Island Fever

The island has been wearing on Sara and I recently. We haven't been off-island since October. With (relative) stress at work ramping up with trials for both Sara and I pending for next week, we've been feeling the need to get away from paradise.

Late last week, Sara took the initiative and got us tickets to (Western) Samoa, to the island of Savai'i. It is a large, minimally populated island. We're eager to get there.

Especially after the last few days. We sweated our way through another hot, humid few days. Last night, Sara found a mass of fire ants battling with termites in one of our extra bedrooms. After spraying the bugs and only getting a few bites, we were able to fight back the invaders.

This morning, we cleaned and ran some errands. I spent the morning trying to figure out what the ghastly smell in our bedroom was. After cleaning my dresser, closet and bedroom, I started to clear the rugs to our deck, only to find the source of the stink, a rotting rat corpse. It was well along its way to decomposition. After pulling the dead rat from between the deck boards with a long handle garden hoe and hosing off the maggots I was able to chase the stink from our bedroom, with only the slightest amount of dry-heaving.

The rest of Saturday was spent cleaning, on errands and watching a sevens rugby tournament. Yeah, I'm ready to get off-island too. Can't wait until Thursday.

Aoloautuai Camping

With no weekend plans, we jumped on a friend's suggestion on Friday to go camping. After some Saturday morning debates on where exactly we should go camping, we opted for one spot that a number of palagi went one of my first weekends here: Aoloautuai. It's a remote bay on the north side of the island that is known for having good fishing and snorkeling. There are only two ways into the bay, either hike down from the end of the ridge road that goes to Aoloaufua Ridge or to boat in. Our friend who owns a boat is off-island, so we were packing our way in.

We loaded up the boat owner's pickup truck (he left the keys with another one of our fellow

campers) and headed out to the trail head. We managed to pick up a friend on layover. She'd been travelling around the South Pacific after her contract was over and had a day and a half layover in American Samoa, so she joined in our hike.

We drove to the end of the Aoloaufua road at the top of the ridge. There are a few houses there. We knocked on the door of the nearest one and got permission to leave a car there and take the hike down to the bay, a few, uninhabited miles below.

We then started the hike down. Most hikes I'm used to starting at the bottom and working your way to the top and back. It was a little disorienting to start our hike at the highest point and then head down.

The track followed a ridge line down through the rain forest. It followed a double track road for the first several hundred yards, which ended into a roughly built fale that overlooked a few bays. From there the track quickly became overgrown with grass and vines. Sara was able to pick out one of the vines that the Japanese students at her position in Australia called Kuru Kuru, something that roughly translates to curly, which is what they nicknamed her for their month there.

The trail continued to descend along the ridge line. The further down we got, the taller the forest canopy got. We even started to develop an under story, which is unusual here, since the forest is so thick, little light gets through to breed another layer of flora. Other than a few spider webs and terrestrial hermit crabs, there wasn't much wildlife to see. When the brush would open up we could occasionally catch views of the west side of Cock's Comb. I'd never been on that side of the peninsula, looking at the rock formation from the other side I realized there's starting to be only a few spots I haven't been on this island yet.

Eventually the steep track started to take its toll. This was the roughest hike that Sara and I have tried on Tutuila thus far. It started to beat up her still healing leg. The steep and slick track also took its toll and near the bottom her legs started to give out a little bit. Luckily, before all was lost we hit the flat lands and the banana

and coconut forest that led up to the beach. Once we worked our way out of the brush we found ourselves on an open beach that was made up of coral and sand.

There was some evidence of people using the beach for fishing, but it saw very little recent use. We made our camp a little upland for the high tide mark and then set about exploring the beach. I made it a point to gather up some drift wood for a bonfire. We'd had such good experiences with that at Amalau, that it was worth repeating.

While gathering up the drift wood, something on the beach caught my attention.

There were a number a blue jelly fish left drying out by the receding tide. Recalling some warnings about Portugese Man 'O'War that I had read somewhere along the way, I pointed these out to the rest of the group. Enough of us shared my suspicions that these were the dreaded stingers of the South Pacific that we didn't end up getting in the water that afternoon. Better safe than peeing on a friend's leg to try and neutralize a tentacle sting.

In lieu of swimming and exploring the reef, we made camp and went hunting for seashells. Eventually, one friend had to hike out on her own, as it was her second to last night on the island. The four of us that remained feasted on pasta salad and beans. We then spent an evening enjoying the camp bar staple of whiskey and Crystal Lite. Only the finest for us tropical campers. A bonfire carried us well into evening and we retired at a somewhat reasonable hour.

We woke up the next morning to another round of jelly fish washed up on the shore. So, again, no water time for us. After some leisurely tuna sandwiches and fruit we broke camp and started hiking back out. With only an up hike, the going was pretty easy on my knees. We made it up to the car without too many issues. The hike up ended up being easier than the hike down. Now I just need to get my legs in shape for some of the longer hauls on the island.

Aoloautuai was pretty great, but I am eager to go back and explore the reef with a snorkel mask on. We just need to hope the invertebrates will cooperate.

Wall Cat

Our office environment is a little different from what we've come to expect on the mainland. The first time I saw a cockroach in the building's atrium I almost flipped out. I quickly learned this is a daily occurrence. A few weeks later, when a mouse interrupted a civil division meeting, I didn't bat an eye, seeing as the corner of every door in our office has been chewed to allow access to all the offices for rodents. Living and working in the tropics, this is what you need to deal with.

That was until we started having an uninvited guest in our Attorney General office suite. At the beginning of last week one of the other assistant attorney generals complained about hearing a cat crying while she was on the phone. This isn't unheard of. Supposedly the public defender's office has a cat that lives in the ceiling and raids food from people's desks. Between all the pests we deal with, a cat in the crawl space may help contain the rodent population.

I was on the phone later in the week when I had my encounter with "Wall Cat," as the creature stalking our vents and ceiling tiles has come to be called. I was talking with a workmen's comp claimant on the phone when I started hearing some meowing coming from the wall. Every time I'd say something during the phone call, the wall would call out to me with sorry pleas for attention and chow. There being a wall between me and the feline, there wasn't much I could do to either help it or remove it from it the premises.

Eventually, I got off the phone and the cat must have wandered off, since I stopped hearing it. Unfortunately, I did start smelling it, or at least its urine. Turns out, Wall Cat peed in the wall. Yuck. I made it through the afternoon by snagging a candle from Sara's office and some gritty olfactory determination.

I assumed that this was the worst that Wall Cat could inflict on us. I was wrong. Monday showed us how much destruction this unseen demon could wreck. Over the weekend, Wall Cat had managed to find a hole through the wall, into the office of the assistant AG who deals with all the HR issues. The cat preceded to use her office as a litter box for Saturday and Sunday. She spent Monday with her office door open, vacuuming, burning candles, spraying down her office with every available cleaner and the stench was still over powering. She ended the day sprinkling Febreeze and baking soda all over the carpet and vacuuming the place twice over the next morning.

The smell had slackened slightly by today, but it still lingered enough that everyone who entered the office caught a whiff of Wall Cat. By the end of the day, the stench had departed all the offices except the one poor HR attorney's that had been the cat's out house all weekend. She was still suffering through the retch inducing odor of cat piss. The pained look on her face said she was counting the hours until her contract's up in September and she gets to return to the mainland.

Some things about practicing law in Samoa just can't compare to anywhere else.

Pests

Sara and I have been busy battling the local ant population at our house the past few days. We thought we were being diligent about cleaning up our kitchen and food, but the ants are determined and keep finding the last morsel of food we didn't see at the bottom of the sink or that there is a way into the sugar package that is encased in two ziplock bags.

It's been a frustrating situation. We hesitate to spray for bugs in our kitchen, since we do prepare food for ourselves there and have no inclination to ingest toxins. But the frustration with the constant battles with ants is getting to us.

The ants here are different from the ants I've dealt with back on the mainland. There are two variety of ants here: sugar ants and protein ants. The sugar ants are tiny and fast. They are about the size of an eye of a needle. They are faster than any insect that size has a right to be. The ants quickly fan out across the whole house and scout out every little piece of food that escapes your notice. Once they find the food, there is a constant stream of them headed to it and taking back what they can carry to their colony.

The protein ants are normal sized, with a black head and tail, and a red body. They have a nasty bite that leaves welts. Thankfully these ones have not made their presence known in the house. The only troubles we've had with them has been leaving a plate a food next to the barbecue an hour and them swarm it.

Thus far we haven't sprayed for the ants, we've just been wiping them up with spray cleaner, but this solution just isn't cutting it. One of our longer tenured friends on the island suggested a poison paste you leave out on a sheet of paper. The ants find it, take it back to the colony and the poison is slow enough to kill them there. I'm not a huge fan of insect genocide, but I'd also like to reclaim my kitchen. We'll see if that solution works when we put it to use this weekend.

At least we haven't had the rat, centipede and cockroach issues other houses have had...