Samoa
I arrived in Samoa on Nov 21 having left Quito on Nov 17 - lots of airport and plane time. I did get to overnight in Auckland on the way though so had one good sleep in that time. I had organised with my B&B in Samoa for a transfer from the airport since the airport is 45mins from Apia and my flight was due to arrive at 2am (typical South Pacific). It wasn't there though. I managed to get to where I was staying alright though and crashed straight into bed.
I didn't actually do much in Samoa. There's heaps to see and do but I just wanted to relax and dive. I did make a day trip over to Samoa's other main island, Savaii. It's not the easiest place to get around if you don't have a car so a group of us hired a taxi to drive us round for 5 hours. It's pretty cheap to do that - worked out at 20 aussie dollars each. The sights of Savaii are fairly spread out so we only managed to get to the blowholes and the lava fields. Didn't make it to the best part of the lava fields though. This lava flow wiped out a village destroying everything except the 2 churches - weird. At the blowholes you can pay the guy that lives there 10Tala and he'll put coconuts in the blowhole. We did. The coconuts died - blow apart, the pieces scattered over quite a large area.

The blowhole on Savaii.

Back on Upolu (the island with Apia on) I decided to head down to the south east to a place called Lalomanu which has a great beach and more importantly, a dive shop. I did take the time to visit the sliding rocks just outside Apia first though. It's basically a few cascades two of which are smooth and form natural slides - good fun. I also went to Aggie Grey's (a famous hotel) for the Fia Fia night. It was a good show with dancing by both men and women and then fire dancing by a few men. Some super hot men too I have to say...

The firedancing at the Fia Fia. Notice they do it next to the pool just in case...

Interestingly, one of the dancing girls was actually a man! Transvestites or Fafas as they call them here are really common. What happens is a family has lots of sons but raises the youngest as a girl because there's womens work that needs doing but not enough women to do it. At a certain age this boy gets to choose whether or not they want to live as a boy or a girl from now on. Most chose to stay as a girl! Is totally acepted here and everyone's quite open about it.

Part of the womens dance at the Fia Fia.

My beach stay at Lalomanu was great. I stayed in a beach fale and went diving nearly everyday. When I wasn't diving I was swimming or lazing on the beach. Tough life aye? The only drawback at Lalomanu was that they were having problems with water so no showers. I was just constantly salty or sunscrenny which didn't do much for my skin or hair I must say. It was all good though.

The dog relaxes on the beach at Lalomanu

I ended up doing 10 dives and saw heaps of turtles, eagle rays, blck fan coral, moorish idols, parrot fish, regal angels longnose butterflies etc etc. Murphys law applied though, we saw WAY more stuff when I didn't take my camera under, even the divemaster commented on that! We didn't even see a turtle when I had my camera in my hand. Not very good underwater pictures from these dives I'm afraid. I was a bit disappointed with my pics to be honest and generally did a terrible job photographing stuff. Still not used to using the camera underwater I guess. The main thing is that I saw lots of cool stuff though.

Clown fish in Samoa

Diving, diving, diving pretty much sums up my time in Samoa. I left feeling very relaxed and have now arrived at my final destination - Christchurch, New Zealand. Many of you would know that I had planned to surprise my host sister Angie for her 21st birthday here. I'm pleased to report that she was indeed very surprised. I got to wake her up and everything!