The whole country in eight days on one car and one boat: Stevenson's grave above Apia, the tsunami coast at Aleipata, a swimming hole thirty metres down a ladder, an island with no cars in the strait, and a lap of Savaiʻi past a church still standing on the lava that filled it.
Apia
Faleolo airport is 35 kilometres west of the capital and the drive in is the whole north coast in miniature. Do the administrative half of the day first: a temporary Samoan driving licence is issued by the Land Transport Authority and you need it alongside your own before anyone hands you a car. Then Maketi Fou at Fugalei, which is the country's market rather than the city's, the Museum of Samoa in the old German schoolhouse, and the Catholic cathedral on the seafront — the nineteenth-century one was found unsound and demolished, and the building consecrated in 2014 stands on its footprint.
Vailima and the Cross Island Road
Robert Louis Stevenson built Vailima in 1890, spent four years in it and died there on 3 December 1894; German governors and then New Zealand administrators lived in the house afterwards, which is why it survived to be a museum. The path up Mount Vaea to his tomb takes about forty-five minutes on the steep side and an hour on the long one. Afterwards go south over the Cross Island Road for the Baháʼí House of Worship at Tiapapata, one of a small number of continental temples, dedicated in 1984 by a head of state who was himself a Baháʼí, and the hundred-metre drop of Papapapaitai Falls, which is looked at from a layby rather than walked to.
East to Aleipata
The north coast road, then the Le Mafa Pass over the spine of the island. Stop at Piula Cave Pool, a freshwater spring in a cave directly beneath the Methodist theological college — the college moved here from Savaiʻi in 1868, the chapel that sits over the pool was built between 1911 and 1919, and you swim through a gap in the rock from the first chamber to the second. Falefa Falls and the Sopoaga gorge are roadside. Aleipata is the south-eastern corner and where the sand is.
Namuʻa and the tsunami coast
Ten minutes offshore, Namuʻa is one small hill with a beach on the landward side and a family running fales on it. Back on the mainland, read the coast: an earthquake of magnitude 8.1 broke about 190 kilometres south on 29 September 2009 and the wave was ashore here within twenty minutes. It killed 149 people in Samoa, sixty-one of them at Lalomanu, and flattened almost every fale on this beach. The evacuation signs and the new houses set well up the hillside are the reason Lalomanu looks the way it does, and everyone who works on the sand was here for it.
To Sua and the south coast
To Sua is a lava tube whose roof fell in: a green shaft about thirty metres deep, connected to the sea by a tunnel you can feel surging, reached by a wooden ladder that is closer to vertical than most people expect. Then west into O Le Pupu-Puē, gazetted in 1978 as the country's first national park and generally reckoned the first in the South Pacific, which runs in one strip from the crest of the island down to a coast of raised lava cliffs; Togitogiga Falls sits at the inland end of it. Finish at Lefaga, where the 1953 film gave the beach the name it still trades under.
Manono, the ferry and the lava
Manono sits in the strait between the two big islands and has no roads, no cars and, by long-standing village rule, no dogs. The footpath around it is about five kilometres and takes two hours at the pace anyone actually walks it. Back on Upolu, the wharf at Mulifanua is five kilometres from the airport and the crossing to Savaiʻi takes somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half. This is the fullest day in the route, and sleeping at Manono-uta the night before is what makes it work: it puts you at the longboat and within sight of the wharf, which is the difference between a morning sailing and reaching Saleaula in the dark. Then 55 kilometres up the north coast to Saleaula, where Mount Matavanu erupted from 1905 to 1911, buried five villages and ran to the sea: the London Missionary Society church still stands, walls and doorways intact, on a floor of set lava that came in through the windows.
The west end
In 1988 Falealupo sold the logging rights to its forest, not out of greed but because the government had required the village to build a school and the timber was the only asset it had. An ethnobotanist working there, Paul Alan Cox, offered to raise the money for the school instead; the high chief Fuiono Senio argued the other matai round to it and then went down the track with a machete to stop the crews, and in 1989 the village signed a covenant protecting the forest for fifty years. The two men shared the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1997, the year Fuiono died. There is a rope-and-plank canopy walkway, dedicated that same year and rebuilt more than once after cyclones, and Moso's Footprint in the rock. Carry on to Cape Mulinuʻu, then down the west coast.
Round the south coast
The Alofaaga blowholes at Cape Asuisui are sea forced up through lava tubes in the shore platform; a man from Taga throws coconuts into them to be fired thirty metres into the air, and charges for it, and it is worth the money. Afu Aau falls into a cold pool inland of the coast road. Above Palauli in the Letolo plantation is Pulemelei, a stone platform roughly sixty-five metres by sixty and twelve high on its downhill edge, the largest ancient structure in Polynesia — ask in the village before driving out, because a long dispute over the land has closed the track for years at a time. Salelologa market, then the ferry back.
Good to know
The Mulifanua–Salelologa crossing is run by the Samoa Shipping Corporation and it is the only way to take a vehicle between the islands: roughly two-hourly each way on weekdays, noticeably fewer on Saturday, and Sunday down to a sailing or two — the timetable is reissued month by month, so check the current one rather than assuming, and turn up an hour early with a car, because the queue for the first sailing of the day forms before the office opens. Samoa switched to driving on the left on 7 September 2009 and left-hand-drive vehicles are still on the road, so overtaking on a blind bend is genuinely dangerous; limits are 40 km/h through villages and 56 km/h (35 mph) elsewhere, they are enforced, and on the coast roads the villages are almost continuous. Pigs, dogs and children use the road as much as cars do, and nobody sensible drives outside Apia after dark. Visitors need a temporary Samoan licence from the Land Transport Authority in Apia — most hire firms will arrange it, but confirm before you land. At dusk, usually somewhere around six, most villages hold sā, ten to twenty minutes of evening prayers announced by a bell or a conch; if you are walking or driving through, you stop and wait, and someone will wave you on when it ends. Sunday is church in the morning and the family toʻonaʻi after it: shops shut, buses barely run, and some villages ask visitors not to swim off their beach. Nearly every waterfall, pool and beach is village land and charges a custom fee per person in cash tālā, usually between five and thirty; ATMs exist in Apia and Salelologa and effectively nowhere else, so draw before you cross. Beach fales are open-sided huts with mats, a mosquito net and roll-down blinds, and the rate almost always includes breakfast and dinner because there is nothing else within reach — treat it as full board and do not bring anything you would mind leaving unlocked. Cyclone season is November to April.
Shorter or longer?
Fly Faleolo to Pago Pago — about thirty-five minutes on a small turboprop, several a day on Talofa Airways — and land on the previous day, because American Samoa keeps UTC−11 to Samoa's UTC+13. Tutuila has a drowned volcanic crater for a harbour and the only United States national park south of the equator. The territory runs its own immigration and a US visa or ESTA does not work there: a short list of nationalities gets thirty days through American Samoa's own online waiver, and everyone else needs an entry permit applied for several days in advance.
Apia and Vailima, Aleipata for two nights, then To Sua and the south coast and out. Cuts the ferry and the whole of Savaiʻi, which removes the two longest driving days and the only fixed timetable in the route.