Palagi Beach

It suddenly dawned on me that the readers of this blog probably are getting tired of reading about beach after beach after beach.... I wish I could give you something else, but, really, that's about 99% of the fun that we have here.

We visited Palagi Beach (pronounced "pa-long-ee") today (Columbus Day). "Palagi" means a white-skinned person, or, literally, "those who burst from the sky" (pa = burst, lagi = sky). Wherever we go, we white folk are referred to as "palagi's;" we even refer to ourselves as palagi's (obviously, it doesn't phase us much). Maybe it was fate then that brought us to "Palagi" beach on Columbus Day (Columbus was, essentially, a "white" guy visiting a group of natives; we're a family of white'ees visiting native Samoa).

Anyway, I hope nobody gets offended by my use of racial terms; I don't know how else to describe it. I've been told that the beach is named "Palagi" because only palagi's would ever go there. Now I see why.

To get there, we had to drive to the westernmost edge of the island. From there, it is about a 20 minute hike on an extremely narrow path, over rocks, clinging onto vines to keep you from falling to your demise, until you reach the waterfront. Once you are there, you still have to walk across jagged rocks for another 5-10 minutes until you reach the beach. It is not for the faint of heart, or the acrophobic, of which I am. Some palagi's will probably say I am overreacting. So be it.

Anyway, once you are to the beach, it is beautiful.

The tide was really strong, and the snorkeling wasn't so great. But the beach was nice, and made for some nice photos.

Jaydn thought it was pretty funny to put sand all over his body. Until he realized he needed to clean it off.

After spending some quality time at the beach, we went for another hike further around the island. We stopped on a small island (an "island to the island," I guess) to take some pictures and see a blowhole (which wasn't outstanding, but looked cool).

I like this picture. It looks like Jaydn is checking out his next wave to tackle (if he was a surfer, that is).Like I said, we did a lot of walking on rocks!

At one point, we stopped on the rocks (shown above) and across from us was a huge rock island, with the waves coming in on both sides of the island. I got a great shot of the waves that I'll probably never replicate:

I stayed on this rock too long, and Jaydn saw something really cool because he moved on quicker than I. He was looking at a red crab in some shallow pools of water right by the shore, when all of the sudden a moray eel jumped out and swallowed the crab. He sat there, completely stunned at this live National Geographic clip that was unfolding before him, and I was kicking myself that I didn't hurry a little faster to see and take a picture of Mr. Moray. Oh well.

We got tired and extremely crispy-burned in the red hot sun. So we had to head back. Before we did, though, we took two more family pictures. I like the second one the best.

The sun was going to our heads.

After heading back over the treacherous path, and after making it back to our home, we didn't last too long before we were all asleep. Man, we were pooped!