• Robert Louis Stevenson’s house - Samoa (video)

The Step Pyramid of Pulemelei (video)

I was a month into my grand trip across the South Pacific, and finally I made it to Samoa. Like many of these tiny island nations spread across this vast blue ocean, Samoa seems to have avoided intense international interest. The reason for this is pretty straightforward. It is not the easiest place to get to. A visit from Europe would involve forking out a considerable amount of money for an ungodly number of hours spent on numerous aeroplanes. As for our Antipodean friends further to the south, they often favour the far closer destinations of Vanuatu and Fiji.

So Samoa has ended up as one of those places that you’ve heard of, that you know its general whereabouts in the world, and that you have seen field a big, powerful national rugby team over the years. But apart from that, as far as I was concerned at least, that really was it.

So it came as something of a relief when Samoa followed the lead of many of my other destinations in this region, and showed itself to be a charming and often fascinating place, certainly worth the effort of the visit. I spent a couple of days on the main island of ‘Upolu before taking the ferry over to Savai’i, ‘Upolu’s larger neighbour to the north west. And as it boasts four hundred and fifty volcanic cones, all squeezed into its one thousand seven hundred square kilometres, it couldn’t help but have some spectacular sights. 

However, my reason for visiting Savai’i wasn’t necessarily the scenery. Nor was it some bizarre desire to visit the Last Place On Earth (the island sits just to the east of the International Date Line, and is therefore the last place to see the day out), though that obviously had its attractions. No, my prime reason for going to Savai’i was over a thousand years old and some way down an heavily overgrown track, deep in the forested interior...