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Come To The Land Of Ancient Mystery As Well As Beauty
Change comes slow to Manu'a compared to the rest of American Samoa. Many of the original Samoan houses were destroyed by the recent desvastating hurricanes and are now replaced with palagi western styled houses. In spite of that, you might experience in Manu'a the same things that the American anthropologist Margaret Mead did when she was doing her research about the Samoan adolescents during the 1920's.
There were no famous palagi who lived in Manu'a like the famous writer Robert Louis Stevenson who lived and died in Western Samoa or Paul Gauguin who visited and did some very famous work in Tahiti. You might be the first famous palagi to visit Manu'a. Anyway, Manu'a is still the most Samoan of all the islands in American Samoa and that may include Upolu in the independent Western Samoa. As a matter of fact when people refer to a Samoan as behaving fa'a Manu'a, they're saying that that person is too entrenched in tradition. Remember, just because there are a lot of food outlets on Tutu'ila, don't expect all of American Samoa to be like that. David Stanley recommends in his South Pacific Handbook to buy your favorate bread and other food items in Tutu'ila before departing for Manu'a. There are small family stores in Manu'a, but they might not carry your favorate items. If you're planning to do some snorkling or camping, you might have to rent equipments at Tutu'ila before you depart for the Manu'a islands.
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