Paul Thomas: Laidback Samoa faces the tourism challenge

In Fiji they say "bula" - rather too often for my liking, but others seem to enjoy it. It suggests the locals are happy to have us and perhaps they are.

In Samoa they say "talofa", and following the Fijian model you get it coming and going, from dawn to dusk.

Slowly but surely mass tourism is coming to Samoa. A new resort hotel has just opened and more are in the pipeline.

The Government has joined forces with Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Blue to create Polynesian Blue, a low-cost airline venture designed to boost tourist arrivals through cheaper fares.

Samoa is taking tentative steps down the road travelled by a number of emerging nations, for which tourism is a vital source of foreign currency.

Like those countries, it faces the challenge of providing a generic international tourism product without compromising its culture and social structures or unduly disturbing the languid rhythms of its way of life.

As New Zealanders know only too well, you can't create a service culture overnight. The Samoans are having to learn on the job, with mixed results.

Our hotel ran movies on a continuous 24-hour loop. Having endured 90 minutes of the half-witted Adam Sandler vehicle The Longest Yard in the interests of family harmony, I felt cheated when transmission abruptly ceased part way through the climactic scene, mawkish and predictable though it promised to be.

Inquiries were made. The employee who pulled the plug disarmingly explained that another guest had insisted that since the hotel had failed to provide sunshine, the least it could do was screen a children's movie.

The Samoan way is to say yes to any request, however unreasonable, and follow through on it - or not, as the case may be - at their leisure. In this instance, though, the employee erred on the side of eagerness to please.

For obscure technical reasons the movie couldn't pick up where it left off; we had to have it again, from the top. Greater love hath no parent than to sit through a double helping of Adam Sandler.

We took a taxi into Apia. I sat in the front feeling like Alice in Wonderland, apprehensive yet intrigued by this alternative reality into which I'd stumbled.

Taped to the dashboard was the reassuring declaration "We prioritise your safety", but as we hurtled around blind corners in the early morning mist, I wished that the author of this fine sentiment had backed it up with a safety belt.

Perhaps the incident that best captured the difficulty of synchronising the unhurried pace of Samoan life and the needs of tourists used to living by the clock occurred when my wife went to the front desk in search of a newspaper.

Informed that they were all gone, she asked if the hotel had a copy she could quickly scan to update herself with what was happening in the world.

The receptionist disappeared into the back office, returning with a newspaper and the virtuous air of someone doing their good deed for the day. The paper was a week old.

Forty-five minutes into our tour of the island, the guide informed us that we'd passed 190 churches since leaving Apia. Organised religion dominates the social landscape as it once did throughout what is now the developed world and might still do in America's Bible Belt.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that urban drift - if that term can be used in relation to Apia - away from the patriarchal discipline of village life might be starting to chip away at the established order of chiefs and churches.

Expatriates based in Apia complain of increasing petty crime and a hotel employee, perhaps over-extrapolating from her own situation, claimed that alcohol and marijuana are increasingly causing Samoan men to neglect their family responsibilities.

During the extended grace that preceded lunch with a village family, the teenaged grandson flashed me the sly, conspiratorial grin of a fellow sceptic.

While change is inevitable and won't always be for the better, Samoa doesn't seem a society in any great hurry to shake off its traditions and embrace modernity.

A Californian working in neighbouring American Samoa reports that it's paying a price for its intimacy with Uncle Sam: the flip side to federally funded prosperity is social dislocation, financial corruption and a booming vice scene.

By contrast, the greatest blight on the other Samoa is a rampantly invasive pest plant that looks suspiciously like convolvulus. Supposedly introduced by the Americans for camouflage purposes during World War II, it covers swathes of the interior like a mouldy green carpet. Only the coconut trees grow high enough to escape its stranglehold.

The minibus that took us to the airport struggled with its load: 20 people, half of them children, had generated a truly staggering amount of luggage. You'd think we were returning from a winter in Siberia rather than a week on a laidback, come-as-you-are tropical island.

The Pacific Island package holiday market essentially wants the comforts of home in 30C heat. Most visitors' priorities are a tan, a bottomless cocktail and the opportunity to show off their new summer wardrobes. Sampling another culture comes in below an air-conditioned gymnasium.

Samoa shouldn't try too hard to make them feel at home.