(Savai'i East)
By the time Matt and I caught up with the rest of the guys they had scouted out and decided on a site in the village of Maota, which means "house" in Samoan.
The meteorological section had a building on the grounds of the East Savai'i Division of the Samoan Forestry Division as a place for their personnel to stay that worked taking weather readings at the nearby airport. The site for the station was located behind that building.
I told you the airport was nearby. Now normally this would have been a problem for our site, but with only a few flights a day, it wasn't a big problem.
I don't think the weather could have gotten too much hotter. For the sake of our bodies it would have been nice to have installed the station under the nearby trees to get a little shade, but that would have compromised the science. Rustling and bending trees make noise and transmit it right into the ground.
The man in the hole in the picture above was a famous Samoan. He was Happy Valley Patu. We called him "Veli", which, for all I know, may have been Samoan for "Happy Valley". He was a fullback for the Western Samoa rugby team, Manu Samoa, from 1995 to 2000. He started in games against teams from Scotland, England, Ireland and Wales. Being a former territory of New Zealand, rugby was very popular in Samoa. Personally, I couldn't understand the game beyond the scrum, and even the scrum didn't make any sense to me. Below are the only two pictures I could find of Veli in action.
We all took turns pounding for a while, and then throwing out large rocks
until we got to the bottom -- the bottom of the easy part that is. Below was
Johnny Ah Kau taking a swing with the pick axe. He worked in the geophysics
section office with Shaun and Veli. He acted as our driver for the whole time
we were in Samoa. To his credit he only swore a couple of times, however,
even with all of the driving he did he failed to get us a pig for cooking,
though he did come close a couple of times.
2018-03-03