Savai‘i - Exploring and Diving

Riding my scooter for about 40 minutes, I arrived in a small village called Manase. I checked into my beautiful beach fale accommodation before heading off to check out some nearby lava fields.

Savai‘i‘s black and dried up lava field has existed for more than 100 years and came into being by a volcanic eruption in 1905 that lasted over six years. Walking on the lava fields, I explored a church that was destroyed by the lava flow, snapped a few pictures and generally just took a stroll on some 100 year old lava. With probably a lot of stuff in Samoa, it is not something very spectacular, but it is a nice excuse to leave your accommodation, drive around, explore the beautiful island and just soak in life in paradise.

On the way to the lava fields, I booked myself a dive for the following day, as I researched that one can go dive in a shipwreck here in Samoa. So this is what I did the next day.

Waking up rather early, I headed to the dive shop at 8am, signed all the waivers, geared up and headed out to the dive sites by boat. I signed up for two dives. The first one being a dive through a reef, canyons and below an arch while the second dive was to the shipwreck.

During the first dive, we didn't see much sealife (we did see a clownfish though), but it was the first time diving through a canyon, underneath an underwater arch and along a reef wall. It took a few minutes until we reached that point and I was already a bit disappointed, but then the dive became really cool when we reached the underwater canyon! Definitely a highlight and a good appetizer for the shipwreck dive, which turned out to be freaking awesome.

Basically, once we got into the water for the second dive, we could immediately see the shipwreck as it was positioned in the water in a way that the front of the ship was down only
2-3m but the end of it was in more than 22m depth. So we basically dived along the entire ship for a good 30 minutes. The ship used to be a missionary ship that hit the reef and sank in 1948 and was a, I believe, three mast ship. Exploring its ins and outs was simply amazing. From seeing an old lantern over finding a telephone to diving through the ship's skeleton, I would do the dive again in a heartbeat. After exploring the shipwreck, we continued our dive along a beautiful reef where we spotted multiple sea turtles and other colourful corals. We were down there a solid 50 minutes and our oxygen was slowly getting empty, so we ascended back to the surface. Next to the shark dive, this certainly was the best dive I have done so far! So happy I did it. Thinking back, it still puts a big smile on my face.

Once back on shore, I took it easy for the rest of the morning and early afternoon, but grew restless at around 3-4pm and took my scooter to drive aimlessly to the next village. When I stopped to take a picture of a colourful church, a local woman said 'hi' and we sat down and chatted for a good 1.5h about Samoan traditions, village rules, the importance of the local chiefs and all things Samoan. This way, I learned a lot about the culture here, which is something I always want to get out of a place when I visit it. It is not just about 'sightseeing' to me, but equally important about the way of life in a place I visit. Hence, it was a perfect end to a really great day in Savai’i.

On my last full day in Manase, Fernando (Spanish) - a guy I met in my accommodation - and I chilled out on the beach, tried and unfortunately failed to harvest some fresh coconut from a tree and drove to have lunch at a local small BBQ shop. There we met Aris (Spanish) and Anna (German) who volunteered at the shop for a few weeks. As we were heading in the same direction, we made plans to meet up at the next place - Falealupo Beach.Baca lagi