Robert Louis Stevenson Museum: An unexpected highlight of Samoa

Robert Louis Stevenson Museum: An unexpected highlight of Samoa

The Robert Louis Stevenson Museum in Samoa was an unexpected climax of our trip to Samoa. A fleeting cult of culture became a really fascinating morning

"The Booker Prize money would not even keep me with cigarettes," joked the bestseller crime writer Martina Cole. In view of snobism about the type of commercial fiction that she writes, the swing of the disrespectful author emphasized the fact that commercial fiction subsidizes literary fiction and enables publishers to publish demanding literature that hardly anyone buys.

Perhaps it was a similar snobism that excluded the author Robert Louis Stevenson from the Norton Anthology of English Literature for 32 years, and the reason why he was completely unmentioned in 1973 in the 2000-page Oxford Anthology of English Literature. Modern critics have criticized its style as simple, but if raw and captivating storytelling has a value, Stevenson would certainly be among the big ones.

The author of Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Stevenson, was born in Scotland and lived and died around the world halfway in Samoa. At the age of only 44, he was given a royal funeral on the Vaea mountain in Samoa.

Today, his 400 hectare house and his grave on Samoa's main island are open to the public. We were involved in a fleeting look and agreed that we could not go to Samoa without visiting this cultural stopover. We arrived at 10 a.m. and expected to spend an hour there, but four hours later came out that we almost missed it.

I couldn't choose a favorite room: maybe his study with his rare first gives, maybe his mother's room with a clear view of the Pacific or maybe the huge living room with dusty piano and lion fur. Even his "hospital room" summarizes the romance of a long past time.

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The deep respect of the Samoan for Stevenson is also striking. The local tour guide Tina spoke with obvious love and admiration of "Tusitala" (the name of the Samoan for Stevenson, which means "narrator of the stories"). Once her eyes watered when she described how he fought for the interests of the Samoan people. She told us that the Samoans manually cut a path to Mount Vaea in order to fulfill Tusitala's last wish to be buried at his summit.

After exploring the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum, we made our way to the summit of Mount Vaea to visit his grave. Visitors can hike a 2.5 km route to the summit or take a steeper 0.8 km long path that is somewhat more demanding. We opted for the latter and reached the summit in an messy, sweaty state. We sat on a sip of water. When we enjoyed the panoramic view, it is possible that we fell in love with this estimated island as Stevenson.

When we went down again, we talked about how a fleeting cultural stopover had become a really fascinating morning. And then we smiled ... If travel was still surprising, we had a long way to enjoy.

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