Samoa - random notes 1

Random notes from the first week in Samoa:

There's awesome plants.  Many tropical flowers; too many to use up bandwidth with.  There's plants with two-tone leaves:

 People like to make their gardens pretty, often with planting species in particular order.

There are signs for villages and a few other things.  Generally, things are really hard to quickly pronounce.

There are stray dogs, all over.  They're very mean and barky and bitey.  These few were photogenic.

There are pigs, all over.  They're not stray, but they're not on leashes.

I almost sat on a scorpion in a chair; also, it turns out an empty coconut makes a wonderful white backdrop to photo scorpions.  This one was about 1 inch long, and sedated from a fumigation session earlier that day.

This guy got unlucky, and lives on a lava flow.  Hard, rocky, but driveable.  Not uncommon.

This is a "fale;" a common hut to live in / rent for a night, by the beach. Sometimes with tarps for sides, other times with much prettier woven mats for sides; either can be raised for better air flow, or lowered in a storm.

It's very humid.  Despite that, very little fungus or mold in nature, though some slimey stuff.  Here's a rare, bright fungus.

Here's an awesome thing that I know nothign about; it's the size of a lady bug, but beautifully bright green, brown, black.

It's lush here.

There are large flowers.

And waterfalls

This is the extent of marketing for a beautiful, ~100m (~300 ft) waterfall, set back about 50 feet from the road.  Marketing to tourists isn't a strength of Samoans, in my experience.

The waterfalls of such verbose signeage.  We walked to the top, and looked right over the edge; no guardrails.  Nice to be responsible for our actions.

I also learned that in a tropical environment, one turns a bit sticky, all the time.