My first day..

30/07/2013

So it's my first day here...

This morning I was pleasantly awaken by the song of several happy birds outside. The bush comes up pretty close to the lodge and listening to the birds it would almost sound like they are inside. I have not hear so many different and happy birds in a long time, actually the last time would have been in South Africa staying over at a place called "Klein Kariba" in the bushveld.

 

My Room

 

The deck outside my room

 

The night was "hot", but not too hot. I still slept under a sheet and a really thin blanket. Whether the sheet and the blanket was really needed or merely something to sooth my need for the familiar I'm not sure, but regardless I had a really good sleep.

There were "breakfast" at 7:30am but I missed that by about 30min, so I'll just have too wait for lunch.

Today being the first day here I'm going to get familiar with the surroundings around the lodge. I went for a long walk all over the property, everywhere you look is lush green plants. Banana trees and coconut palms seem to be in the vast majority and seem to be "undervalued", there's coconuts on the ground everywhere some been there long enough to start growing where they fell. Plenty of the banana trees show that they have been on the receiving end of someone's machete. The coconut palms and banana trees are so abundant that they are just "plant" and not the pride and joy of someone's garden like you would "normally" find in NZ or South Africa.

By lunch time I was actually really hungry. One of the "gangster" looking young men from last night made me some lunch for 30TALA, there was a cheaper 15TALA option too, but I was really hungry... Apparently the young man was either a pretty good cook, or I was hungry enough that anything would taste good. Either way the food had plenty of good flavor and I really enjoyed it.

I spent the rest of the afternoon assembling my bicycle, writing some of this bog. In the evening I met two more interesting people, one is Adan and the other Malama. Adan is an interesting fella from Mexico who is here in Samoa with Oxfam's Humanitarian aid program. He's helping in some of the local villages with post cyclone recover.

Malama is the wife of David Parker the owner of the lodge. She's a very friendly and pleasant lady and I really enjoyed talking to her. I told her about my dream for living in Samoa and settling here in favor of the more modern world where money seem to be the only purpose to life. She told me I came to the right place and that there's a Japanese lady here (that's sometimes but not always at the lodge) for the exact same reason. I'll get to meet her on Friday, it will be interesting to hear about her experience here and get some tips from someone that's already "done" what I'm juts now thinking of...