It’s a long haul across the Pacific. The next real marquee location on the tour was Australia, which is something like 14 hours from Easter Island (and that’s just to Brisbane on the eastern coast; it’s another three hours to Ayers Rocks, where we were really headed). The design of this tour is really excellent, they have planned it so that there are no individual travel legs/flights longer than about 6 hours (not that I couldn’t fly for substantially longer in these accommodations, with the Bolly flowing); thus, they scheduled a one-day (really, just overnight) stopover in Samoa, craftily billing it as “International Date Line” (a stretch, I think, touting it as a substantial point of interest). Not that there isn’t interest or compelling reason for a true visit to Samoa; there is the Robert Louis Stevenson association to explore, as well as local Polynesian cultural flavor to discover and experience, and then just the island paradise aspect to luxuriate in, but those weren’t our true intentions in visiting. This was purely a stopover, to break up the Pacific crossing. Sure, there was an excursion (early and short) to the Robert Louis Stevenson house and museum the next morning, and a Samoan dance troop that greeted us at the airport and again serenaded (if that word can be used for tribal drumming, chanting, and stomping) us at our late-night snack upon arrival at the hotel, and some handicrafts available the next morning in the hotel lobby, but honestly it was all quite crammed into a small space and provided mostly as gestural stop-justification.

In addition to the full-ring atoll shown in the header photo for the post today (part of the Pitcairn Island group), there were some spectacular sunset/storm views flying into Samoa.

I don’t remember the exact time we got to the hotel (a casualty of being so far behind on the blog), but I’m thinking it was around 9:00 in the evening, which equates to 2:00 in the morning Easter Island time (which, to complicate things, is actually artificially fixed to Chilean time, two or three hours later than it should be based on longitude—but, regardless, it’s the time zone we’ve been living off of, and woke up to that morning, or rather, the day before, given that we were now across the International Date Line, but not really, since Samoa is actually on the same side of the traditional date line as the Americas, but a declared exception…OMG!!!). Anyway, it was kind of a strange scene, with people wandering in for a 2 am bite, mostly feeling obliged to partake in the food and entertainment provided, to pay token respect to local culture and the effort put forth in presenting it to us. Not surprisingly, people were exhausted, and the crowd thinned out quickly, though those who stayed were treated to a friendly hip-shaking contest between the female dancers and a fire-juggling demonstration by the men.

I didn’t get any good pictures of the dancers or musicians or fire-juggling, but here is a shot of the traditional construction and ornate decoration of the roof structure above the dining area, before going off to bed (after a 45 hour day).

“Forty-five hour day?”, you might ask? You figure it out.

But speaking of hours in a day, let’s have a brief discussion about traveling not only across distance, but across time. This is a twenty-day trip, traveling across twenty time zones to the west. That’s an average of moving one time zone per day, or twenty 25-hour days. Those of you who have known me long enough and are unfortunate enough to have heard all of my gripes, know that I have a big problem with the moment of inertia of the earth. The earth just spins too damned fast for me, Twenty-four hours is not long enough for me to get in all of the work, time wastage, and sleep I would like to in a day (one of my days, that is). And mother nature (or Stephen Hawking’s universe or whatever) is generally not helping me out in this matter. Most of our big geological processes, like tectonic plate subduction, seem to be moving things in the wrong direction. The plate-slippage which caused the deadly Indonesian tsunami in 2004 also caused the rotation of the earth to speed up by one millisecond a year. That’s no good. I suppose a huge volcanic eruption, which brings a mass of magma from deep under the earth’s crust up to the surface, would actually help me, but it would have to be either an epic catastrophe or a drawn-out multi-million year process in order to have any meaningful effect (and I don’t have the time or inclination for either of them).

So that brings us to around-the-world jet travel. Twenty 25-hour days. 28-hour or 30-hour days would probably work better for me (and perhaps a wee bit more than twenty of them), but don’t get me wrong, I’ll take any number of 25-hour days when I can get them, so I’m not complaining. Especially nice when those days are accompanied by a tour of the iconic “heaven-and-earth” sites of the world, and by the chance to travel in the lap of luxury with my mom. The truth is, of course, that the journey and the sites and the experiences are the primary rewards of this trip; the time travel is just a (rare) bonus.

I talked a little about Robert Louis Stevenson and Samoan culture during the island stop, above; we also got to taste a bit of the island paradise aspect of Samoa (pronounced, incidentally, by the natives as “SAHM-wa”). This was our view out of the hotel room window upon waking up the next morning:

Whaddya think? I’d say it’ll do ’til another one comes along. After breakfast, Mom and I took a leisurely walk around the resort property, with its idyllic shoreline, tropical trees, and nice grounds. I think most members of the trip could have used a day’s down time in a place like this, but it wasn’t to be. Our Samoan hosts were clearly disappointed that we just zipped in and zipped out, but they were gracious about it and proud of their heritage and their land, and that is perhaps my biggest take-away from this short visit.