The National Park Service probably has the stats.  Maybe one of the eight National Parks in Alaska gets fewer visitors, but I doubt it.  For starters, who even knows there is a U.S. National Park in American Samoa?  Most Americans could not even find Samoa on a globe.  One unit of the National Park of American Samoa is on the tiny, remote outer island of Ofu in the Manu’a group.  Ofu is a “high” island, the peaked and jungled tip of an ancient volcano, of less than three square miles.  There are fewer than 200 residents.  Most of the island’s south shore and its associated coral reefs in To’aga lagoon are part of the park.  It is the closest thing to paradise I have ever found.

There are two Twin Otter flights a week from Pago Pago International Airport into Ofu’s abbreviated airstrip—if the wind is right.  I was often stranded there by cancelled flights.  I didn’t mind.  I made being there part of my job, first as territorial folk arts coordinator, then for 13 years as State Historic Preservation Officer.  Archaeological evidence from To’aga dates human habitation there back more than 3000 years.  It is also, famously, one of the most haunted—aitua—sites in the archipelago.  No one any longer lives in To’aga.  It is totally deserted.  Locals do not pass by there after dark.

When I started writing my Samoa-based Jungle Beat Mystery series, I resisted mentioning Ofu.  I considered it a secret best kept.  But its material was just too rich. I placed the third book, The Dead Don’t Dance, there, figuring its isolation, inaccessibility, and total lack of tourist amenities would continue to protect it.  Maybe readers would deem it mythical. 

As in all the books in the series, The Dead Don’t Dance’s basic conflict is the interface between Samoan culture and invasive American assumptions. Our detective sergeant, Apelu Soifua, is a native Samoan who spent years on the San Francisco Police Department.  His family and his father’s chiefly title are from Ofu.  The bad guys are mainland developers with designs to transform To’aga into a resort destination.  To’aga, with the aid of Apelu, his son Sanele, and Nupo, a weird old man hermit, must fend them off.  The mystical gets involved, the deep history of the place.  Strange events start occurring.  There is a grisly murder in the jungle night, a mysterious plane crash.

“The next day, Apelu took Sanele out to To’aga, and they removed all the plastic survey markers and stakes from what Apelu believed to be the approach to their ancestral land. For the hell of it, they pulled up a bunch of the other ones too. Then Sanele had the bright idea of moving the stakes around, so they put them back in different locations. They had fun…. Apelu took one of the stakes with its plastic ribbon and stuck it into a crack in the reef a dozen yards off shore.”

In a way, I guess, because all the Jungle Beat Mystery books take place in a tropical vacation setting, the reader becomes a tourist there.  The whole series is newly available in paperback, Kindle, and audio books from Open Road Media.  Welcome to Samoa.