TASHY TRAVELS

Every Sunday, I am going to upload a post about the different countries I have visited and/or lived in since 2002.

I can assure you of some interesting stories.

SAMOA 3

Ready? Sure? Let’s go.

We were due to leave Savai’i on the day after the money theft and Samoa as soon as possible afterwards. By the way for these next blogs, you will have to read the previous ones too; they are not of the stand-alone type.

We packed everything into our hire car but couldn’t actually leave as there was still no petrol. We not only needed to get the ferry but we also had to get to the police in Savai’i. We had 50 tala left and there were no banks and no credit left on our phone, having spent the last bit trying to contact our runaway thief. My girlfriend was beginning to freak out, complaining of serious stomach cramps. The guy who stole from us had obviously run away again and I think, as she was the one who had invited him and trusted him, she felt responsible for that aspect of what had happened. The day before he took the money, she had gone off with him on a walk to the local village and spent a couple of hours or so talking to villagers while I had stayed at the resort writing up my notes and the latest reviews. What else was said on that walk I have no idea but some time later my suspicions were kinda confirmed; by the money thief when we met.

After an hour of hanging around, we saw a van belonging to the company from whom we had hired our car. They stopped and asked if we were returning the car that day. We said that was the plan but explained the lack of petrol and our other problems with the stolen money. They said if we could find a lift before they came back later that evening, we should take it and they would pick up the car on their way back. We left the key with the resort, discovering that the owner was the sister-in-law of the car rental owner. Small place Samoa, you know.

An hour or so later, with still no sign of petrol, we found a lift and were taken back to Salelologa, from where we would catch the ferry. Once there, we contacted the friendly pastor who we had met previously and he allowed us to use his phone to make a call to the police. They asked us to prepare a report and we were also able to provide photos of the ‘suspect’, although as he had admitted the theft and even given us the receipt from the bank where he had changed the money, ‘suspect’ seemed a little generous. Our pastor put us up for the night and the next day we went to the police station.

The police copied all the information straight on to the memory sticks they proudly carried around their necks. We asked when they would send the info across to Apia, as we were sure the guy had by now left this island, but they told us that would have to wait till Monday as they had no internet, and presumably no printers or faxes, at their station. Someone was going by ferry on Monday. We also told them that, if they found the guy, he would have messages on his mobile from us as we had been trying to find him since he disappeared. They said they would investigate. So, all we had to do was survive till Monday, when we could be back on the main island and something would be done.

Our pastor had some sort of party that weekend so had no room and we walked into town looking for somewhere to stay. Matters got worse as by now it was Friday night, the banks were shut and the ATM didn’t work. While walking, we met an old chief who asked what we were doing and we told him some of the story and he offered us accommodation for Friday and Saturday night and told us he was driving across to Apia on Sunday and would willingly take us. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast but were so tired, we just wanted a bed. Didn’t work out that way, because the chief wanted to go into great depths about everything and it was about 10.00 pm before we got to bed.

Half an hour later, there was a loud knock on the door. The chief’s daughter told us there were policemen in the hall and we should come and talk to them. Thinking this was good news, did I never learn, we got dressed and went out. But the police were not there to sort out a theft, they had been told about Ms Sass’s email to hotels and had come to question us about being frauds and abusing Samoan hospitality. We calmly explained that this had been investigated by the police in Apia, they had found we had done nothing wrong, but our once friendly chief turned out to also be a member of the Hotel Association and now changed sides. He also ran something called the “Church of the Divine Mercy” (that’s called irony by the way) and to him sponsorship-in-kind was an evil. I tried to point out there was quite a lot of it about in our world and that we had never, ever lied to anyone about what we wanted, but “divine mercy” did not get into bed with reason.

The Savai’i police decided they should investigate us all over again and so it was another hour or so before the chief looked at my girlfriend, who was now close to breaking, and said maybe we should get some sleep and leave all our documents with him and he would liaise with the police and work out how to proceed in the matter regarding the theft.

Another knock on our door first thing and I went out to be met by the chief. He had now decided, amazingly he returned all our documents without any going missing, that everything we did was a scam. He was disgustingly abusive but my nature is such that I just let him go on with his tirade, which I have learned is sometimes not so good because it annoys the other party even more. My girlfriend came out after half an hour or so and he told her that she was young and beautiful and I was taking advantage of her. She was, effectively, a stupid bimbo who had been enticed from her own culture and dragged into my scam. She attempted to defend me by pointing out that she was a joint partner in the project, something she had vehemently insisted on, she had been the one who wanted to leave Europe not me and the snapshotsfrom site, the scam, had been her idea.

He told her she should run away, even giving her ideas on how to do this, and that I would be punished in hell for my scam and my arrogance. To be honest that idea quite appealed but I said nothing. He repeated that sponsorship-in-kind was an evil concept and we had no right to bring it to Samoa because Samoa was a commonwealth country and there were very strong human rights and asking people for free accommodation, even if it is in return for promotion, is strongly against human rights.

The police, meanwhile, who stood and watched all this, informed us they had found the guys phone and it was agreed, by the divine mercy man, that we should go all the way back with them to the police station near where we had been staying. At least it got me away from his insults. Apparently our thief had given the phone to some woman when he got drunk the previous night. Once we got to the station we witnessed some more Samoan policing as we sat outside while the woman was questioned. Outside the room where the questioning was going on, and unable to see us, was a policeman, crouching down and obviously listening to every word inside. Why, I don’t know? It turned out that the woman who got the phone had deleted all the messages and cleared all calls because she had made some calls to a boy friend and didn’t want her husband to know so, she deleted everything. The police appeared happy with this explanation. I wasn’t.

We returned to Salelologa and my girlfriend then started getting phone calls and messages from someone asking to meet her. We decided to agree to a meeting, common sense had long since been abandoned, and met a guy who had so little command of the English language that I had no idea why or what he wanted and how he got the number. We didn’t stay long. We needed to sort out a few more things out and my girlfriend asked the chief’s daughter if she could make one call for us on her phone. She agreed, but a few hours later, the chief erupted again and spent ten or so minutes shouting at me and saying we were abusing his hospitality by asking his daughter to make calls for us whilst she has no money. Apparently, in his culture, it wasn’t polite to refuse, so we just shouldn’t be asking. The explanation that it was my girlfriend who asked, didn’t seem to matter as he appeared to like shouting at me. I was quite happy at this, as at least it meant I didn’t have to talk to him.

The next day we all climbed into his car and set out for the ferry. Because it had been the weekend, and the hire car company was closed, I had not been able to retrieve my passport but, at the time, this was the least of our worries. The chief had originally offered to pay our fare but he changed his mind so our last 40 tala went on that. We sat in the car, below decks, in shimmering heat, for at least an hour and a half.

When we arrived in Apia he went to a shop and offered us some cold beer. I refused. Then he tried to convince us to stay at his Apia house for the night, I refused. Eventually we found a hotel with a card machine, paid for two nights and sank into a deep sleep.

Tomorrow was another day but, as it turned out, not too different from the last few. In fact, tomorrow stretched into about 80 tomorrows.

Tomorrow duly came and we telephoned the TV journalist who had done our first interview and she said that was now being broadcast that night. She had grown more and more impatient with not getting the other side of the story and decided to go ahead with or without it. That prompted the Hotel Association head to talk but she just made more accusations, which it was actually agreed in the broadcast, were more suspicions. The problem was that she had been challenged publicly and stood to lose face. We were told later that she was one of the so-called elite Samoans, who had been educated in New Zealand and thought they were better than ordinary Samoans and so happily pulled rank. From here on, I believe, she took our wish to allow the truth to come out as a personal challenge against her and an insult to her abilities. The other thing I learned a lot later was that she didn’t cope very well with another female becoming the centre of attention.

Basically, at this point, we had four major problems. One, I needed to get my passport back; that should have been easy. Two, we needed somewhere to stay while this happened. Three, we were running out of money because we were now eating into the money we needed for Vanuatu and four, there was the case against our little thief. Believe it or not, this actually took 10 weeks to sort out. I thought about detailing this chronologically but I think you, and I, could get confused by this. Therefore, I have decided to take those four problems and deal with them one by one. Obviously, they overlap. If it hadn’t taken 8 weeks to get my passport back, we wouldn’t have needed so much accommodation and so on.

So, bearing that in mind, I’ll discuss accommodation first. When we got back to Apia, we found somewhere to stay but it was no longer a sponsorship-in-kind deal; we paid. We had been there for four days, when the TV station came out to interview us. Media-wise we had gone viral, but more of that even later. As soon as the interview was over, we were asked to leave. No real reasons, just we weren’t wanted there any more. The TV journalist was still around when this happened and she introduced us to a friend who had a hotel in Apia and she agreed to put us up. Again, we were paying. For various reasons, it was now becoming obvious that we were being, in a very subtle way, well not that subtle actually, but we had been kidnapped. I could not get my passport back. After two weeks in that hotel, we had exhausted our money, we should by then have been leaving Vanuatu for New Zealand, but a guardian angel appeared in our lives.

I got a call from Aggie Grey’s hotel, from the manager, Ms Aggie, who told me that her father, still very much the patriarch of the whole operation, had been reading what had been going on with us, remember we were front page, top story news, and he was horrified. She told us that he had no time for the woman running the Hotel Association. He wanted us to come and stay, free of charge, at his hotel, with all meals paid for and they would also do our washing and help in any other way they could. This was incredible and we stayed with them right through until we left Samoa at the beginning of February, with one exception which I will tell you about in a moment.

The staff and Miss Aggie could not have done more. At first, we were asked not to say where we were as Alan Grey didn’t want any publicity for what he was doing. We obliged but, apart from using the tradesman’s entrance, sooner or later someone would find out and I am sure they did. By the time we were given this offer, we were both pretty low. My girlfriend was always more concerned about getting her own back on the thief and her emotions ranged from anger to depression to anger again. My task was to get my passport back, find us some money to live on while we waited, and also to protect her.

The time when we were unable to stay at Aggie’s was Christmas and the New Year; they were fully booked. We had met with, and talked to, on our very first visit to Apia, an elderly lady who lived near the hotel and we went to see her again a few times. When she heard we would be homeless over the holiday period, she immediately invited us to stay with her. On the basis that we would provide some food in return, we agreed. It was actually quite pleasant as she put a mattress out on her verandah for us and we slept looking at the stars, except, of course, we had our eyes shut while asleep but you know what I mean. On reflection, in view of other things that happened, this might not have passed Health and Safety, but I am a light sleeper.

However, as we were hardly ever off the TV news by now, or out of the papers, our little old lady was getting so stressed out by the way we were being treated that we felt we had to move on. We found some guys, maybe not we, and they offered us a room. To describe it as dirty would be polite, it was rank. The first night we were there, we all went out and when we got back or in the morning, my girlfriend discovered a little bit more money which she had hidden in her socks in her suitcase, and never thought to tell me about, had also disappeared.

My girlfriend was always totally secretive about her money and indeed emails. She needed all my PIN numbers and email passwords but I was never given, nor ever asked, for hers. Years later, after we split up, she accused me of taking money from her account and transferring it to mine, a impossible task as the money was in her Australian account and couldn't be transferred without a string of security measures. In my mind, unless she had given her account information elsewhere, there was only one person who could have managed to effect the transfer.

Anyway, more of this in a separate blog section later, we never found the money from the socks, so we left but by now we had also been befriended by a lady who, along with her fa’afafini friends, these are the men dressed and behaving like women, used to sit on a street corner, which we passed each night on our way back to Aggie’s.

I need to point out here that the only way my girlfriend could cope with our “imprisonment” was by going each night to the local club and dancing. It wasn’t the safest or best thing to do but it seemed to keep her sanity. One night we stopped and got talking to these people and, when we discovered we couldn’t stay with the guys any longer, we took up the offer this woman had given to spend a few nights with her.

Returning to the club, one night I was standing at the side watching my girlfriend dance. I had my fourth glass of water, it was free, and she was, as always, the centre of attention. You could perhaps describe her dancing as provocative but maybe I’m old-fashioned, she had always danced that way, but here, in particular, I felt I needed to be pretty close, just in case. She sometimes did very strange, or maybe stupid, things. As we got to the hotel one night, a guy who had been watching her very closely, came up and asked if she would go for a walk with him. She then set off down the road before I gathered my wits and ran after them and brought her back. I think she was totally unaware of the danger we were in, and, she was putting herself in. again, after we split, she spent some time in Tonga on her own and told me a story, in email, of how she was nearly raped.

Anyhow on this one night, a big Samoan came up to me and said he knew who I was. I think everyone did by then but he also told me he was a policeman and he had a big fat file on his desk about us. He seemed a bit aggressive but maybe I was getting paranoid by then. He said he was investigating everything and he knew what it was all about. The end result though, in case you were worried, was that he said “don’t worry, it will be okay”, and added, “if anyone ever bothers you, find me”, and slipped me his card.

Yet another occasion also turned out well in the end but could have been so much worse. On these nights in the club, my eyes were everywhere. Not only was I looking for spies, I knew people were watching us; not only was I trying to protect my girlfriend from over enthusiastic admirers but also I was looking out for anyone acting suspiciously. I would leave the club after two or three hours totally drained. I had been watching one guy who had been moving around, watching us and, whenever I moved a bit, he tried to stand behind me. After a while he moved forward and I felt sudden pressure on my back, waist level, and instinctively breathed in and moved forward, he kept walking, quickly, and moved on. When we got back to the hotel that night, I checked the back of my belt, unseen at the club as I had my shirt outside my jeans, and there was a long gouge mark running along it. I think I may have been saved from a stabbing by that belt. We didn’t go to the club much after that. As you will find out later, the press had been inviting such an attack.

It was a weird existence and I, for one, was happy when Aggie’s phoned me again and said the holiday rush was over, we were welcome back. In a strange way, we were now experiencing exactly what Ms Sass had accused us of trying to obtain and we had never wanted. For all those last weeks in Samoa, we stayed in the best accommodation on the island, had the best food, witnessed one of the best cultural performances each week, had far too many seafood buffets and watched Ms Aggie herself perform at the show doing a Samoan dance. And there was very little work to do; it had become one long holiday, or would have been without the problems

We also kept meeting the flight crews from various airlines who were using the hotel as a stop-over. They kept turning up and seeing us in the swimming pool and it became a bit of a joke that they would fly off for a week or so and come back and we would still be in the pool. Purely from a personal viewpoint, the virgin staff were the most entertaining and fun.

Ms Aggie’s kindness didn’t just extend to a hotel room and food and washing. For two days in December I completely lost my voice and then developed a severe inflammation in my gums. Ms Aggie found out, took a look, said she had suffered something similar a few years back when she was under great stress, wrote a letter to her pharmacist explaining who I was and asking him to prescribe something. The note added that she, Ms Aggie, would pay. It would be difficult to thank her and her father enough for what they did and, I am sure that they are far more typical of the real Samoa than some others we met who held positions of authority.

Accommodation then was sorted, how did we deal with money? At first we didn’t. By the time we had gone to the second hotel, after the TV interview got us thrown out of the other one, we were down to pennies. Food would be a 1 tala rice vermicelli, soaked in water boiled in the electric kettle and poured into the hotel wash basin. This we would mix with a 1.70 tala tin of sardines for dinner.

After two weeks in Apia, and 3 since we should have left, we had very little money left. By now we should anyway have been back home in New Zealand. There are certain people in the world I would trust with my life; they, in my case, are called children. I could only remember one telephone number in the UK, that of my ex-wife. We had divorced in 1987, some 20 years ago, but I rang her and asked if she could get our son to ring me as we had a few problems. She not only did that but contributed to the money that was then sent to us by Western Union. We could now survive for a while and that while became much longer once we had the offer from Aggie’s of free accommodation.

But how long would we have to stay? Why couldn’t I get my passport back? The answer, I am certain, was, once again, Ms Sass. Next week you will find out why.

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