Driving Samoa and the Savai'i ferry: sort these two things first

Two pieces of Samoa logistics are worth sorting before they sort you. Neither
is hard once you know it is coming.

First, driving. A foreign licence on its own will not do here; you are meant to
buy a temporary Samoan permit, normally a quick formality you arrange on
arrival. Ours never materialised at all, because the licensing office had,
briefly and literally, run out of the blank stock to print the permits on, so
we drove the whole trip without one. We got stopped once at a New Year's Eve
checkpoint and waved on with good humour, which became its own story, but the
safe play is to get the permit if you can, and to leave a little slack in case
the office cannot print one the day you turn up.

Second, the Savai'i ferry. We turned up early to take the car across for a day
trip and found the vehicle tickets sold out days in advance, with a standby
queue that rarely boards. Our fix: we flagged a taxi at the port, drove both
cars to our nearby hotel, left the rental there, and the taxi ran us back to
board as foot passengers minutes before departure. On the far side we hired
another taxi to drive us round the island. It meant the rental was not left
sitting at the port, which never quite felt safe, and it got us across on a day
the car queue would not have.

So: reserve the car ferry well ahead if you must bring a vehicle, or do Savai'i
by taxi as we did. And if you are on a deadline, take an earlier ferry back
rather than the last one; the late sailings fill, and being stranded the wrong
side of the water is a sour way to end a day trip.