Work trips to Samoa and Rarotonga

I have been fortunate enough to be able to visit tropical islands that others would only visit on their holiday, but as part of my job. I was very excited when MWH asked if I could go to Samoa and Rarotonga to do some environmental monitoring at two oil terminals. I had never been to any of the Pacific Islands during all my years in NZ so here was my chance.

Samoa
At the end of June, when Chch was at its coldest, I made my way to Samoa. The client I was working for in Samoa was trying to also win a contract for the management of a site in American Samoa. At the same time I was visiting, some delegates who were evaluating their tender were paying a visit as well. Somehow I managed to get invited to a nice traditional Samoan dinner that was designed to sweep the delegates off their feet. It certainly swept me off my feet!!

I think I had never seen so much food: 2 whole pigs (we only ate a quarter of one of the poor buggers), lots of fresh fish, taro in palm leaves, sea cucumber (a delicacy apparently), lobster, crayfish, fried fruit bat...Of course I simply had to try it all. The sea cucumber looked very similar to snot in a bowl and it tasted like oyster, although 50 times more rich in flavour. It was a bit too much for me and I went onto the fried fruit bat as my second choice. I could still see the heads of the poor wee bats as I was staring into the casserole. There wasn’t a lot of meat on them, but what I managed to taste was pretty nice..a bit like chicken (classic comment).
I felt very privileged to be invited to the special dinner. I never really felt alone over there since I met two hilarious cartoon characters from Aussie in my motel and they took me out one evening too.

Once I had completed the sampling, I had a little bit of time to see the island so I decided to take a guided trip around half of the island. It was a lazy-man’s tour when we got severe warnings when we had to walk more than 50m. Despite this, I thought it was very nice to hear about Samoa, the island, the people and customs.

Local market in Apia where coconuts and bananas were the most common commodity:

The bush was pretty lush and I could certainly feel that I was on a tropical island.
I am happy I don't have to wash my clothes in a river like the woman below. Hrm..maybe it would make me wash less often, which might be a good thing?

I lost count of the number of churches we passed. Some tiny villages still had up to three churches. Samoans are very Christians and Sundays are for visiting church...twice. There are some churches where their members get fined if they don’t show up on Sundays (it sounded common). Each family have the right to have one person staying at home to do the cooking. The guide, Foua, was telling me that his family got fined since his niece was hiding and didn’t show up to the mess. Hrm...I don’t know if that is democracy.

Samoan life is pretty simple. They don’t seem to make much money. The island is largely dependent on UN aid. Families on the island are very large and live in open style houses with separate buildings for different purposes: different houses for washing house, toilet errands (at the back), a meeting house (to hang out after church), sleeping (woman separate from men of course) and cooking house.

As I understand, domestic violence and abuse is fairly common..at least common enough so that they had these signs erected in every village. It didn't give me a particularly good vibe I must admit. The lushness of the bush and the water fall gave me a better vibe:

I made good friends with the NZ rugby fanatic, Leo, and the tour driver:

One of many beautiful beaches. The 29 September 2009 a tsunami struck this east side of the island and killed about 100 people. It was hard to see signs from the disaster, but further along the beach we passed houses that had been flattened by the wave.

Rarotonga
I was very focused on the risk of tsunamis when I travelled to Rarotonga just one day after the Christchurch 7.1 magnitude earthquake. The turbulence on the plane made me feel like I was in the middle of a large quake and even worse, when the strong winds shook the motel I stayed at, I kept on waking up in fear of earth quakes.

I felt very welcomed when I landed in 'Raro', as the locals and kiwis call the island. The purpose with the trip was to take some ground water samples at a site and bring them back to NZ for lab testing. My client met me and I got these beautiful looking and gorgeous smelling necklace of flowers, picked by his wife from their garden. I wish all clients were that giving :-)
It was very interesting to see the similarities and contrasts between the Rarotongan and Samoan life styles.

Raro is a small island with 19,000 inhabitants. The island is part of a country called the Cook Islands with its own government. All Cook Islanders automatically become New Zealand citizens too.

Apart from working very hard (of course :-) I had a little bit of time exploring the island. I had one day of whizzing around on my electric bike. Almost every man and his dog were using scooters as their main mode of transport. As I couldn't be bothered to get a local driving licence from the police, I went for the electric bike option instead. I later heard that one American guy managed to get his licence by showing his health insurance card, so I probably could have got one after showing my SAS Eurobonus card or something equally useful that demonstrates nothing relating to my driving skills.

The bike did 25 km/h at best and it always showed an almost full battery...until it went flat. Unfortunately this happened when I was quite a few kms away from my motel with a blasterly head wind heading back. At that point, the scooters looked pretty attractive.


Rarotonga is certainly more touristy than Samoa with more influence from New Zealand. Rarotongans are still big church goers (it was still hard to find a restaurant that was open on a Sunday), but they are not as strict about their church visits as the Samoans. The Rarotongans speak a version of Maori which is very close to NZ Maori, and they seem to understand each other.

The island was much cleaner and tidier than Samoa. I got the sense that people had more money and more pride in their island.

In Raro, I heard that all house holds are regularly visited by someone from the government/ council who inspects their houses to make sure they are keeping it nice and tidy including tying up the pigs outside, cleaning the yard, recycling and managing rubbish, etc. The household is later issued with a yellow or white note (yellow = bad! I think) depending if they passed the test.

Both Samoa and Rarotonga had pigs everywhere. As I am a big pig fan, I took a few photos of the nice ones:

Happy pig..until they eat him:

A typical island street. Not sure if you can find it on Google street view yet.

I was delighted to hear that there were many humpback whales (knolvalar) migrating past the island when I was there. It was possible to see them even from the shores of the beaches. I saw their dorsal fins in the water almost every day I was there. The first time I saw them close to the shore, I was so excited I stumbled out on some rocks without paying attention to where I placed my feet. I managed to scrape off a pretty big chunk of skin from my heal. I hardly noticed as I was staring at the whales. I later had a quick snorkel and was a bit worried about attracting sharks with my wound. Snorkeling was fantastic and I saw lots of colourful fish and moray eels, etc.

After spotting the whales from the beach, I wanted to get closer to them and decided to get on a "tour" on my last day.

The trip on a boat was nice but it didn't help me to get closer to them. We had a few sightings but nothing spectacular. I will need to come again I guess...

Hump backs were obviously important to the locals with large paintings on many buildings.

The island had many stray dogs. Some of them were nice (like the one below). This little one just started hanging after me wherever I went. I never even touched him (I promise!). He even came to my motel and had a sleep outside my door. When I saw that, I crumbled and gave him a few chips. After that he certainly didn't want to leave.

There were also many dogs that were not so nice. I wanted to go for a hike over the island and was looking for the start of a trail that was marked on a shitty tourist map. Of course I couldn't find the trail, but I got attacked by an angry dog when I walked past. I tried to keep cool although my instinct said: RUN!!!..I managed to keep calm and carry on (as they said during the war). I turned back against the dog and shouted at him in cheer panic and that seemed to scare him off. I never felt safe enough to go running whilst I was on the island. I encountered barking aggro dogs here and there when I thought a scooter would have been safer.

As you can read, I have been working very hard during my trips :-) I did what I came there to do, and that's the main thing.

I now have a much better idea about Samoa and Rarotonga. If you have kids and want an easy, safe holiday, go for the latter. If you have a bit more time and if you are keen to visit more remote islands, go to Savai'i, which is another large island of Samoa. I only saw the second largest one, Opolu, but the others are apparently less crowded.