This post is heavily lifted from Sophia's blog...she did such a great job that I had to use it :)
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: Sophia and I 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.
Sophia and I again from Taupo to Napier
Napier - Hawkes Bay, Sophia 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!
This is from the day after Sophia's 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 Sophia's b-day.
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 pretty sketchy (but cool) plank, rope and wire bridge. Sophia's pretty scared of heights and Brian got this video of her slowly making her way down the stairs after having climbed up and looked around. And Brian and I are joking about it the whole time.
More driving around
We stopped at some blowholes. They're basically created by the ocean hitting rock and the water finding its 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 coconuts 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 is the waterfall where we went cliff diving. We jumped from the side, not the top, but apparently some people do that. This is also where Sophia scraped her knee jumping too close to the side of the cliff. It freaked her out a little bit, but after a few minutes she was alright.
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 village's women were out there cleaning the area, sweeping and weeding.
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.
Napier - Hawkes Bay, Sophia 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!
This is from the day after Sophia's 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 Sophia's b-day.
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 pretty sketchy (but cool) plank, rope and wire bridge. Sophia's pretty scared of heights and Brian got this video of her slowly making her way down the stairs after having climbed up and looked around. And Brian and I are joking about it the whole time.
More driving around
We stopped at some blowholes. They're basically created by the ocean hitting rock and the water finding its 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 coconuts 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 is the waterfall where we went cliff diving. We jumped from the side, not the top, but apparently some people do that. This is also where Sophia scraped her knee jumping too close to the side of the cliff. It freaked her out a little bit, but after a few minutes she was alright.
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 village's women were out there cleaning the area, sweeping and weeding.
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.
