In Samoa, going to church on Sunday is as essential as brushing your teeth. Photo / Riah Jaye / Intrepid Travel
Sundays in Samoa move at their own frequency. The country slows to a heartbeat on the day of the sabbath, steady and unhurried, pulsing with music, food and faith, writes Ben Tomsett.
I can’t fight it, and I don’t try.
The trick is to lean in, to give myself over to the rhythm of the island, and let it swallow me whole.
My Sunday in Samoa starts with church.
In most places, church can feel like an obligation, a box ticked before brunch. Here, it’s as much a part of life as brushing your teeth.
I hear the choirs before I see the doors swing open, harmonies spilling into the street, voices soaring over the tin roofs and breadfruit trees.
I slip into a pew, and the air smells faintly of coconut oil and starch.
The men are in crisp white shirts and lava-lavas, women in bright dresses, children wriggling but contained.
Occasionally, one might break free and come to stare at me, the newcomer.
Sermons thunder and roll, cadences rise and fall, the choir lifts me out of my body.
I don’t need to understand the Samoan language to grasp the gravity - the way people shut their eyes, the way the music lands in their bones, the reverence in their bowed heads.
Here, belief isn’t a lifestyle choice; it’s infrastructure, as essential as the fale roof overhead. Agnosticism? I hardly know him.
When service lets out, the streets empty.
Shops are shuttered.
A dog barks in the distance.
The island takes the sabbath seriously.
But behind closed doors, the kitchens work overtime.
The toonai, or traditional Sunday lunch, is waiting.
I’m invited into a family home, and the spread is obscene in the best possible way.
Platters of taro and breadfruit, bread rolls sweet as cake, oka (raw fish in coconut cream), and great hunks of pork, slow-roasted in an umu, the underground oven.
The umu itself is a thing of beauty: stones heated until they glow, food wrapped in banana leaves, covered with earth to steam.
It’s an old technology that still puts my oven to shame.
Nobody hurries through this meal.
People heap my plate again and again. Kids dart in and out.
After the feast, the village stirs again.
A giant speaker is placed at the edge of the fale, a young man takes up the pate drums, and suddenly the air is alive with rhythm.
The young men lead a dance, the elders sit cross-legged on mats, clapping along.
A woman rises, hips rolling in time with the beat, her hands carving shapes in the air, graceful and deliberate.
After I’ve eaten more starch and protein than I thought possible, the only logical next step is immersion.
Not in theology or food, but water.
The road west from Lalomanu snakes through villages where pigs roam freely and children play in the shade.
My destination is To Sua Ocean Trench, and nothing really prepares me for the sight of it: a sinkhole, 30 metres deep, ringed with tropical green.
A wooden ladder disappears into the turquoise water below.
I climb down slowly. It’s steep, slick, and slightly unsteady.
When I hit the water, it swallows me, cool and salty, a jolt after the heavy meal. I float on my back, staring up at a circle of sky framed by jungle.
My body softens, the food and heat dissolving into something like bliss. If I’ve got gas left in the tank, there are more stops on the way back to Apia.
The Sopoaga waterfalls, where white ribbons of water cascade through the green, remind me that Samoa doesn’t need embellishment. The land itself is a spectacle.
By the time I reach Apia, the capital, the sun is dropping low. The city is modest, functional, nothing like the neon chaos of Southeast Asia or the polished resorts of Hawaii.
But that’s the point.
Samoa doesn’t sell itself as something it’s not.
Sunday night is quiet. No bars blaring Top 40, no traffic jams, no urgency, so I sit on a veranda with a cold Vailima beer. I think about how, in so many parts of the world, Sunday is just the day before Monday, the anxious prelude to another week.
In Samoa, it’s the week’s heartbeat, the day everything revolves around. Here, Sunday is church and feast, water and rest, and, if you’re smart, you can let it rearrange your own sense of time.
Because you can fly back to the city, back to emails and deadlines and traffic, but part of you will be stuck here: in a pew, in the ocean trench, at a table heaped with taro.
And that’s not a bad place to be.
Samoa
GETTING THERE
Fly direct from Auckland to Apia with Air New Zealand.
DETAILS
www.intrepidtravel.com/nz/samoa/samoa-adventure
New Zealand Herald Travel visited Samoa courtesy of Intrepid Travel.