Reprint from the London Sunday Express--Travel
January 18, 1996
By Clare Colvin

More than a century ago, Robert Louis Stevenson left the grey skies of Edinburgh in search of his paradise Island. He found the land he had dreamt of in his poetry "where the golden apples grow" when he reached Western Samoa.

In the green highlands above the north coast he built a splendid house, Vailima. The great author, ill with TB, lived his final years there with his wife Fanny, writing on borrowed time.

The man the Samoans called Tusitala--Teller of Tales-- was given a royal burial on Mount Vaea, where , if you make an hour's climb from Vailima, you can read his poem Requiem:

Home, is the sailer, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill.

Since the days of Stevenson, others have found their paradise in Western Samoa. Like Barry and Jennifer Rose, an American couple who built their dream place on the south coast of the main island, Upolu.

Disillusioned but enriched by their work as Hollywood lawyers in the eighties, they wandered the seas in a chartered yacht looking for their island paradise.

After two years, they reached the South Pacific and found in Western Samoa the place Stevenson could have told them about all along.

They set about creating a hotel, the Coconuts Beach Club and Resort, out of the jungle on the edge of the sea. Built in traditional style from local materials, it is a magical place. If you like "tree houses" amond lush vegetation, baths that open on to verandahs with a sea view, showers that issue from rock faces, you will love it. Part of the appeal is the way it is assimilated into the landscape. It is not for those who like conventional hotels.

We learned more of the spirit of the place when we were taken by boat through nearby mangrove lagoons. One of the villagers, a man tattooed from the waist to the knee, considered a great mark of bravery in Samoa, paddled the boat along the tranquil waterways.

Yellow hibiscus flowers drifted on to the water and air was rich with birdsongs. We glimpsed Polynesian trillers, Cardinal honeyeaters, sandpipers and even an owl perched high in a tree, looking down at us with round, all-seeing eyes.

Our tattooed man shinned 60ft. up a coconut palm and cut down coconuts for us, which landed like cannon balls near the boat.

That evening Mika, the Club's Slovakian genius of cuisine, created a wonderful dinner of mangrove crab cakes, tuna sushi and baked lobster. Villagers, in palm-leaf costumes, gave a virtuoso display of fire-dancing.

The youngest dancer, a seven-year-old girl, confidently twirled fiercely burning sticks to a crescendo of beating drums.

The poet Rupert Brooke, a lover of the South Pacific, wrote of the people "moving and dancing like gods and goddesses, very quietly and mysteriously."

And there is something mysteriously exotic about Western Samoa, a place where things are not always as they seem. The beautiful and feminine leading "lady" among the dancers was following the traditional role of fa'afafine--a boy who from an early age adopts the role of a girl.

In the rainforest on the suth coast you can swim in a pool under a waterfall and see about you ferns larger than umbrellas. It is like being in a Victorian fairytale illustration.

The feeling of being in another world is emphasised by the houses that most Samoans live in. Known as fales, they have roofs and floors, but no windows, doors or walls. At night you can see families sitting in front of their televisions in full view of passers-by. Those in search of a truly simple life can always rent a thatched beach fale. Althought we were not adventurous enough for a night in one, they make good bases for beach barbecues and picnics.

To sit in the shade of the thatch and look out on to white sand and turquoise sea while an enticing aroma wafted from the barbecue was close to paradise.

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