Realize that these pictures and the ones from the previous post were taken over a period of 4 days. You can't just see this island in one day, but this was the first trip and we made the most of it.
Afu Aau Falls is a beautiful fall and pool on the south side of the island. It's a short drive in with some beautiful small falls and a river that flows to the ocean. Theron is standing by the big fall and I'm swimming by the many smalls falls that surround the pool.
As you travel further west on the south side, you come to Alofaaga Blowholes. We arrived and an older Samoan met us at the end of the road with a basket of coconuts. He went right over the the biggest of the blowholes and stood there for a moment and then quickly dropped one of the coconuts in and just a few seconds later that coconut shot several hundred feet into the air. At times he would put four or five coconuts into the hole at a time and they would shoot into the air. He was having as great of time as we were.
Traveling around to the north side of Savai'i, you come across the lava flows. This is the desert part of the island. You will notice there is not much growing out among the lava and it extends inland for a ways. There is a beauty to even this part of the island.
These next pictures are very interesting. We happened to notice a man carving out a canoe as we drove by and immediately stopped to watch. His daughter spoke English and told us that he and her brothers had cut the tree many miles up in the mountains. They brought the tree to the yard and used a chain saw to cut the outside and trim out a large section of the inside. Then the father goes to work with a small ax type tool and a scrapper to get the wall the thickness he wanted. What a treat to see one of these canoes being made.
Another real treat was coming upon a Relief Society meeting in the ward fale. We had stopped to check the firewall and found these sisters weaving mats. These are the fine mats, the tree fronds are slit into about 1/4" widths. This type of mat is very expensive to buy and is mostly used for burials. There were five sisters and their children (notice the one asleep). They had a pot that was cooking some food for them (you can't do Relief Society without food) and each had a mat in various stages. The one I'm kneeling down and looking at is huge - a guess would be 10 feet long by 8 or 10 feet wide. When she gets to the last 6-12 inches of a frond, she lays another on top and starts to weave using wo layers until the first one ends. This was a very special treat for us to be able to meet and watch these sisters.
These next two pictures are the umu shack where the Vaiola kids that live on campus cook their meals. The boys do a lot of the cooking. Tonight, they have some chicken cooking over the fire and a large, large pot of rice cooking - see the two large pots on the far right with aluminum foil over them. They are being cooked over a wood fire.
We leave you with this beautiful sunset taken from the porch of our cabin at the resort where we stayed one night.
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