Tropical Rain

Well....I spoke too soon. We haven't seen the sun now for over 24 hours but we do have PROPER rain. It's hurling down out of the sky, banging on the tin roof of our carport and assuring us of a day of rest. We are very cosy in our hill house and I can potter around making delicious stuff to eat from the produce Maria has given us. Huge papayas are a favourite and are the traveller's friend....I'll leave that to your imagination. Last night we ate a bacon, watercress and avocado salad; the avocado was splitting its skin with ripeness and the size of two tennis balls. Pork is a staple in tropical climates and wild pigs wander about everywhere here-a family was crossing our drive as we drove in yesterday!

Email may be a problem but the phone signal is usually great...it worked well enough on a ferry crossing from our main island of Upolu to Savaii to be able to text Louise in Glasgow. Isn't that amazing? And this morning she let me know that she's been offered a place on the PGDE (primary school teacher training) course at Glasgow uni in September...only 80 places and she's got one!

Here we can get a grainy terrestrial TV station that brings domestic news from New Zealand ( the Hoblyn weather effect is on target....the rear end of cyclones affecting south island!), local news in Samoan and English and lots of Christian TV. Religion is really a large part of the culture here with an endless variety of Christian denomination churches; also lots of Latter Day Saints and now a Bahai temple and a Hindu retreat. There is still a curfew in every village between 6 and 7 pm for family prayer time but the creeping changes are there. Until recently no shops were open on Sunday and now they are. Whether the young will continue the culture, I'm not sure. The average age on Samoa is a staggeringly low 22.


What have I loved about this place? Apart from the peace of the lush countryside and the open-ness of the people it's a visual treat. And I love the generous proportions of the people, at ease in their skin. I've even got to like tattoos a bit.....on Samoans anyway!

And that neatly links to my latest reading matter, picked up in the airport in Hawaii, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I've just begun and so far it seems a good holiday read. My copy is saturated as a bottle of water leaked on it yesterday and the atmosphere is so humid it hasn't dried yet. I'm not going to try and help it as I've had two disasters trying to do that; I carefully put some waterlogged shoes (result of wading a river) in the warmed oven in Costa Rica and they dried nicely but shrank...so I had to buy more in Hawaii. And I put my all
weather vinyl travelling handbag (soggy from same bottle of water) in the oven here but forgot to turn it off. Result one melted bag! Luckily no damage to oven or house though....

I began this blog at about 9 a.m and it's still raining at 3.30 Ok...enough now....and the wifi is still preventing picture evidence...but soon, I hope!