Samoa: Tradition marches on

Even in darkness, on the way from the airport, Samoa didn't look like anywhere else I'd been in Polynesia — not like Rarotonga or Fiji, not like Tahiti or Easter Island.

Open pavilions dotted the roadsides almost as frequently as the small houses. Some were more brightly lighted: Designed as ovals and sometimes squares, their thatched roofs supported by pillars, they glowed like cages in the hot tropical night.

In some small ones, families were watching TV, as if the pavilions were open-air living rooms. In the largest ones, men were sitting as still as cross-legged statues, one at the base of each pillar. A church service, perhaps? But we were passing dozens of churches. A ceremony, then?

The pavilions were the first things I asked about on a visit to the Samoas last winter, though they weren't the reason I'd come, and my reason wasn't all that typical to start with.

Most tourists come to the Samoas in search of the picture-perfect South Seas paradise — green mountains sloping to white beaches, coconut palms framing deep-blue ocean, and friendly people with flowers in their hair. And all that is here.

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But I'd come for a house — an old house and a long-dead hero. I wanted to see Vailima, the carefully restored Victorian villa that was Robert Louis Stevenson's last home.

Drawn by fragile health and a wandering soul, the prolific author and his extended family began building Vailima in 1890, in the hills above Apia, independent Samoa's small capital. He died here four years later, about as far from his native Scotland as he could get.

I could identify with that. I was a Minnesotan trying to escape the cold, and I'd once dreamed of plying the Pacific in a white schooner, as Stevenson did.

Now I rode wildly colored Samoan buses, made a sweaty climb up a small mountain to pay homage at Stevenson's grave, toured Villa Vailima a couple of times and lingered here one afternoon to read Stevenson's poetry in the breezy shade of its verandas.

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter, home from the hill.

The rest of the time, I asked locals about ancient customs and modern contrasts — everything from those mysterious pavilions to the incongruous presence of McDonald's, rush-hour traffic in downtown Apia, even coconut biodiesel — an attempt to reduce Samoa's dependence on imported oil. Its time may be coming, given that potential fuel grows on trees here, free for the gathering.

Just about every conversation led back to fa'a Samoa — the Samoan way — a tradition that still shapes the society of this small, South Pacific nation and its closest relative, American Samoa, just a half-hour's flight east.

Fa'a Samoa centers on two things, "the family and God," said Dwayne Bentley, marketing manager for the Samoa Tourist Authority in Apia. "And 'family' almost always means your extended family — everybody from the nuclear family out to your aunties and uncles and second and third cousins."

The pavilions are part of it too. The small ones are traditional-style family dwellings, called fale samoa — Samoan houses, as opposed to modern fale palagi — foreign houses, made of concrete block with metal roofs.