The Bizarre Truth (4 page)

Just a white-knuckled puddle jump away lies the stunningly beautiful, relatively unvisited islands of Samoa. A multi-island chain of inhabited and empty atolls of unmatched beauty, this just might be the last great unspoiled deep-Pacific country in which to find your own Robinson Crusoe experience. Just keep your hat low and your expectations lower, since you’ll probably be spending one night in American Samoa anyway. After shooting for a week in Hawaii, I flew to American Samoa, landed, and spent the night in the glorious Quality Inn: Two hundred rooms of unmatched luxury, with a twelve-inch television chain bolted to the ceiling. Mold and mildew spewing from the ancient wobbly and rattling window
air-conditioning unit. Bedding stained from the endless procession of local call girls, short-haul truckers, military contractors, and traveling salesmen who call these types of hotels home away from home. I couldn’t sleep. Food, save the five-dollar minibar offering of Pringles, was nonexistent, so the crew and I headed out into the night in search of dinner. We commandeered a local cab and interrogated the driver mercilessly as to where to find the best eats in town. Cabdriver interrogation (sans waterboarding!) is an advanced research technique that field operatives like myself have long since mastered. Growing up in New York City helped put me at ease while sitting in the back of a beaten-down old Chrysler with a shameless grafter slouched behind the wheel. A lifetime of getting lost in cities all around the world has made me an expert at extracting information from willing and less-than-willing locals, and cabbies are a great resource for food tips. The driver in the pimped-out 1987 Pontiac Coupe de Ville who shuttled us from the airport to our hotel seemed like an okay sort of chap, so I gave him ten bucks to park outside and wait for me in case I needed to pull the plug on the hellhole we had been scheduled to sleep in that night. I grabbed the team and off we went, piling in with Farid, ducking the fourteen air fresheners he had dangling all over the interior of his jalopy. A short while later, we emerged from the cramped confines of his velour-encrusted love-mobile into the parking lot of some dive serving some of the worst Chinese food I have ever eaten. If Howard Johnson decided to make chicken chow mein, it would taste better than the swill that passed for food at the Quality Inn.

I was crushed, and on several levels. I hate wasting a meal, but frankly it filled me with a dread that I fear more than any other. Could the misery of AmSam be an accurate predictor of what the next week’s shoot would look like? I dread the Lost Week. That’s when you have your expectations for excellence dashed by a sixth-sense premonition that the country you’re about to step into simply won’t measure up. Don’t give in! Negative future fantasizing is
a game I play all too regularly, but ignore everything you see in American Samoa and remember, as little Orphan Annie says, tomorrow is only a day away. So I headed back to the hotel, crawled inside my silk sleep sack to avoid the humiliation and degradation of the not-so-Quality Inn, and set the alarm for 5
A.M
.

Six of us were on the twin-prop heading into Samoa that next morning, and the plane was full. It takes only a half hour or so to head into Upolu, the most populated of the Samoan Island chain. We hopped into our van after a gentle landing and headed to the Aggie Grey’s Hotel in the heart of Appia, the capital city of Samoa. You’ve probably seen this Samoa in your dreams: quaint city streets speckled with old colonial-style bungalows surrounded by brilliant tropical gardens, interspersed with marine shops and small local banks. Welcome to Samoa. We rounded the main harbor, snug with luxury sailcraft, industrial rust buckets, and professionally outfitted fishing boats with loud
Charter Me!
signs all bobbing in the early-morning sun. We pulled into the turnaround of Aggie’s and fled the van for the friendly confines of the elegant lobby replete with a cozy coffee and tea lounge, a kitschy, open-air dining room with a few ukulele players, a guitarist and piano player pounding out Polynesian-style music at all three meal periods for the guests willing to endure the agony. Aggie Grey’s is the Samoa of Somerset Maugham and Robert Louis Stevenson, an ancient hotel with luxurious gardens and a pedigree that most hotels would kill for. Ignore the fact that most services (like Internet or phones) are offered but don’t function, and focus on the fact that hotels like Aggie Grey’s simply don’t exist anymore, holdovers from an era when traveling to Samoa meant staying for several months until the next tramp steamer left the harbor. Of course, traveling is different now, so Hotel Management has undertaken the massive (and, for the most part, completely unnecessary) task of creating a hotel that they believe appeals to international travelers.

Rather than cooking local fish (with an occasional grilled pork shoulder thrown into the mix), Aggie Grey’s feels it necessary to
do a themed dinner seven days a week, 365 days a year. When we arrived, the billboard in the lobby proudly hailed Chef Jaime’s bold proclamations that tonight was “Mexican Night!” O-fucking-le. If you think the worst Mexican food in the world is served exclusively on domestic airline flights, you’re wrong. Try going halfway around the world to the South Pacific to find a Samoan chef who thinks throwing salsa and a pinch of cumin into a dish equals Mexican food. Steamer trays filled with gallons of ground taco meat, piles of overly ripe avocados, platters of sickingly overcooked adobo chicken … my God, it was horrible. And in an effort to fill out the buffet we were subjected to the same sort of island-style poke salad (basically, a raw tuna salad with coconut milk and lime juice that was superb in its basic form), gussied up with whatever single ingredient they felt was most emblematic of the culture they were mimicking. Just horrendous.

We unpacked and headed out to shoot the little village of Tafagamanu, where the local government, in partnership with several nature conservancies, had established an underwater protection site for the study and propagation of the giant Pacific clam, a behemoth of a mollusk that can grow to the size of a Volkwagen Beetle if it has the time. Before we crept into the water to shoot our story, we met with the local villagers and their mattai, or chieftain. He greeted us at the large open
fale
that the tribe gathers in for important meetings and served us some homemade cocoa, and we made small talk for a few hours, much to the upset of my field producer, who was anxious to start shooting. In Samoa, every shoot each day begins with a business deal. Every story is shot in a different location, and each location is controlled in every sense of the word by the local tribes who received the islands back from the New Zealand government several decades ago. The Kiwis know how to leave a country, and after their colonial experiment tanked they ceded the country back to the tribes themselves, hundreds of them, so while there is a government in Samoa, the tribes and extended families own the land and the waterfront, another reason
why there is so little development here. But to shoot each day means sitting and getting the blessing of the local people who control your every move. Want to shoot a sunset shot from the beach? Ask the tribe. Want to tape a stand-up walking down the road next to a banana farm? Ask the tribe. And they better like you, so sucking up and kissing ass is important. That being said, bringing each mattai a five-pound can of Hormel corned beef hash is de rigueur and goes a long way toward getting permission to shoot anything. The Samoans are addicted to the cheapest processed meats in the world. Canned hash, canned Dinty Moore stew, SPAM, they can’t get enough of it, so doing business in Samoa required a constant shuttle back and forth to the local supermarket with Fitu, our fixer, piling can after can of the vile stuff into the back of the minivan. Irony of ironies—as we perambulated around the island, dosing out canned meat products with all the insouciance of a riverboat gambler, we ate very well. Oranges, grapefruits, dozens of banana varietals, and every other tropical fruit you can imagine grows extremely well here and can be had for pennies. Tuna is sold on the side of the roads for about a dollar a kilo, and that’s the rip-off tourist rate. Every day, hundreds of local fishermen head out into the surf in teeny little canoes fitted with an outrigger to pull in the local yellowfin and blackfin tuna on hand lines. You heard me right. Sometimes as small as a few kilos, oftentimes as big as a man, the local tuna is traded around the island like a commodity, and with it you can pay bills, sell it from the side of the road, deliver it to the back door of a restaurant kitchen by foot, or bring it to the local market. It’s a tuna economy here unlike anything I have ever seen before or since.

So we ate and drank with the mattai, shot our giant clam piece, and headed back to Aggie’s for Mexican Night, swearing to never eat there again, and with justifiable cause. We awoke the next day and headed out to sea, traveling four hours into the South Pacific Ocean, where the big tuna run fast and thick. Deep-sea fishing is a passion of mine, and buckled into the fighting chair with several
monsters hooked on the multiple lines we were running was thrilling in the extreme. Reeling a huge tuna into the boat is a challenge, but the motivation provided by the groan of the outriggers and the movement of the crew, sweeping fish out of the water with their gaffs, lashing the outrigger lines to my rod, and starting the whole process over and over until the coolers were full and we headed back to shore made for an easy day of work. Of course, eating the catch is what it’s all about, and while clichéd in the extreme, slicing and scarfing huge chunks of fresh tuna, raw, in the high hot Pacific sun is about as good a food day as one can have. The captain came down from the uppermost deck to show me the joys of true poke, mixing tuna with lime and coconut, cracking open the eyes of the fish and filling them with lime and soy sauce, and arguing over who would eat the still-beating hearts of the fish. Truly wonderful. We even got to try palolo, a rarity even in this part of the world, where these teeny tiny little coral worms are eaten, seasonally, when they swim out of the coral to propagate twice a year. Sautéed in butter, they look like blue cream cheese and taste like rotten eggs mixed with anchovies, but spread on toast they are an addictive snack.

We skipped Italian night in the dining room that evening, headed out to the Appia Yacht Club, a generous description for a small Quonset hut on the beach with a postage stamp of a bar and restaurant with six tables on a twenty-square-foot deck built on the beach about five miles out of town. Drunken expats who long ago chucked in their cards in England, heading south with romantic notions of remaking their lives, these are the characters we found at the yacht club. Rumpled cashmere sweaters tossed around their shoulders, pathetically in their cups, arguing about the weekend’s sailboat races and drinking cheap beer and rum, burning through the stipend provided by grandpa’s trust, the people-watching was almost as superb as the food. Simply turned on a wood grill, the platters of true raw-fish salads and slabs of perfectly grilled local fin fish made the AYC our regular dinner stop every night for the
rest of our trip. And as the Southern Cross revealed itself in the night sky turning from blue to black, I thought to myself,
Well, tomorrow should be another easy day in Paradise. How tough could a bat hunt really be?

We woke at dawn and traveled to the Southeastern Coast, to the little town of Aleipat. Off in the distance on the horizon, as gazed at from the town’s public dock, lies a small cluster of uninhabited volcanic islands, the largest one being Nu’utele, which is known for its pristine flora and fauna and is home to a rare and delicious breed of giant fruit bats. Ten-pound giant fruit bats, often referred to as flying foxes. Furry, large brown and black bats. Yumm-o!

It was on the beaches of Aleipat that I met the man who would eventually save my life. Afele Faiilagi, an environmental scientist with the Samoan Forestry Department, is inarguably the closest thing I have ever met to Lenny Kravits’s doppelgänger, sans jewelry and a guitar. Buff in the extreme, he has a huge toothy infectious smile and sports baggy basketball shorts, a tank top, and flip-flops. He is that good-looking islander who is schtupping every hot South African and Swedish botanist coming through town doing research for their PhD. I was buoyed by his confident swagger and the easy way he carried himself. He was nervous about the TV part of the equation, but this guy spends his life prowling the jungles of Nu’utele and I wanted what he had, so off we went.

Afele commissioned a boat to take us out to Nu’utele. I use the term “boat” loosely; it was more like a tiny tin can, an ancient pontoon boat with an ailing 1960s Evinrude outboard on the back end, strapped to the transom with picture-hanging wire. We piled on the crew, our guests, and 500 pounds of gear, and pulled off from the dock in a warm and light morning rain. As soon as our voyage was under way, I got the feeling that the humble amount of money we had offered up for our five-mile voyage was probably more money than our anxious captain and mate had seen in months. It occurred to me that they probably said yes to the job not thinking
of whether or not they could get us there safely with all our gear, or whether their boat was up to the task based on the day’s weather forecast, but instead had seen the visions of sugarplums that our currency represented. Oftentimes on the road, the small sum of money we see only as a token payment is in reality a gargantuan sum to the person staring down at the stipend—so they take risks, stupid unfathomable risks.

The last thing you want to do when crossing a channel in the deep Pacific is put your life in the hands of a couple of old drunks whose vessel is actually a glorified soda can with a plywood storage bin affixed to the top. But we were on a tight schedule and our field producer needed to shoot. Well, the bay outside the harbor dock there is flat as glass, it’s ten feet deep, and the boat is gliding out of her slip. We get out in the middle of the channel, and it’s only five miles across to Nu’utele, but a half mile from shore all of a sudden we are in ocean several hundred feet dip in fourteen- or fifteen-foot seas, big rolling waves coming under the pontoons, and this little tin can of a boat is being pushed sideways. I’m petrified. I look around—there are no life jackets … there is no radio. The vintage forty-horsepower engine that is trying to push us over to this island is failing miserably. The guy who’s driving the boat looks like the kid who carried my bags at the hotel but doesn’t seem half as confident about making it to his destination, and he’s got this worried look on his face that the boat is not going to make it. And all of a sudden, what had started as a “wow, this is sort of scary and thrilling” thing became scarier and scarier and scarier as the waves got bigger and the boat began to get pushed around more and more. The overcast sky swirled around us, the wind rose and fell, and my producer starts singing the theme from
Gilligan’s Island:
“Well, sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip, that started from this tiny port aboard this tiny ship.” It was funny. The first time it was funny. The second go-round was less funny. On the third go-round, I turned to Chris and said, “If you sing one more bar of that thing, I’m going to punch your fucking
lights out.” THAT was pretty funny. Chris volunteered that when he’s really scared he does that to calm himself, and I looked over at Joel, one of our videographers, and he looked really scared. I felt really scared, and I realized in a flash that we all truly felt somewhat doomed, in the middle of the ocean, on the boat ride to nowhere. After much nail biting and hair pulling, we finally got within the bosomy and calm natural harbor of Nu’utele, the sun came out, the waters were tranquil, and all we had to do was navigate through a maze of car- and bus-size rocks in this bay and try to beach the boat on the rocky shoreline. We did, and ran two lines, one to either end of the pontoon boat, then up and around the massive palm trees that stand vigil on the shoreline. Then, for about an hour, in waist-deep water, we ferried all our gear off the boat and made a temporary base camp in the trees.