Sailele

We hadn't been to Sailele in a while (previously blogged about in this post) so we decided to spend our Saturday there. It's a quiet village on the Northeast side of the island. When we go there, I can easily imagine what life would be like in a Samoan village a hundred years ago.

As we drove through, some of the villagers were sitting along the edge of the road pulling weeds and others were raking up leaves and other debris to burn. It's just a very idyllic setting. One of the older women was sitting in the water with some young kids. When we walked by the littlest started yelling, "palagi, palagi" and pointing at us while she tried (unsuccessfully) to get him to stop. The others just waved and smiled.

We had heard that there was good snorkeling near a rock by the beginning of the village. It wasn't a huge spot, but there were lots of different fish. I love longnose filefish - I can't really explain why. It's probably because when I first saw a pair of them it was so surprising. I had never seen a fish that shape before and the colors were so bright that it seemed unreal and cartoony. There were several pairs of them in the little pool in Sailele, along with a few juvenile emperor angelfish, Clif's favorite.

beaching

The weekend after all our stuff was stolen we went to Sailele. It was beautiful! Sailele is on the other side of the island. It has almost no garbage on the beach, which is a novelty here, and we avoided rain on the other side of the island. The kids had great fun exploring a little tunnel in the rock where there was beautiful coral and even some colorful fish. Then last weekend we went bowling in a sauna - well, technically we just went bowling in a bowling alley with no A/C, but that's not what it felt like!

We spent Columbus Day at $2 beach. It's called $2 beach because it costs $2 per person to swim there. I know some people here don't think the $2 is worth it, but we liked having a small fale to keep us out of the small bouts of rain that came through. And it was a great place for snorkeling, especially for Everett. There is a small little deep spot away from the waves and current where tons of fish hang out. Our exciting creature views were sea urchins, juvenile emperor angelfish and juvenile rock mover wrasse, which I find really interesting since it looks like a bit of plant matter floating in the water until you look closely, and then when it grows, up it looks like this. We saw a few more pipefish and many juvenile parrotfish too, plus, of course, all the many fish that we weren't able to identify!