Crazy Palagies

American Samoa is, like, a US territory, right? It's got National Parks, run by the US Dept of the Interior; tax dollars are spent to maintain trails and roads and informational signs that you see on hikes. Yesterday at a finger-like projection of the large National Park (accessed through some dude's property; there were chickens everywhere), I used a fully-functioning bathroom with a flush toilet and tiled floor on this tiny beach at the ends of the goddamn earth. So it stands to reason that there are many things that should be the same as the US. Access to clean drinking water, for example. Italian restaurants and suchlike. People who don't look at you weird when you say you're going hiking.

This is a 76 square mile island with a continues road that goes around the island in a circle. Every so often, there's a break in the cliffs and jungle, things level out into beaches and rocky shores and you find a village. Nothing is very far away, but it takes a long time to get there since the speed limit maxes out at 25mph.

White people and non-Samoans are called Palagies (pronounced pa-lon-gees). There are a lot of words where there's the reverse of a silent consonants; there are INVISIBLE consonants that are pronounced. This happens with g's a lot. Pago Pago is pronounced Pango Pango, which is sneaky and a surefire way to tell who's new here.

Anyway.

For this being a tiny island and half of it being a National Park, and nothing being very far from anything else, it's surprising how little the native residents here have explored. I myself would have gone stir crazy staying in this tiny village. You'd think that if you had years of time available, you'd have crawled to every part of American Samoa, snorkeled every beach and memorized every road. It is perplexing to a Floridian who could swim before she could walk, that most folks living on an ISLAND cannot swim and really fear the water, despite never ever being out of sight of the ocean. Going into the jungle willingly as a way to entertain oneself is perplexing to the inhabitants here.

Native Samoans think that white people are insane.

With our waterproof hiking boots, lightweight NorthFace gear, canteens of water, snorkels and fins, palagies do crazy shit. In the heat, in the rain, in the salt spray.

We took a taxi to the trailhead of a 7 mile hike up a jungle-covered mountain. That hike ended up being longer and hotter than I could have fathomed (I did not know we were hiking 7 miles at the time, but that's another story for another day). The taxi was a 4-door jeep/SUV thing from the mid-90s. The cab driver spoke little English, but his daughter was there and translated for us. Her name is Diana and she was drop-dead gorgeous; she just started at the community college, is studying criminal justice and wants to be a lawyer. She sat in the trunk area of the jeep and we chatted during the 40 minute drive from our hotel to the other size of the island. As we turned off the main road on the outskirts of the village (to head inland over the mountain), Diana, who was very soft spoken, told me that she had never been on this road before. Nor had she been to the other side of the island. She'd never been on a hike, though she'd like to go on one someday. I was having a hard time understanding how one could live on an island for 19 years and not venture a mile from your hometown. The things we saw along the road, breathtaking views of the sea, sheer cliffs, tiny houses, were as novel to her as they were to me. "Diana, look at that waterfall!", I said. From her seat in the trunk, she had to crane her neck to see the things I pointed out.
We arrived in the tiny village where the trailhead is. The cab driver and his daughter were reluctant to leave us. They asked us several times if we were sure this is where we wanted to be dropped off. As the crazy palagies were reviewing our map of the trail under a tree on the side of the road, the cab driver had turned around to go back to Pago Pago. He paused where we were, and Diana, leaning out a window, asked us again if we were ok and if we were sure that we wanted to be dropped off here. She and her father were sincerely concerned we were going to hike into the jungle and die.

I had only been in American Samoa for a few days and did not know that adventures were considered something that mad Caucasians sought. I've been mulling this over since. Whenever our group is preparing to do something adventuresome, whether putting on SCUBA gear or retying hiking boots, a local wanders over to try to figure out what the hell we're doing. As we explain, they shake their heads, wish us luck, and walk away. Often after our adventure is over, they head over to greet us, amazed that the palagies had managed to come back.