breadfruit dropping from the trees, they have no incentive to contrive and struggle….  Nowhere in the world is life easier; that is why they sing and dance and put hibiscus behind their ears….”  I should mention that many Samoan women still put a hibiscus flower behind an ear but that most of the time the flower is plastic.  I finally gave up and asked why.  I know, it was rude, but the answer was that plastic keeps better.

Perham wrote that the governor shared her belief that outsiders had no right to disrupt Samoan life, yet both he and she asked whether Samoan culture could be saved.  She wrote: “The school hours have already smashed up the elaborate divisions of labour on which village economy depends… already the work provided by the white man on the wharf, in the police, etc. has menaced the communal system.”

When Perham got to Apia, she met the New Zealand Administrator.  That was his title, Administrator of Western Samoa.  Sounds a bit like Orwell’s Controller.  The man’s name was Stephen Allen.  He had a distinguished war record and would later be mayor of his small hometown on New Zealand’s North Island.

Perham spent a day visiting schools with Allen, and in her diary she wrote “…I had a feeling that the Governor was doing everything just wrong.  A great feast had been prepared for us but he hurried away without much apology, and all his utterances and actions were marked by the same shy brusqueness.  Coming home, in discussion, he said he wondered if the Polynesian people were worth preserving–words that… had a chilling effect on me.” 

Leaving Samoa, Perham wrote that she felt “most wretched to think I should never see that loved and lovely place again.”  The Samoans, she wrote, “opened for me a new perspective of beauty.  Beauty of their land, of their bodies, of their apparent happiness, of their manners, their dignity and ordered courtesy, their warm, gentle kindness to myself.” Perhaps she was not quite as fatalistic as Adams and La Farge.  She writes that “I asked myself with anguish whether the Western world must utterly violate the still surviving beauty and innocence of these islands.”  She asks the question but I think she knows the answer.

Yet, and I want to emphasize this, the Samoans were not and are not victims or, at least, not just victims.  Adams wrote that Samoa was a paradise, but he added that “the young men were devoured by the wish for something new.”  He added that boredom was probably “the chief cause of Samoa’s wars.” 

Gavin Young in the early 1980s quotes a Samoan who asked him ”if modern development means the dehumanization of societies, what is the use of it?”  Young agreed and advised another young man to cling to traditional life “like grim death.” Then Young met a 19-year-old woman who told  him that she wanted to go to New Zealand.  Young suggested that instead she stay home and, if she wanted to work, teach English here in Samoa.  The woman replied, “I like to see New Zealand.”

I have my own anecdote.  I was walking down Apia’s main street, Beach Road.  I must have been looking lost because a woman asked if I needed help.  I said no, I was just looking.  It turned out that she lived in American Samoa.  I asked her which place she liked better, Samoa or American Samoa.  She said she preferred Samoa because there was land enough for people to grow all the coconuts and breadfruit and taro they needed.  You couldn’t do that in American Samoa, she said.  There you had to work to make money to live.  I mentioned this to other people, and they agreed, yet they all chose to make money whether in Samoa or American Samoa or New Zealand or the United States.

A  reporter for The Samoa Observer asked people a few years ago how they felt about Samoa’s schools using English as the language of instruction.  One person answered, “I don’t want my kids to learn the English language because I don’t want them to be living palagi [foreigner] lives. Once they learn the English language they will consider themselves palagi people and act in palagi ways.” Another person disagreed.  “We know life is moving forward,” he said, “and the way I see it, you can’t get a job if you don’t know both languages.”   The reporter didn’t ask these people why they needed a job in Samoa. And so Samoa moves forward because Samoans, whatever their ambivalence, want it to move forward.   

La Farge described Apia as “an orderly little place strung along what might be called a street or two, the main one of which is on the beach and goes by that name.  There are stores, a few hotels and drinking places, warehouses and residences of the consuls.”  It was all made of wood, mostly by Germans drawn to Samoa by the copra business, which was big in those days, when Germany was short of vegetable oil and discovered that oil could be produced from this dried flesh of coconuts.  The business was big enough that Germany finally made a colony of Samoa in 1900 and ran it until 1914.  New Zealand took over and shipped a couple of hundred Germans to internment camps.

The colonial town had a few showpieces, chief among them a grand building built to house unmarried employees of the biggest copra producer.  The building was confiscated and became housing for New Zealand officials.  Later it became the Casino hotel and was finally demolished in 1972.  The site is now another hotel–at the other end of the beach from the Sheraton.

Very little is left of German Samoa.  The waterfront is now dominated by two government buildings of perhaps six stories, one bearing the words Central Bank of Samoa. The other has no words but has windows that do not open and a huge digital clock over the entrance.  I don’t suppose anyone thinks of it as wicked humor.

On the other side of the street there’s a garish five-story office building–white tile with lots of bright red trim–put up by the National Provident Insurance Company, and there are two bank buildings, one for New Guinea’s Bank of the South Pacific and the other for ANZ, based in Melbourne.  A block inland I stared at a dozen cars lined up at a McDonald’s drive-thru.  I asked myself in disbelief how this was possible, then I headed to the nearby Nourish Cafe, which would do well in Palo Alto.  I went to the cafe more than once.

I haven’t said much about American Samoa.  The main island, Tutuila, is only about 20 miles long, tip to tip, and it’s much narrower than that, narrowing to less than one mile at Pago Pago Harbor, an angled inlet almost hidden from ships at sea.  The harbor is what drew the U.S. Navy here in the 19th century, and the Navy administered the island from 1900 to 1951, when it handed administration over to the Interior Department.  

For its own use, the Navy built a coaling station on the south side of the inlet.  There was the governor’s house, of course.  The Navy also built a parade ground and a barracks and a post office, all of which have been converted to civil- government use now, in some cases handsomely.  There are a few houses up on the hill above the old naval station.  Many can only be reached by stairs.  

The harbor had a moment of glamor when the Pago Pago Intercontinental Hotel opened in 1965.  That was a year after the arrival of Pan Am’s jets.  The hotel was designed by the same firm that in 1945 renovated Honolulu’s Royal Hawaiian Hotel.  The firm is still in business, but the Pago Pago Intercontinental isn’t. The public areas of the hotel, built on the prime site of the Navy’s officer’s club, have been demolished, and the waterfront they occupied is vacant and covered in tall grass.  One wing of guest rooms does survive and operates under the name Sadie’s by the Sea.  It has a beautiful beach.

Less than a mile away, there’s another hotel called Sadie Thompson’s Inn.  It’s much older, a little rundown, and is on the side of the road away from the water. The entrance does display a fine poster of Rita Hayworth, labelled “a woman without shame, a woman without a soul.”  The poster was produced for MGM’s 1953 musical, “Miss Sadie Thompson,” one of several filmed versions of Somerset Maugham’s “Rain,” a 1921 short story.  Maugham’s description of Pago Pago is surprisingly faithful to the actual place.

The hills around the harbor rise so steeply that development since the 1960s has shifted five miles to the south to the island’s one bit of flat land.  That’s where the airport is, of course.  The road between the harbor and the new area is two lanes, crowded, and slow, but here–the village is called Tafuna–you will find American Samoa’s one McDonald’s, as well as the Costco knockoff I described earlier.  Nearby, there’s a hotel that looks as though it had been picked up somewhere on an interstate highway in the Florida Panhandle.  The hotel is expensive and not even on the waterfront, but customers don’t have a lot of choice.  There is a splendid range nearby of new and very big and spiffy churches.  

I spent an hour in the local office of the Department of Historic Preservation.  I had a hard time finding it, but it’s across from Tafuna’s DHL office.  What was the department doing these days?  What had they published?  The answer was pretty much nothing.  There seemed to be nothing anyone wanted to preserve or even to write about.

I visited American Samoa’s museum, established through the efforts of Jean Haydon, the wife of John Haydon, who came from Washington State to serve as American Samoa’s governor in the early 1970s.  It had a big sign over the entrance, but a smaller sign at the door explained that the museum was closed for an indefinite period.  Still, the door was open, and I went inside to see stacks of stuff piled casually on the floor and on tables. The Apollo 11 astronauts had been picked up in nearby waters and had given the museum a bit of moon rock.  I saw the certificate.

Now, I think, you’re reconsidering that suspicion you had that I’m on some tourism outfit’s payroll.  My own takeaway is wondering what it takes for people to be happy if paradise is boring.  

Henry Adams wrote that the Samoans were desperate for something new, and, by God, they got it.  So have we all.  How about the thrill of arriving back in Fiji very early one morning and facing immigration lines that snaked back and forth through the room and overflowed outside and out of sight?  That’s what you get when an ambitious airline moves faster than the government.

Thank God, I thought, there’s another line, very short, just for people with immediate domestic connections.  That’s me, heading to nearby Suva, Fiji’s capital.  The immigration officer smiled  when I commented on the chaos around us, but she wasn’t as warm as I expected.   I understand.  She was probably wondering why she was stuck in this chaos while everyone else in the room had either just come from or was headed to paradise.  I carried on and found that Suva has 20-story buildings.  It makes Apia look like a backwater, but that’s another story for another day.