3/19/08
I’m back from a week long spring break in Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia. No, it’s not a fictional place – it’s real and it’s pretty awesome. The trip was great, mostly thanks to my friend Michaela, who is a WorldTeacher there. I tried to jam as much in as possible, and it worked out really well.
I arrived on Saturday, met up with Michaela at the airport, and was immediately dumbfounded by the mountains. I knew that it had mountains, but I could not get over how geologically different it was from the RMI, only a 2 hour plane trip away. There were also mangroves, streams, rivers, waterfalls, and did I mention FRESH WATER?! Everywhere. The capital of Pohnpei is Kolonia, a small city comparable to Majuro in everything except its elevation, which is more than Majuro’s maximum 5 feet above sea level.
On Sunday, Michaela and I had brunch with some expats at the world famous “Village,” an ecotourist’s dream come true. The Village is about a 15 minute car ride from Kolonia, on a paved (wow!) road. It’s a bunch of grass huts built into the side of a mountain, each with two water beds, electricity, and mahogany floors. Their restaurant is completely open and overlooks the water and the famous Sokehs Rock, and probably has the best food on the island. The view was unreal, and when combined with some mouth-watering macadamia nut banana pancakes and bacon… well… life was good.
After brunch, we hit up Lididuniap Falls, one of the many waterfalls on the island. I’ve heard that Pohnpei is second only to Kauai in terms of annual rainfall, but we were lucky enough to get hit by the rain while we were swimming in the waterfall, which made it more enjoyable.
On Tuesday, I hiked Sokehs Ridge by myself, which is a huge rock formation often compared to diamond head. It overlooks Kolonia. After the hike, I met up with Ken and Debbie, the American couple that lives on Gugeegue, for dinner at the Village. They also decided to spring break in Pohnpei.
Wednesday was scuba day number 1. Diving turned out to be much harder to arrange than expected. When you get off the plane in Pohnpei, you can get a free travel pamphlet that has a directory of about 10 dive shops on the island. After going through all of them and getting nothing but disconnects and confused wrong numbers, I realized they were not real dive shops, but dive shop ideas that existed at some point in ambitious Micronesian’s mind but were never followed through with. I went to the Village to ask if they could help me out – since I would be going alone, they offered to take me on a two tank dive for $200. Ouch. That is over $100 an hour. Sorry, can’t do it. Michaela to the rescue – she knew someone who had been diving here with someone who might work at more than just a dive shop idea. Well, it was much more. Tony, a half Pohnpeian half American ex-marine ran a small business that ran out of a shack with 3 old, empty-hulled boats propped up on trailors in the front yard. We made arrangements to meet Tuesday morning and he never showed up. On Wednesday, he was more than an hour late, and we weren’t in the water until eleven. He never asked to see my certification card and he never made me sign anything. Very unusual. We were about to get in the water at our first dive site when he asks me how long I’ve been diving. Then he asks what the deepest I’d been to was. I told my certification was only to a maximum of 60 feet, but that in Majuro they’d taken me to 75. He sad okay, and flung himself over the side of the boat. I had only just managed to catch up with him under water when I started to realize something was very wrong. We were very deep. I looked at my depth gauge: 105 feet. Hmm, I thought, that’s very deep,
…… but look at that really cool sea anemone. Wow, this is soooo coooooollll…. I’m under the OOOOcean… look, you can’t even see the top!!! I wonder if I can do a back flip down here with my gear on? What a neat fishy …….
I was narc’d. The technical term is nitrogen narcosis. Basically, when you go too deep too fast and your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. It happens often, but usually you’re expecting it and they train you for it when you get advanced diving certifications. It didn’t even register with me until we were on our way back up that I had been diving under the influence of nitrogen. Yikes. Thankfully, nothing too exciting happened on the first dive anyway – the place we went to had been largely wiped out by the invasive coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, which has been known to destroy entire reefs. The second dive of the day was at Manta road, a place with two underwater cliffs on either side of the diver that manta rays often swim through. Our boat ride there was treacherous. The boat, which was not a dive boat but just an empty fiberglass shell with tanks sliding around inside, was slamming up against the waves at high speed. At one point a life jacket flew out of the back and Tony never even noticed. When we got to manta road, I hurried into the water, worried that if I hesitated that my conscience wouldn’t let me do another dive with him. I had my gear on, floating in the water, when I noticed a black mass with a 7 foot wingspan soaring by about 40 feet below me. I told Tony to hurry please, we’re missing the show, but he couldn’t find his mask. Apparently it had blown off the boat with the jacket. He looked over the side at me and said, “well… why don’t you just go ahead.” Uh…. What? “…I’m… I’m not doing the dive alone.” He said “What are you scared? Ha ha ha ha.” I didn’t say anything. Instead I sat there floating, angrily imagining driving back in his boat at breakneck speed without diving while the mantas laughed at me from below. I waited. He finally found a spare. We descended. At a 7 foot wingspan, the midsized manta did a flyby from about 5 feet away from me. I was humbled. It is now my goal to see a full sized adult before I leave the RMI.
Thursday, my Gugeegue friends and I took a tour with the Village to see the Nan Madol ruins. It is a man-made archipelago built on a coral reef from about 500-1500AD. Each island served a difference purpose, and all of them were connect by canoe-accessible canals, making it the “Venice of the Pacific.” The coolest island was, of course, the king’s, where huge boulders of basalt had been cut out of a nearby mountain and piled on top of each other to create walls, tombs, and a meditation chamber. No one knows how the boulders were transported to the islands… some weigh over a ton, and there’s no evidence of any kind of tool being used. Island legend tells of levitation powers. At the end of the tour, I went back to the Village. My friends and I played scrabble on the outermost deck of the restaurant while watching the sunset on Sokehs Rock before ordering dinner.
Friday was scuba day number 2. This time Tony was two hours late, but he gave me a free polo to make up for it. While I knew that I was lucky to be alive after a first day of diving, he was my only connection, and I had conceded that scubadiving in Micronesia might not be such a bad way to go. He took me to a site called Black Coral, which during March is a Grouper sanctuary. When we got in, at about 70 feet you could see all of the 2-3 feet long groupers fighting over spawning territory at the bottom. It was like Planet Earth. The highlight of the trip, however, was seeing 3 rather large Gray Reef Sharks cruise by us in formation. Seeing a small white tip or black tip is pretty much guaranteed on every dive, but these Grays were a special treat. While Tony estimated them to be at about 9 feet, I guessed somewhere from 6 – 8 feet. They were not interested in us, and simply continued cruising in formation. Sharks are not aggressive. Unless you are chumming or carrying around a bloody fish in your hand, you are not likely to get noticed unless it’s a tiger shark, whom I would not be opposed to eradicating from the worlds’ oceans.
Saturday was Sokehs Rock climbing time. Sokehs Ridge is a fairly easy climb that can actually be driven most of the way, providing a good view of a massive rock between it and the ocean. The Sokehs Rock hike puts you on top of that massive rock, and is perilously dangerous. At one point in the hike I used a hanging vine to traverse a gully. At another point I was clinging to a rusting metal electrical pipe (that was once used to bring power to an antennae at the top of the rock) while trying to find a foothold on a 75 degree rock face. When we got to the top, two weary endemic owls flew off the edge. If you google pictures of Sokehs, imagine me standing on top of the huge rock.
On Sunday, a few WorldTeachers went to the south end of the island (about 45 minutes in the car) to try hiking the legendary six waterfalls. Our guide (one of the teacher’s students) wasn’t there, but we wandered around the tiny rural area until we ran into his brother and a friend, who took us. I didn’t know that places like that actually existed. All of the waterfalls looked fake, like they were CGI’d into fantasy movies. For the last one, the grand finale, we swam through an 8 foot wide and 30 yard long canal of unknown depth, with towering sheets of flat rock rising up on either side of us, in the middle of the jungle, and finally ended up in a pool fed by water coming down 20 feet from a huge heart shaped hole in a rock. It was a great way to end the trip.
I’m back from a week long spring break in Pohnpei, one of the Federated States of Micronesia. No, it’s not a fictional place – it’s real and it’s pretty awesome. The trip was great, mostly thanks to my friend Michaela, who is a WorldTeacher there. I tried to jam as much in as possible, and it worked out really well.
I arrived on Saturday, met up with Michaela at the airport, and was immediately dumbfounded by the mountains. I knew that it had mountains, but I could not get over how geologically different it was from the RMI, only a 2 hour plane trip away. There were also mangroves, streams, rivers, waterfalls, and did I mention FRESH WATER?! Everywhere. The capital of Pohnpei is Kolonia, a small city comparable to Majuro in everything except its elevation, which is more than Majuro’s maximum 5 feet above sea level.
On Sunday, Michaela and I had brunch with some expats at the world famous “Village,” an ecotourist’s dream come true. The Village is about a 15 minute car ride from Kolonia, on a paved (wow!) road. It’s a bunch of grass huts built into the side of a mountain, each with two water beds, electricity, and mahogany floors. Their restaurant is completely open and overlooks the water and the famous Sokehs Rock, and probably has the best food on the island. The view was unreal, and when combined with some mouth-watering macadamia nut banana pancakes and bacon… well… life was good.
After brunch, we hit up Lididuniap Falls, one of the many waterfalls on the island. I’ve heard that Pohnpei is second only to Kauai in terms of annual rainfall, but we were lucky enough to get hit by the rain while we were swimming in the waterfall, which made it more enjoyable.
On Tuesday, I hiked Sokehs Ridge by myself, which is a huge rock formation often compared to diamond head. It overlooks Kolonia. After the hike, I met up with Ken and Debbie, the American couple that lives on Gugeegue, for dinner at the Village. They also decided to spring break in Pohnpei.
Wednesday was scuba day number 1. Diving turned out to be much harder to arrange than expected. When you get off the plane in Pohnpei, you can get a free travel pamphlet that has a directory of about 10 dive shops on the island. After going through all of them and getting nothing but disconnects and confused wrong numbers, I realized they were not real dive shops, but dive shop ideas that existed at some point in ambitious Micronesian’s mind but were never followed through with. I went to the Village to ask if they could help me out – since I would be going alone, they offered to take me on a two tank dive for $200. Ouch. That is over $100 an hour. Sorry, can’t do it. Michaela to the rescue – she knew someone who had been diving here with someone who might work at more than just a dive shop idea. Well, it was much more. Tony, a half Pohnpeian half American ex-marine ran a small business that ran out of a shack with 3 old, empty-hulled boats propped up on trailors in the front yard. We made arrangements to meet Tuesday morning and he never showed up. On Wednesday, he was more than an hour late, and we weren’t in the water until eleven. He never asked to see my certification card and he never made me sign anything. Very unusual. We were about to get in the water at our first dive site when he asks me how long I’ve been diving. Then he asks what the deepest I’d been to was. I told my certification was only to a maximum of 60 feet, but that in Majuro they’d taken me to 75. He sad okay, and flung himself over the side of the boat. I had only just managed to catch up with him under water when I started to realize something was very wrong. We were very deep. I looked at my depth gauge: 105 feet. Hmm, I thought, that’s very deep,
…… but look at that really cool sea anemone. Wow, this is soooo coooooollll…. I’m under the OOOOcean… look, you can’t even see the top!!! I wonder if I can do a back flip down here with my gear on? What a neat fishy …….
I was narc’d. The technical term is nitrogen narcosis. Basically, when you go too deep too fast and your brain doesn’t get enough oxygen. It happens often, but usually you’re expecting it and they train you for it when you get advanced diving certifications. It didn’t even register with me until we were on our way back up that I had been diving under the influence of nitrogen. Yikes. Thankfully, nothing too exciting happened on the first dive anyway – the place we went to had been largely wiped out by the invasive coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish, which has been known to destroy entire reefs. The second dive of the day was at Manta road, a place with two underwater cliffs on either side of the diver that manta rays often swim through. Our boat ride there was treacherous. The boat, which was not a dive boat but just an empty fiberglass shell with tanks sliding around inside, was slamming up against the waves at high speed. At one point a life jacket flew out of the back and Tony never even noticed. When we got to manta road, I hurried into the water, worried that if I hesitated that my conscience wouldn’t let me do another dive with him. I had my gear on, floating in the water, when I noticed a black mass with a 7 foot wingspan soaring by about 40 feet below me. I told Tony to hurry please, we’re missing the show, but he couldn’t find his mask. Apparently it had blown off the boat with the jacket. He looked over the side at me and said, “well… why don’t you just go ahead.” Uh…. What? “…I’m… I’m not doing the dive alone.” He said “What are you scared? Ha ha ha ha.” I didn’t say anything. Instead I sat there floating, angrily imagining driving back in his boat at breakneck speed without diving while the mantas laughed at me from below. I waited. He finally found a spare. We descended. At a 7 foot wingspan, the midsized manta did a flyby from about 5 feet away from me. I was humbled. It is now my goal to see a full sized adult before I leave the RMI.
Thursday, my Gugeegue friends and I took a tour with the Village to see the Nan Madol ruins. It is a man-made archipelago built on a coral reef from about 500-1500AD. Each island served a difference purpose, and all of them were connect by canoe-accessible canals, making it the “Venice of the Pacific.” The coolest island was, of course, the king’s, where huge boulders of basalt had been cut out of a nearby mountain and piled on top of each other to create walls, tombs, and a meditation chamber. No one knows how the boulders were transported to the islands… some weigh over a ton, and there’s no evidence of any kind of tool being used. Island legend tells of levitation powers. At the end of the tour, I went back to the Village. My friends and I played scrabble on the outermost deck of the restaurant while watching the sunset on Sokehs Rock before ordering dinner.
Friday was scuba day number 2. This time Tony was two hours late, but he gave me a free polo to make up for it. While I knew that I was lucky to be alive after a first day of diving, he was my only connection, and I had conceded that scubadiving in Micronesia might not be such a bad way to go. He took me to a site called Black Coral, which during March is a Grouper sanctuary. When we got in, at about 70 feet you could see all of the 2-3 feet long groupers fighting over spawning territory at the bottom. It was like Planet Earth. The highlight of the trip, however, was seeing 3 rather large Gray Reef Sharks cruise by us in formation. Seeing a small white tip or black tip is pretty much guaranteed on every dive, but these Grays were a special treat. While Tony estimated them to be at about 9 feet, I guessed somewhere from 6 – 8 feet. They were not interested in us, and simply continued cruising in formation. Sharks are not aggressive. Unless you are chumming or carrying around a bloody fish in your hand, you are not likely to get noticed unless it’s a tiger shark, whom I would not be opposed to eradicating from the worlds’ oceans.
Saturday was Sokehs Rock climbing time. Sokehs Ridge is a fairly easy climb that can actually be driven most of the way, providing a good view of a massive rock between it and the ocean. The Sokehs Rock hike puts you on top of that massive rock, and is perilously dangerous. At one point in the hike I used a hanging vine to traverse a gully. At another point I was clinging to a rusting metal electrical pipe (that was once used to bring power to an antennae at the top of the rock) while trying to find a foothold on a 75 degree rock face. When we got to the top, two weary endemic owls flew off the edge. If you google pictures of Sokehs, imagine me standing on top of the huge rock.
On Sunday, a few WorldTeachers went to the south end of the island (about 45 minutes in the car) to try hiking the legendary six waterfalls. Our guide (one of the teacher’s students) wasn’t there, but we wandered around the tiny rural area until we ran into his brother and a friend, who took us. I didn’t know that places like that actually existed. All of the waterfalls looked fake, like they were CGI’d into fantasy movies. For the last one, the grand finale, we swam through an 8 foot wide and 30 yard long canal of unknown depth, with towering sheets of flat rock rising up on either side of us, in the middle of the jungle, and finally ended up in a pool fed by water coming down 20 feet from a huge heart shaped hole in a rock. It was a great way to end the trip.
