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Paw Paw - Log Day 216: The Chinese Invasion



Today was another lazy day aboard, but we did do a few things though. Roy replaced the bungies on the shrouds, Elaine continue to upload all our photographs of Surwarrow, American Samoa and Samoa to our website gallery and then did something she hasn't done in years.

In fact it's been so long that she can't remember when last it was - She baked an apple pie! The odd thing was that when she opened the tinned apples which we managed to find here under a New Zealand brand name, she made the comment that they looked just like the ones she use to use in South Africa. On further inspection we discovered that they were indeed from South African, but packaged for the New Zealand company. What are the odds!

The rest of the day was spent lounging around, reading and enjoying the activities of the anchorage / dock on a Saturday afternoon. The one thing we have noticed, over the three weeks that we've been here, is just how busy this li ttle port is.

We've seen ships from all over the world loading and unloading containers - Hong Kong, Panama, Polynesia, Cook Islands, New Zealand, Australia and China. What has been most disturbing are the number of Chinese fishing vessels we've seen constantly coming and going as well as running their generators 24/7, causing pollution.

After curiosity eventually got the better of us, we learnt that Samoa handles all the distribution of goods to the Cook Islands and the Chinese fishing vessels unload their catch onto larger ships here before returning to China. It appears that fishing isn't the only pie China has their fingers in here. Apparently many of the government buildings are Chinese built and many of the businesses around Apia are Chinese owned. Need we say more!

Oh, and Chinese flip-flops can be purchased for less that $2US a pair while the tinned apples cost $6US- Staggering!

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