American Samoa: the road to Vatia and Pola Island

At the start of the tour

Welcome to Road to Vatia and Pola Island

Welcome to the National Park of American Samoa, one of the most remote national parks in the United States, some twenty-six hundred miles southwest of Hawaii. The park spans parts of three islands: Tutuila, where you are now, and Ofu and Taʻū, farther east. Almost all of that land is tropical rainforest, from the mountaintops right down to the shore, and about four thousand acres of the park lie underwater.

This park is unlike almost any other. The land doesn't belong to the federal government. It belongs to Samoan villages, Vatia, Afono and Pago Pago among them, and they lease it to the National Park Service for fifty years. The park was officially created in 1993, through an agreement between the American Samoa Government and the Park Service, and it's managed together with village leaders.

Today's tour starts here by the harbor, crosses the mountains to the north shore, stops at a park overlook above the sea cliffs, and ends at the edge of a north-shore village, looking out toward Pola Island. Along the way you'll pass through villages, so take it slowly. Sunday is a day for church and rest, and around dusk each evening, villages pause for prayer.

I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there.

Point 1 · At the stop

National Park visitor center, Pago Pago

This is the park's visitor center, and a good place to begin. Inside are exhibits in both Samoan and English about the rainforest, the coral reefs, the native fruit bats and Samoan traditions, with models of the islands, marine life, forest birds and cultural tools. Rangers here can tell you about trail conditions, and you can get a passport book stamped or pick up a Junior Ranger booklet for the kids. It's open on weekdays, and closed on weekends and federal holidays.

The park protects more than nature. Samoan culture is the oldest in Polynesia. The first people are believed to have arrived here by sea about three thousand years ago, and over the centuries a way of life grew up that Samoans call faʻasamoa, the Samoan way. At its heart is the family, the ʻaiga, a wide circle of relatives connected by blood, marriage or adoption. Each family is led by a chief, the matai, whose role is one of service: to look after the family and to speak for it in the village council.

Keep that in mind as we set out. Every village on this road is a living part of that story.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Lower Sauma Ridge overlook

Next, we're heading over the mountains to the Lower Sauma Ridge overlook, where a short park trail leads to an ancient Samoan site. While we go, here's what archaeologists have learned about the people who lived here long before there was a road.

The first people reached Samoa about three thousand years ago. For roughly the next thousand years, they made a simple, undecorated pottery that archaeologists call Samoan Plain Ware: mostly open, round-bottomed bowls, about the size of a kitchen mixing bowl. Pieces of it have been found at Afono, on the north shore, and at more than twenty other sites in these islands. Then, about fifteen hundred years ago, people stopped making pottery altogether, and nobody knows why.

Later clues are made of stone, and there are two kinds. The first is tools. About seven hundred years ago, the island was a major export center for stone adzes, the blades Samoans lashed to wooden handles with coconut twine to carve wood. Adzes made here have turned up as far away as the Solomon Islands, Pohnpei and the Cook Islands. To sharpen them, people ground the blades on big stones, and those stones still carry smooth, bowl-shaped hollows worn into their surfaces.

The second is the star mound. Ancient Samoans built raised stone platforms, from two to fifteen feet high, often with arms reaching out like the points of a star. Most were built in the last five hundred years, and more than sixty have been found in the eastern part of the island alone. Before Christianity came to Samoa, they were used for catching pigeons, the lupe, as a sport of chiefs. Pigeon-catching huts stood on top of the platforms, and the chiefs competed to catch the most birds, with a tame pigeon as a decoy and a long-handled net to sweep up the flocks it drew in. Early missionaries wrote that whole villages would camp in the forest for weeks around these mounds, and that pigeon-catching season was a time of feasting.

So many mounds, and so much ceremony. It tells you how rich these forests once were in birds, and how much those birds mattered to Samoan life.

Point 2 · At the stop

Lower Sauma Ridge overlook

This is the park's Lower Sauma Ridge overlook. Out along the coast is the Vaiʻava Strait, a National Natural Landmark, and this pullout is the best place to see it. It's a classic picture of what the sea does to a volcanic island: waves cut steep cliffs and leave behind outliers of harder rock that resist them. The tall, skinny island to the north is Pola, a nesting place for seabirds. You'll get a closer look at the end of the tour.

The trail here is about four-tenths of a mile round trip, a gentle climb of thirty to forty-five minutes, with exhibits along the way. It leads to an archaeological site with an ancient star mound and grinding stones, the kind of place you just heard about. Mornings are best, when it's cooler and the light is better.

This is also the one overlook in the park that's accessible with assistance. And across the road, a much harder trail begins: the Mount ʻAlava Adventure Trail, a loop with fifty-six ladders and seven hundred eighty-three steps.

Take a minute here if you can. Chiefs once watched for pigeons from mounds on ridges like this one, and the seabirds out over the strait have been circling those cliffs far longer than that.

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History, on the way there

On the way: Pola Island trailhead, Vatia

Next, we're heading to the end of the road at Vatia, and the trail to Pola Island.

On this part of the north coast, listen for a small bird with a lovely voice. Its Samoan name is miti vao; in English, the Polynesian starling. Across most of the island it's hard to find, but this stretch of forest is one of the few places where it's more common. It's a small, short-tailed bird with a grayish back, a pale, streaked breast and white eyes, and its whistles and trills are quiet and musical.

And if you see a big, dark shape flapping over the treetops in broad daylight, that's a flying fox, a fruit bat. Bats are the only native mammals in these islands: two large fruit bats and one small insect-eating bat. The flying foxes have wingspans of up to three feet, and they're active by day as well as by night. The Samoan flying fox, peʻa vao, lives only in the Samoan islands and Fiji, and on a warm day it often soars on rising air without flapping at all. Its cousin, peʻa fanua, roosts in colonies of hundreds, even thousands.

These bats are the forest's gardeners. They pollinate flowers and spread seeds, and they're the only animals here that can carry fruits with big seeds over long distances and uphill. They may travel between feeding areas up to forty kilometers apart in a single night, and the seeds they carry help new trees fill the gaps where old ones have fallen.

Point 3 · At the stop

Pola Island trailhead, Vatia

This is the end of the road, at the edge of Vatia village. Just offshore is Pola Island, which the Park Service describes as rising more than four hundred feet straight out of the ocean. From here, a rough track leads to three park exhibits and a short trail, about a tenth of a mile there and back, down to a rocky beach that looks out at the island.

The island is one of the great seabird places on this coast. Frigatebirds and boobies nest on its high cliffs. Watch, too, for the white-tailed tropicbird, the tavaʻesina, with gleaming white feathers and long tail streamers. Samoan fishermen watch these birds at sea to find schools of fish, and their white feathers have long been prized for fishing lures. By tradition, only feathers from a living bird stay dry and shiny, so it was a badge of honor for a young person to climb to a nest and pluck a few plumes, leaving the bird unharmed.

The beach is coral rubble and rock, so watch your step, and if you go near the water, remember that channels through the reef can carry strong currents. This is village land, so it's polite to ask before using the beach, and on Sundays, swimming may not be permitted.

That's the end of our tour. You've come from the harbor over the mountains, past star mounds and pottery more than fifteen hundred years old, to an island the seabirds have kept for themselves. Thank you for traveling with me today, and enjoy your time on the north shore of the island.

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