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At a party in Apia, on the Samoan island of Upolu, my conversation with a new acquaintance proves so animated and entertaining that he invites me to drop by his office the following day to continue it. That he is Samoa's prime minister, with demands upon his time more pressing than my propensity for a chat, doesn't seem to matter.
Ushered into his office early the next afternoon, we pick up where we left off the night before, though with less background noise. In what could be a stellar example of the famed fa'a Samoa (the Samoan way), Sailele Tuilaepa has cleared his schedule for an hour so we can re-engage in conversation. We arrive swiftly at the one inevitable topic in the lush and languid 'treasure islands' of Samoa - Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson.
The author of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped was welcomed by the Samoans. When Stevenson, much taken by the volcanic-etched terrain and the handful of amiable expatriates, settled with his family in Apia in 1890, he became active in the Samoan independence movement and had bestowed upon him the name Tusitala (teller of tales). On his death in
1894 he was afforded a burial ceremony on a scale normally reserved for royalty.
Today, his plantation home, Vailima, maintained as a museum, is a principal tourism site. Many visitors also climb the steep, forested Mount Vaea to see the graves of Stevenson and his wife Fanny.