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Malolo, tagata uma!
It’s Sunday here on American Samoa, and on this pretty uniformly Christian island (I’ve yet to hear a restaurant soundtrack that hasn’t been hymns or praise), Sunday is a day of rest. Most shops, restaurants, and attractions here are closed for the day as folks attend prayer services, so long story short, I was prepared to take it easy.
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While I’d journeyed east the last few days, today, I went west to explore the town of Leone, formerly the island’s capital! Here, I went looking for historic sites like the Fagalele Boys School (now a private home), Atauloma Girls School (somewhere behind a private home), and the Leone Petroglyphs (somewhere behind a cluster of homes and a pack of very grumpy feral dogs)! But because it was Sunday, and the whole city was in church, there was no one around to ask for directions. So I bookmarked my visit by admiring the Leone Healing Garden, a memorial to the 11 residents lost in a tsunami back in 2009.
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But Leone was the perfect place to spend a pious Sunday. Why, you ask? Well, it was here on October 18, 1832 that John Williams (the missionary, not the composer), arrived on Tutuila and established its first church. Sixty-eight years later, the London Missionary Society built this church—Siona Le Mauga Paia, or Zion the Holy Mountain—on the site of the original, and today it still stands as the oldest church on the island and the most happening place in Leone on a Sunday!
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There were lots of forbidden things to do on a Sunday in American Samoa, so it made sense to find the most! Cape Taputapu means “forbidden,” but mostly because the people who found paper mulberry trees growing there wanted to maintain their monopoly on this resource. It’s also a National Natural Landmark and the westernmost point in all U.S. states and territories! To get to this forbidden cape, I’d need a bit of luck!
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And as luck would have it, the tide was low enough for me to make it! At high tide, most of these rocks are underwater, so I was able to skip and scramble over the rock shelf that serves as the main barrier to the forbidden cape without even getting my feet wet!
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And wow, what a treasure on the other side! The island ahead wasn’t the cape itself, but instead, it was a lively colony of fruit bats! I could hear them up in the trees, making the most unsettling screeching sounds, but I knew they were just using the language their vocal chords gave them to gossip and flirt.
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I slid through a sea cave full of seashells and coral that had been smoothed by the waves to look like chunky pancakes. In here, I was very glad the tide was low, because I’d have been smashed into a pancake myself! Instead, I just got to see some really neat views of the island through the cave’s opening!
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Samoan waves are intimidating, but as my last stroke of luck would have it, the channel between shore and the island was both shallow and calm. So, even though I failed to bring my dive suit on this trip, I was glad I remembered my flamingo floatie! Angling it with the current, I floated all the way across the channel until I was directly under the chatty bats and could get a much clearer look at Cape Taputapu!
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And there you have it, the last land before the International Dateline! It’s very popular to watch sunsets from here, but looking ahead, I could tell that, even at low tide, I wasn’t going to have much luck traveling any farther (or coming back), because the whole shoreline ahead was rocky and heavily overgrown! So I was content to watch the waves and admire the scenery from this side of noon.
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Besides, Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, right? So I took some time enjoying the quiet solitude of Cape Taputapu, hunting for neat shells—cowries, cones, even a juvenile giant clam! I rested plenty afterward, as beach siestas are the finest siestas, waking up just in time to scramble back over the rocks to the road before the tide came back in.
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I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out at the hotel, which was actually hopping with activity! You’d never guess it from the rest of John Williams’ Tutuila, but it was Super Bowl Sunday here on the Football Islands! So I pulled up a stool at the hotel’s bar and cheered and booed and reveled in today’s successful exploration of the forbidden extremities of American Samoa!
Tapu to you later!
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Total Ground Covered: 83.5 mi (133.4 km) |
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