Daniele Somenzi's Samoa

Samoa Donato is on the first trip of his life, just turned 18, how lucky he was to meet me; usually for a first trip you do a little tour of Europe. Not him: first time abroad, first time on a plane, and where does he go? Nothing less than a Pacific island. If I were to kick the bucket, he should bring a candle to my grave every day.

Also because he loved the trip to Samoa very much, and why not, I loved it too.

The landing came at night with Air New Zealand Boeing 767 from Los Angeles. We treated ourselves to an "overdose" of flying: Linate-London-Los Angeles-(Apia) all in one go.

Lucky he liked flying straight away, otherwise he'd have died on 22 hours of flight.

We land at night, and have ourselves taken to the Flame Tree Bungalow; a half-naked Samoan girl in a costume complete with a flower crown on her head and a necklace assigns us the only room with 4 walls and a door available (yes, because the others are all external bungalows made of palm leaves without a door). But that we were lucky we discover the next morning.

Here they serve breakfast Samoan style, that is all of us guests together sitting on the ground on mats with, on the floor, laid out with big banana leaves and flowers galore as a tablecloth, coconuts for glasses, leaf plates full of already-cut tropical fruit, kinds of mango, papaya, bananas, passion fruit etc, plus butter, jam and milk; we sitting cross-legged, and so we have breakfast every morning. Oh, I forgot the waitress, naturally dressed Polynesian style and very pretty. But the most interesting peculiarity of the Flame Tree is that you set the price of the room yourself, not them. So, after consulting with a guy who'd been there a few days, we threw out a figure that in our opinion it was worth and the owners accepted without batting an eyelid.

Donato and I in about ten minutes take our 2 Graziella bikes, all dismantled, out of their packaging, brought from Italy on the plane, and go for a ride in the city, Apia, the capital of Samoa. Here the indigenous men wear a skirt by tradition.

Incredible the kindness and hospitality of this people, isolated from delinquency and from everything that modern and emancipated civilisations have.

Here they're very Catholic; there are little churches all over the island.

The next day Donato and I hire a 125 cc scooter and do the circuit of the island, and once we reach the other side, always under the sun and amid the luxuriant vegetation, we have a nice swim in the sea, very clean; we also come across a small town full of gatherings and people getting tattoos.

At a certain point in our very long ride there's a big climb, with the road not yet tarmacked, and there we find two lads collecting wooden poles to make a fence for their pigs; we greet them and set off again. The mangroves are full, at their roots, given the low tide, of those little fish that jump out of the water and hold a little drop of the precious liquid in their mouths to breathe (they do the opposite of us, who take air tanks underwater).

But it's incredible how all the locals on foot at the edges of the road keep greeting us; if only we had this spirit in Italy!

We enter a local travel agency to ask for some information, and something happens to Donato that left us astounded: the lad at the PC who was checking a flight route suddenly spins around on his swivel chair and gropes Donato's balls, just like that, out of the blue, at which we instantly understood which way the guy leaned, and we immediately slipped away, splitting our sides laughing for at least an hour.

At our accommodation we happen to see a Samoan dance performed by adult women and little girls; I hurry to grab the camera, to capture the typical dance, very beautiful with sudden movements of the body. By bike, we go to the little beach where Donato has a nice dip and then to the little shop to buy half a roast chicken that we eat in the public gardens.

We weigh up whether to spend a night on the nearby island of Savaii, where a ferry would take us or we could even go by bicycle, but then accommodation on that island costs a lot and like the Flame Tree there isn't another in the world; at the same time though we're torn about not taking the opportunity; in the end we ask someone who's already been and they tell us not to go, that island of Upolu is more beautiful, so we decide to stay. On the night a few days later we even risk missing the plane, because the taxi we'd booked never arrived, but in the end we made it and caught the big beast that, reluctantly, carried us away from Samoa.

bye