Videos by Brian: North Island to Samoa

These are videos that Brian took throughout our trip from Wellington to Samoa. Most of them are of us driving or are out the window shots of around Samoa. They're pretty short, but I think they're cool because it gives you a chance to see what we saw outside of a snapshot photograph. I hope you enjoy them!


The beginning of the trip: Me and Chris jamming to the Beach Boys on the first few minutes of our drive out of Wellington. We're heading out of Wellington toward Lower Hutt.


Me and Chris again from Taupo to Napier


Napier - Hawkes Bay, me running away from the water, which was freezing.


Driving, I think this may be from Napier to Rotorua, but I'm not sure. Be warned, this video is loud due to wind noise.


Craters of the Moon - In between Taupo and Rotorua. This video is also loud because of wind. Brian comments on the smell of the sulfur. Haha.


And that ends the New Zealand videos...

Samoa!
Funny thing is that these videos are of stuff that I have yet to write about in my blog, so bear with me, but I think you'll enjoy them none the less.

This is from the day after my birthday when we went to see the Dwarf Caves. We had two Samoan guides that gave us coconut to eat and drink right off the coconut tree. They gave us a tour of the caves and taught us some Samoan words. In this video, one of the guides finds Brian a fruit opens it and eats it.


This is at Stevenson's resort, every weekend we had a little performance. All the guys in the band are locals, living in Manase literally right next to Stevenson's. One of them worked at the BBQ place where we got lunch on my birthday.


This video is of two boys fishing. The fish they catch are very small and were the ones we saw most frequently because they would come right up to you and swim around in the areas away from the coral. The people eat these fish, but they mostly use them as bait for deep ocean fishing. We saw people all the time doing this along "our" beach. I don't remember what particular day this was, but we had all just taken a walk together up and down the beach and Brian had stopped to talk with the boys and take a video of them.


This is a video of the coast of Savaii. We took a day trip around the entire island. We paid 120 tala each (which is like nothing for us) for a man to drive us around and show us all the sights of the island. It gives you a pretty good idea of how small Samoa really is. Our driver told us, without stopping, it would only take him 4 hours to do the entire perimeter of the island (there's really only one main road you can drive on). It took us from about 9:30 am til roughly 5:00 pm. Which just shows how much we stopped and how much we saw.


More of the same day, driving around the island. This is a village, I'm not sure of the name.


On our adventure around the island we stopped at this thing called the "Canopy Walk." It's an enormous tree that has stairs built on it that spiral up to the top and you can get a good view of the surrounding jungle from uptop. It also has a scary plank, rope and wire bridge (I can't think of the appropriate name right now of course) that connects to another tree. It is this bridge that gives the tourist attraction it's name. I, for one, am pretty scared of heights and Brian got this video of me slowly making my way down the stairs after having climbed up and looked around. You can see me taking one step at a time. Haha. And Brian and Chris are joking about it the whole time. I obviously did not walk across the bridge because it looked dangerous and also like it would break really easily but Brian, Jon and Chris did it.


More driving around


We stopped at some blowholes. It would require too much effort to write in detail about them right now, but they're basically created by the ocean hitting rock and the water finding it's way through crevasses and exploding out with immense power. This particular blowhole is famous in Samoa because of it's size and also because the people like to throw coconut into the hole at precisely the right time and they come exploding back out. A tiny little old Samoan man, who we deemed "the coconut man", demonstrated this local tradition for us. Brian later went up and threw a few coconuts in himself. This video is particularly funny because Chris jokes that coconut man had to attend 3 years of school in order to get that timing just right.


This is the waterfall where we went cliff diving. We jumped from the side (not from the top of the water fall! - but apparently you can do that! ahh!). This is also where I hurt my knee jumping from the cliffs too close to the side of the cliff. I slammed down onto some rocks at the bottom of the water and scraped my knee. Overall, I was okay, my knee just had a bad cut and I was mostly just shaken up, but I now have a scar to prove it all happened.


This is us walking through some lava ruins. All the villages around Samoa (mostly in Savaii) try to have some sort of tourist attraction in their village because that happens to be a great source of income to the people there. Some things were as small as charging people 2 tala for a simple place to take pictures and others were much more substantial, such as these lava ruins. It was weird because lava crusts are meant to reproduce life of plants and nature around it after the flow destroys them, but these people were "weeding" the budding grasses and trees because they wanted to keep the lava flow are clear and "new" looking as possible. Which sort of seemed backwards to me, but that's their living. The whole villages women were out there cleaning the area, sweeping and weeding. Jon is in the light blue shorts, Chris is in the orange and I'm obviously in the pink. The white ground that we walk on in the beginning of the video is cement the village lay down in order for people to have an easier time walking to a certain spot - the virgins grave (which is a whole other story I'll write about later.)


This video isn't really of anything because it's so dark but you can hear our friend Evan talking. He was the manager of the neighboring resort called "Vacations" and was a good friend to us throughout our time in Samoa. Through him we experienced a lot of Samoan culture that I don't think we would have been able to experience if we hadn't met him. This video is of our kava bowl ceremony. Chris had bought some kava - a root that Samoans traditionally use as a welcome drink and make a huge ceremony out of it. It used to only be drunk by certain people but it is now sold at local stores. Chris bought it at the gas station we frequented in hopes of tasting some because it's so popular here. He had it with him when we went to Evan's (Vacations) on the last night that Jon was in Samoa. He suggested we have some and Evan got very excited and insisted that his cousin and cook, Apu, make it special and put it in a traditional special ceremonial kava bowl. We were also served in a very formal fashion. Kava has effects similar to alcohol. It makes you feel very relaxed and sleepy and a little out of sorts. This video is funny because Evan is talking about the next time we all come to Samoa (which probably won't happen for years) and he speculates that Chris and I (since it was apparent that we were dating) would have children. Haha. Although it's nice of Evan to believe that Chris and I will still be together years from now, it's really difficult to for us to imagine that, let alone having kids.


Finally, this is the last video - although Brian has several more on his youtube account and if you're really interested you can check them out. This is of the fish market in Apia. On our last day, after we took the ferry from Savaii back to Upolu, we went back to Apia because we had HOURS to kill before our flight. We ended up going to a fish and chips place that was right in the fish market and after eating Brian insisted on going back to take a video of it because he thought it was so cool.


I hope you enjoyed the videos. I will hopefully write up a long update about Samoa and also NZ life, but I've been really busy recently. I have a test on Thursday and papers all due June 5th. Other excuses that I have are that my internet got cut off (they charge by the bandwidth here and I used it all up really early on in the week trying to watch the season finale of Lost season 5) and then Chris started getting sick on Friday and on Sunday was in bad shape. So I spent Sunday and today taking care of him and making sure he was okay. Surprisingly, I'm not sick yet... but I feel like I may be speaking too soon and that in a couple of days I'll be just as sick. Hopefully, this won't be the case, but I'm not making any sort of predictions at this point.