Several weeks ago, we decided to hike Mt. Alava Ridge, which is the border of the American Samoa National Park and overlooks Pago Harbor to the South and then into the Park to the North. The Ridge hike has several different access points, but the one we chose is 7 miles round-trip which takes you up and then back down an access road.
Most other trails to the top involve ropes and ladders and I wasn't quite sure my almost-healed tibia was ready for anything more than a steady climb. Periodically along the way the National Park Service had mini tree nurseries with saplings growing in bunches shaded by roofs made of palm fronds.
We actually ended up running into some NPS workers along our hike who informed us that they do a hike every Saturday to "keep fit." Admittedly, they may not have been the most fit Samoans we've seen on-island, but at least they were out and doing something in the heat of the day (in flip flops, of course).
As it turned out, the majority of our hike left us surrounded by lush jungle, with only occasional glimpses to the ridges, valley, and villages below.
Once we got to the top, we took a sweaty break in a fale which had been built for weary hikers like ourselves. We also took the opportunity to sign our names to the guest book.
And, naturally, we also took some time to enjoy the incredible views...
Despite the fact that we almost exclusively write about our recreational activities, Sara and I do actually go to work on this island. Our day jobs keep us pretty busy from 7:30am to 4pm, the bruising schedule of working in a Samoan government office. It's a rough life in the tropics, but someone needs to live it.
So after a pre-trial conference this morning, I got to get away from the office/dungeon that most civil litigators are confined to for a little bit to statutory explanations for conference the at the Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources ("DMWR"). DMWR is implementing a program where the coastal villages can set up their own marine reserves and establish their own fishing regulations that both the village and DMWR enforcement officers can enforce. I got asked to attend this meeting by one of the Samoans I met at the talofa barbecue I went to last weekend for a departing member of DMWR.
The talk sounded a little on the legal-nerd end of the spectrum, just the kind of thing for an attorney on the environmental kick back on the mainland. The meeting turned out to be interesting in a few, non-legal ways. The whole events started with a buffet breakfast, I caught more than a few looks for not eating a big plate from the available food. I didn't realize it was going to be catered and had a meal before commuting into Pago Pago. The meeting then kicked off with a hymn sung in Samoan and was followed by two prayers, also in Samoan, led by different members of the group. The group of village mayors, or matais from the participating villages, then gave reports on the enforcement they had done in the last year as a part of the program. This whole presentation was, also in Samoan, so I gathered little outside of there were a lot of "thank you's" and they referred to the "rules" a bunch. Knowing only about two-dozen Samoan words will hold you back in this context.
After these presentations I got up and did my presentation on the rules, the first part of the program to be in English. This was followed by a break for brunch, which consisted of a buffet of the left overs from breakfast along with some rice, beef stew and meat pies. Again, I caught some looks for turning down a soda and a big plate of food at 10:20 in the morning. Participating in Samoa events is calorie intensive.
The DMWR enforcement officers then did more explanations of the fisheries program and some specifics from the regulations, again, also in Samoan. I had an easier time following these talks, since they had power point slides with the code sections and many of the legal terms had no practical Samoa translations so there would be acronyms and legal terms mixed in to the explanations.
This session went OK until the end. The events started to get side tracked when the matais started asking about creating village specific regulations. Most of the sought regulations involved closing the fishing to non-villagers. Unfortunately, I had to be the bearer of bad tidings and make it clear that any regulation passed by the village had to apply equally to the villages and outsiders. This upset some of the representatives. Apparently excluding everyone else seemed to be what most of them hoped to achieve. Sigh. Sometimes the hardest thing about being an attorney is telling people "no."
I hopefully conveyed it clearly enough to convince them that's not what the fisheries and marine sanctuary program was about, but a number of the representatives were still up in arms by the time this portion ended. Hopefully these hard feelings were smoothed over by the large lunch, I dashed out before the 3rd buffet of the morning got too far underway. The Samoans running the event caught me in the hallway when I was talking to a few biologists who work for DMWR and gave me a take-out tray piled with food. They must have assumed I was in dire need of food, since it was heaped with beef chow mien, battered and fried chicken, pork stir-fry, a fried banana, rice and two soft drinks. Too much food and most of it that's not in my diet. I ended up gaving it to one of the Samoans I work with.
We'll see if this program is a success, since these villages really are the front line for protecting these natural resources.
A frequent social gathering for the palagi community here on American Samoa is for goodbyes. With almost all the of community being contract workers, there is almost always someone whose contract is coming to a close and is making to depart the island. One of the Department of Marine Wildlife Resources staffers had her going away party over the weekend. Her Aussie neighbors took it upon themselves to build some entertainment for the party. Always looking for an excuse to play with power tools, I let a hand. We built a set of cornhole board and a pair of washer toss boards. Basically any game that lets you hold a beer in one hand and participate with the other. The games were a big hit, though the numerous children around did do some damage to our home made bean bags. Those will need some repair prior to their next go around. We also barbecued.
Being the attorney for DMWR was also interesting, since many of the attendees to the barbecue were the Samoan employees for the agency. I got drafted to participate in a conference on fisheries management and village level oversight. Sometimes work and leisure intersect in interesting ways.
Sundays are a dead day in Samoan society. Few stores are open and most people spend their day in church or sharing a massive umu meal with their family. I really don't have much of an issue with this, only that the Samoans use it as a excuse to close down their beaches and not allow any swimming or activities near villages. Thus, non-church-goers and non-binge-eaters like Sara and I end up trying to to plan activities at some of the few spots that remain open on Sundays. Luckily for us, there's a large portion of the palagi community that's in the same boat, so when one of our friends suggested the Vaitia Tide Pools, Sara and I jumped at the opportunity to get out and go to one of the few swimming areas that's not close to a village.
We and some friends from paddling rallied up in the late morning at the house of another married lawyer couple and headed out. Sara and I got to see the island in style - we rode in the back of our friends' pickup truck in beach chairs, which is the true Samoan way to get around the island.
There's really no better way to see and feel the mass of the rainforest-covered volcanic peaks than from a truck bed. Though my hat kept trying to fly off, it was a blast. It makes me want to have a pickup truck just for transporting our eventual visitors.
The hike down to the tide pools from the National Park fale isn't long. It's a little steep and rocky, but there are a few interesting archaeological sites along the route. The Park Service has some good signs explaining their finds from a dig five years ago, and if you take some side trails you can see a few artifacts that have been allowed to remain in place.
The trail down also offers some some great views of Pola Islannd (the Cock's Comb). Every few weeks I need to remind myself that I live in one of the most beautiful and dramatic island landscapes around. Too often I get mired in the suburbs-lite feel of the Tafuna Plain. I need weekend trips like this to balance out the trash and traffic of the south side of the island.
The wind was blowing pretty hard once we reached the rocks above the tide pools. This was driving some large swells. Even at low tide, the pools were getting refreshed on a pretty regular basis. We set up camp on the rocks and a few people walked down to the pools and snorkeled around the largest pool. I worked up a little courage and did a dramatic entrance by taking the plunge into the water from the overlooking rocks. I also coached one of the other attorneys from my office into making the jump. It's a little spooky since the landing area is narrow and the footing up top can be a little slick when it is wet.
Another member of our party lost his wedding ring in the pool. A frantic snorkel search was commenced, but the wave action that was feeding the pools turned out to be a little too much and the ring became a permanent resident.
Sara, still a little gun shy after her last tide pools experience, opted out of the swimming. Turns out, she might have been on to something. Soon after the low tide, the waves picked up. They were regularly crashing over the rocks and aerating the tide pool. These occasional surges were dramatic and shoved those of us swimming in the pools around, but didn't cause too many problems. The real danger was that the waves were crashing over the only exit point for the tide pools. As a result, each person needed to use some spotters from the high ground, since they couldn't see the waves coming when they were in position to climb out. I made it up without issue, but a few of our group did get caught in some waves upon exiting the pools. Not being able to offer assistance against the crashing walls of water or the slippery, sharp rocks, I did the next best thing, I captured it on video.
After the pounding, cut short our trip to the tide pools, we decided we needed another activity to fill the remainder of the afternoon. With few places being open, we opted for the palagi standby of Tisa's Barefoot Bar. Something about Vailimas, banana fries and Pina Coladas on the beach do an amazing job of patching up bruises to the body. Just another weekend in paradise.
Thus far I've had a number of oral arguments in court, here in American Samoa. All have either been unopposed, or the issue was been pushed down the road by the justice/judge. I was eager to finally have a contested motion to argue this morning. I'd drafted and sent out my motion to compel last month. I'd spent a healthy part of yesterday afternoon drafting my arguments and rehearsing them. I knew my law, I knew what my opponent would argue and I had my counters ready. I was ready to go.
Sara reviewed my arguments and suggested I pair it down to a few broad strokes. Not wanting to lose out on the technical aspects of what individual objections were improper and the finer points of civil procedure I lopped off as much of the fat as I could part with. I needed those arguments to be on the record.
I show up for the hearing, this morning armed and ready. We sit down and the Chief Justice looks around and say "Start talking. What are we arguing?" I then launch into my carefully crafted treatise on civil discovery and why the other side owes me some answers. A minute in the justice interrupts me with "I'd rather listen with my eyes, this matter is taken under advisement." Cut and done.
Lesson learned, if you can't say it to the court within a few sentences, it's not going to get heard.
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.
So after our tropical car camping extravaganza at Amalau (during which I found more amazing shells than I have found heretofore combined), we paid our "resort" host (chief Lauti) and took the meandering road back to the western side of Pago harbor.
After a quick stop at home to drop off gear and grab pina colada supplies (Coco Lopez, pineapple juice and rum), we headed back east to the Aussies' home base of Coconut Point. If I do say so myself, the pinas were an extremely successful venture on their front porch. As a side note, Coconut Point is pretty much at the top of the list for places to live and where we would likely have ended up if we weren't required to accept government housing. There really is something to be said for being able to go swimming off of one's front yard....
Being in an ideal location for such, we then took our camp-dirty selves into the South Pacific for a dip. After taking the below video, I found myself wishing I had not narrated, but I suppose you folks can handle it just this once.
Several weeks ago, we decided to hike Mt. Alava Ridge, which is the border of the American Samoa National Park and overlooks Pago Harbor to the South and then into the Park to the North. The Ridge hike has several different access points, but the one we chose is 7 miles round-trip which takes you up and then back down an access road. 
