The islands that stepped back in time

In the first installment of a three-part guide to the South Pacific, Peter Walker visits Western Samoa, which receives fewer visitors in a year than the British Museum does in two days

It is rarely one's lot in life to go to sleep in one country and wake up in another bed, and in another country, on the morning of the day before. To achieve this, we first had to get to the Kingdom of Tonga for a 24-hour stop-over, sleep early Wednesday evening, rise at midnight, go to the airport, fly across the dateline back into Wednes-day again and to the neighbouring nation of Western Samoa.

Tonga, on fleeting inspection, looked hot and dark and melancholy, with the roads, even at 1.30am, crowded with desultory groups of pedestrians. "Who are these people?" I asked. "They are someone looking for someone," was the driver's gnomic answer, and it may be that life in the Kingdom offers so little for the mass of commoners that walking the country roads at night is a major entertainment.

Samoa by contrast, even at 4.30am, seemed to be crackling with energy. This was partly an effect of the architecture: most of the houses that line the road to the capital, Apia, are open, lit-up, pillared halls, like modest wooden Parthenons. Samoans have wonderful physiques and, driving past these tale fele, or "speaking houses", with draped figures stirring here and there, it felt like entering some electrified, rustic Attica, in, say, the fifth century BC. This struck me at the time as a very unreliable first impression but it held up well during our week on the islands of Western Samoa.

Our first stop was a 20th-century institution, Aggie Grey's hotel, once the haunt of Zane Grey and Somerset Maugham and Marlon Brando. Now, it must be said, Aggie's is not what it was. It has been knocked down and tarted up to within an inch of its life, with aluminium - not iron - lace festooning the balconies, and deep-pile carpet deadening every footfall.

"This is not Aggie Grey's - this is a simulacrum of Aggie Grey's," said Albert sternly. Albert is a Samoan architect, who had come back to the country to photograph the huge 19th-century coral churches that dot the island. He is also a former pop star and considered very good-looking, at least by the ladies we met in Tonga who took one look and announced, calmly and practically, "I love you," as well as various gay EU officials who were in Samoa for an international conference. They kept popping up wherever we went around the island, inviting Albert back to their fales for "rum". It's nice to think of rum, sodomy and, one hopes, the lash, taking their place among the modern traditions of Brussels.

But, despite its faults, Aggie's is still a great hotel. Its casements open wide on one of the best views in the Pacific, a deep port which contrives, in a hallucinatory manner, to have waves breaking both in the background and in the foreground with ships at anchor in the middle. A row of palm trees soughs in the trade winds, a line of church towers visible behind them. The only blot on the whole landscape is a huge, hideous new office building, donated to Samoa by the Chinese govern- ment, which should surely be forbidden from exporting its bullying state architecture to Third World countries.

But apart from that, Apia is a pleasing town, raffish and churchy at the same time, with fafafine - the local drag-queens - hissing at you from alleys, under the impression you are an EU official, while hymns and cocoa are being served up elsewhere in abundance. In the market on Saturday morning, as shoppers bought their CDs, paw-paws and loofahs, and downed mugs of lukewarm black cocoa, a line of enormous men and women stood swaying gently from side to side, crooning: "Baby Jesus is the sweetest thing I know, Baby Jesus just the sweetest thing I know."

And the wildest Samoans - ie the odd drunk, and street kids in denim, came forwards and repented. On Sunday morning, I went to a church to hear the singing, for which Samoans are fam-ous. I was struck by one liturgical innovation. Communicants didn't go up to the altar rail: instead, trays of wine were set around the pews, as the organist played "She'll be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes".

Western Samoa consists of two large islands, Upolo, where most of the population lives, and the larger and wilder Savai'i, a few hours away by ferry. No sooner had the ferry set sail than the entire body of passengers fell fast asleep, as if under an enchantment or on Night Nurse. "Polynesians hate travelling by sea," said Albert, casting a new light on the heroic early voyages across the Pacific by his race. "They prefer to fly." He was disappointed that there was no practitioner of Vi'i aboard to keep people awake: the Vi'i is a long, lyrical ballad composed by a Samoan prisoner, who, on his release, went about singing the story of his crime and punishment. Meanwhile, we were approaching a coast of noble aspect - beyond the surf, we could see the pillared "talking houses" and a couple of towering, windy basilicas - some villages boast two or three built by rival denominations.

Savai'i is thought by some to be the true Hawaiki, the original Polynesian homeland, from which the rest of the Pacific was colonised. In support of that claim, there are two mysterious and undated pyramids on the island, larger than any other early structure in the Pacific. One of them is so mysterious, in fact, that it seems to have gone missing. We drove along the coast with our Visitors' Bureau guide, Mosi Sua, and hunted about in a vast coconut plantation for two hours, but everything was covered in fast-growing vines with leaves the size of a pumpkin's, and the pyramid escaped us.

But we did locate the Statistics Department, in the form of six young men with Elvis haircuts drinking beer by a river. They told us they were making a survey of households and income, though there were no signs of those in the locality either. The Elvises all pointed in different directions to the star pyramid, waved goodbye as we bucked over a ford made of boulders and, in general, were as amenable a group of civil servants as you might hope to meet.

About 35,000 tourists visit Western Samoa each year - fewer than go through the doors of the British Museum in two days - and the further west we went, the wilder and more unpredictable the land and people, appeared. In one village, we were met with black looks, but I was told the villagers should not be judged too harshly. They are harassed by a demon called Old Tooth who causes excruciating pain in the feet of his victims and, from time to time, drops a coconut on the head of anyone making a loud noise.

At noon the next day, we reached the far west of the island, a place called Fafa - "the abyss". This is the place in Samoan mythology where the souls of the dead leave the world. A deserted beach ... ranks of black rocks standing in the sea, with white flowers growing on them. Fafa is also, as it happens, the westernmost point of land on earth. A hundred miles away out to sea, a long and unmarked line, the East begins.

Albert went off to photograph the world's most westerly flowers, Mosi, and I went 100 yards into the forest to look at the island's second star pyramid. In the rubble on the summit overgrown with whispering trees, I found a strange stone cup, polished smooth within, but what it was for and why it was still there, I do not know. It occurred to me what, in another mythology, this place was - the Garden of the Hesperides, the land hidden in the furthest west. There was even golden fruit growing above our heads - not apples, true, but guava and paw-paw ripe for plucking.

Almost no-one lives on this coast - the inhabitants moved inland after two cyclones in a row smashed up their villages a few years ago. But an old man in a torn green T-shirt appeared from nowhere and led us further inland to a large natural stone chamber hidden underground. This is where the locals sheltered during the cyclones, while their churches and houses blew down. The House of Rock previously served other now-forgotten purposes: in the semi-darkness stood a throne of stone.

The old man, a woodcarver called Falaniko, invited us home for some lunch. We sat on the floor of his pillared house and ate fish and coconut cream and drank cocoa, while Falaniko, who is a Catholic, discoursed on the con- nection between the Reformation and Mrs Camilla Parker Bowles. A grey- whiskered piglet, very wise and cunning with just the look of Raphael's Pope Alexander, scuffed through coconut husks and peered up at our conversation from time to time as if suddenly struck by a thought.

Samoa is not a land of reliable cuisine or five-star service. The night before, in a wooden hotel that groaned and creaked in the sea-wind, we ate supo (tinned soup) and sapasui (chop-suey) for a price higher than a meal in Quaglino's would cost. Further along the coast we met a honeymoon couple nearly in tears after three days at a thatched seaside stalag owned by a New Zealand lawyer and run by a staff of jeering Samoans. Yet a few miles on, the resort we stayed in had a fire-lit feast of roast suckling pig and seafood, with singing and dancing. Even the huge fafafine with her brow like thunder who arrived on the arm of one of the EU delegates, seemed to cheer up.

Before the feast, Albert and I went into the next village to observe the ulufale. At sunset, most of rural Samoa comes to a standstill for this curfew. It is signalled by the blowing of conch shells - bulls' horns or bugles are also used though considered less classical. For the next 20 minutes, everything stops. No sports, no cooking, no television; it is especially forbidden to walk along the road. Each household goes indoors to sing hymns in a competitive way.

We sat in the watchtower with the old men who monitor the curfew. The sunset faded, and the sound of conches blew along the coast from village to village, signalling the lifting of the rule.

I had thought of the classical world when I arrived in Samoa a week before. Here, at the end of the trip, the impression was even stronger. If "classical" means simple, public and ceremonious, then a fragment of the classical world really does exist in this overlooked corner of the south Pacific.

! Next week: the Kingdom of Tonga

TRAVEL NOTES

Quantas (0345 747767) flies to Auckland daily via Australia or the US, return tickets from pounds 720. Peter Walker flew from Auckland to Samoa on Air New Zealand (0181 846 9595). Returns from the UK to Samoa from pounds 954. British nationals do not require a visa for stays in Samoa of up to 30 days.