Samoa - Manase, Savaii - April 17th

Last time I updated on Samoa was on my birthday.
April 17th (wow, over a month ago) - Chris, Brian, Jon and I decided to go to the "Dwarfs Cave." After having breakfast and taking a swim in the ocean, we had a cab come and take up to the village Paia where the caves were located. Our cab was actually a fancy looking SUV driven by a very friendly Samoan. He gave us advice about payment for the cave and what to do when we got there. The village was in a very spread out area, in a clearing right by the edge of a jungle. When we pulled up we were met by an elderly gentleman who we paid 5 tala each and he set up a guide to come take us over to the caves.
Our guides name, funny enough, was Tala. He seemed a bit disgruntled to have to take us out to the cave and was very standoffish and suspicious of us. He brought a horse of his over who had a foal. His horse was really really underweight and had a horribly infected eye. Her foal didn't look too bad, but both of them were really skiddish and wouldn't let me come up and pet them. Most of the horses in Samoa are really skinny and look overworked. Horses are their main way of transporting things from plantations and they ride them or load them full of stuff to be brought back to the village. Really there isn't much I can do about that because the horses are their livelihood but I was distrubed none the less.
Our guide lead us on a 30 minute walk up a slow sloping path through the jungle that the village people of Paia use to get back and forth from their plantations. We saw a lot of people pass us carrying machetes and riding or driving horses. We all said "Talofa" to them and they all gave us friendly waves and stared at us.
Tala had a friend join us, who I think was his cousin. I never learned him name unforunately. We started joking around with them and talking and eventually they warmed up to us. They got really excited with our interest in their lifestyle and everyday work. We asked them how they harvest coconuts and they got really excited and insisted on showing us and cutting down some coconuts to give us. Tala's cousin pulled a rope around his feet and using that as a leverage (I can't really properly describe this) and climbed to the top of a coconut tree and hacked at the coconuts with his machete and cut down a huge amount of them.
While he was doing this Tala found a very large stick, cut it so that it had a large point at the end and stuck it into the ground. They used this "tool" to break the coconuts open and then peel away the green exterior to reveal the small nut inside that contains all the goodstuff. Then they used their machetes to cut off the top of the nut and reveal the water inside and handed out one to each of us.
The water was surprisingly cool and did not taste at all like the very concentrated form of coconut that I'm used to. In fact, I normally don't like coconut, but the taste so mild and had a sweet bitter taste to it that I was able to drink a good amount of it. They also cut open one of the coconuts enough to get the "meat" of the nut out. They cut the meat out using what they deemed a "samoan spoon" - which was just a piece of the exterior of the coconut cut very thinly.
After our coconut break we walked on (all of us sweating profusely) and finally came to the cave.
Located next to the cave, in the middle of the jungle, all alone was a cow. It was pretty terrified of us and Tala explained that it was his other cousins cow.
The mouth of the cave was hidden pretty well because it was pretty much just a hole in the ground. We climbed down, with Tala leading the way with the only one flashlight we had to guide us. It was nearly impossible to see and the way we moved through the slippery rocky cave was having Tala run ahead and then shine the flashlight on the footing he had just passed through so that the rest of us could catch up with him.
We saw fools gold and bats flying around the top of the cave. About 2 minutes into the cave was this huge naturally made shelf that they called the "Dwarfs Table." I can't really describe how this looked. It looked like a rock and mud huge shelf that ran along the side of the cave. Really bizzare. There were two ways to go down the cave. Tala explained that you could get easily lost if you didn't have a guide. We wandered down one way, jumping over puddles and ducking under low lying ceilings. We came to a drop into a large pool of water below. There was no other way of getting down to that part of the cave other than jumping into the pool of water. Lucky for us we had a guide book that warned us that we probably should not jump into any water in the cave because of the possibility of bat droppings and other gross things being in the water. However, Tala's cousins leaped into the water quite willingly and we all laughed and enjoyed watching him make his way back up the steep edge of the drop.
Then they took us back. It was a rather short exploration and a little disappointing but just hanging out with Tala and his cousin and getting a feel for the culture and life of these people so different from us was well worth it!
When we got back we managed to catch a bus back to Stevenson's. However we decided to get lunch at another resort called "Vacations" which was located across the stress from the gas station where we got all our water and snacks about a 5 minute walk from Stevenson's. At Vacations we enjoyed some really good Fish and Chips and this is where we met our soon to be friend Evan. He was very soft spoken and had a really sad sounding voice. He advised us on a tour around the island saying that most places over charge people but he thought he'd be able to hook us up with a cheap tour. We thanked him and promised we'd come back because we had enjoyed our meal so much.
When we got back to our fale we swam and watched the sun set and had dinner. We played uno in Brian and Jon's fale and tried to play another game that kind of failed. We stayed up late talking for a really long time. We shared a lot of stories about our lives and hometowns.

I need to get lunch, so I'll write more later and post pictures!