Pago Pago is the capital of American Samoa. It encompasses nine villages strung together along Pago Pago Harbor, one of which is itself named Pago Pago. It is home to one of the deepest natural deep water harbors in the South Pacific, making it a fisherman’s mecca. Ninety percent of the island is covered in untouched tropical rainforest. It is beautiful!
During the 1800s Germany, Britain and the U.S. all staked claims to Samoa for shipping interests. This led to two Samoan civil wars as different chiefs supported different countries’ interests. After the U.S. and Britain shelled a harbor being controlled by Germany things came to a head. The three countries reached an agreement on the division of the island, apparently with little or no input from the Samoans themselves. The U.S. gained control of the eastern side of the island, and it was renamed American Samoa.
As citizens of a U.S. territory American Samoans can travel to the U.S. serve in our military, but they cannot vote in our elections, hold any Civil Service positions, or sponsor family members for immigration. They have their own form of government and do not pay U.S. taxes.
For our day in Pago Pago we arranged a tour with a local company. We rode on the “Rambo” bus to visit the site of an abandoned tram that was built in 1965 to facilitate education. At the time it was very difficult for children of the different villages to get to school. A local TV station offered to solve the problem by broadcasting the day’s lessons. To do so they needed to install and maintain transmitters on one of the island’s tallest mountains. The tram provided regular transportation for TV engineers to service the transmitters. It ran from an elevation of 191 feet to 1,612 feet over Pago Pago Harbor, a span of 5,100 feet. We visited the office of the National Park Service where we saw examples of traditional cloth made from local plants, the skeleton of a BABY whale, and information about the surrounding rainforests, then drove through those rainforests and the villages that make up this side of Pago Pago. Look closely at the picture of the home and you’ll see an interesting sight in the front yard. It is full of tombstones and crypts. The Polynesians bury their dead in the front yard of their homes. The greater the position the individual held in the tribe, the larger the marker for their grave. Crypts are generally reserved for chiefs.
There’s much more to the story of this 3-hour tour that lasted 6 hours, but we’ll save that for when we return home. Not enough room here for all the details!
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