Lost World of Pohnpei: Part II

When we last left our heroine, she was desperately ill, tossing to and fro in the night, wracked with chills but burning to the touch with a 103-degree fever. OK, that sounds dramatic, but it really was pretty awful. Not as awful, actually, as the food poisoning I had yesterday; I'll take a fever over stomach pains any day.

The next morning, Thursday, I still felt horrible, and we went to go find some acetaminophen. If the medicine worked and we felt good about it, then we would go on The Village tour of Nan Madol. If not, we would go home and I would spend the day in bed. The tour that The Village Hotel provides, by the way, did NOT include driving for an hour and a half and then down those awful back roads, like I did the day before (see here for Part I). A guide would take us via boat, not vehicle, to Nan Madol, and there would be no wading in waters fraught with sharks and Portuguese Man o' War siphonophores. Of course, Andrew still got stung . . .

But, not getting ahead of myself, that morning we went to Genesis, a very pinkly painted hospital run by Filipinos, which is a functioning hospital that I would have admitted myself to if I had gotten worse. The Pohnpei hospital, I heard, was . . . out of commission since its roof had caved in. There Andrew found some acetaminophen and my fever started dropping rapidly. The guide said that we were in no hurry, since it was only going to be our family on the tour (which we had already paid for the day before) and so I waited to feel better. Andrew was weirdly inspired to bring a thermometer on our trip, and we watched in astonishment as my fever plummeted over the next hour. I started sweating like you wouldn't believe, beyond the normal sweating that a jungle island causes. The fever was broken! My raging headache subsided, too, and we felt good about going on to Nan Madol.

 Maxwell obliged us with a nap while Andrew snorkled with our guide, Jay. Since there weren't very many mantas out where they normally find them (too bad), I decided to stay in the boat and rest. I also got a remarkable sun burn.

 A fish I've never seen in Majuro. We love our underwater camera.

 Andrew did see one manta ray as it was gliding away. The guide had taken us to a channel where they normally pass through, but, maybe because it was January, they weren't there. Later we found out that packs of Portuguese Man 'o Wars also go through that channel. In January.

We stopped for lunch on this crazy island that was dredged so that boats could pass over the reef. Vegetation that grows on these islands is just remarkable.

My little boy on an outer island of a jungly island in the middle of the North Pacific. I can't tell you, growing up in the desert state of Utah, how utterly different my life is now.

Rickety shelter for when it rains, which it did a little.

Lunch consisted of some nice sandwiches and a traditional Pohnpeian meal: rice, fish, sausage, egg, a few vegetables, all wrapped in a banana leaf. It was really, really good.

A starfish I found near the shore.

 One of the places that potentially might have been a quarry site for at least some of the basalt of Nan Madol. The islanders still believe that the massively heavy basalt columns were transported via levitation from some place to the west.

 Before we went to Nan Madol, however, there was one last stop; the Keprohi waterfall. I would have liked to hike to some other waterfalls, but given my sickness, I'm grateful that I even got to see one. We paid the landowners for trespassing and walked into this paradise-like jungle.

On our way to dock the boat, Andrew stuck his hand in the water. BIG MISTAKE. He got stung by some jellyfish on the inside of his forearm, which elicited some horror stories from Jay. It wasn't a Portuguese Man o' War, thankfully, but Jay said that you can see herds (flocks? packs? deathtraps?) of them floating by in the water when it's windy. He's been stung by Portuguese Man o' Wars a few times, and he says it hurts terribly. Their tentacles wrap around your arm and leave angry red scars. Islands pour gas on the stings, which cools it off temporarily, but then they grind waini, older brown coconuts, and squeeze the meat to get the coconut oil for the wounds. Then, he said, you have to make sure that you go to the hospital for an infection shot.

Good to know.

Box jellyfish are the worst, he says, because they're translucent and you can't see that you're swimming into them.

Really glad I didn't go snorkeling! I hate jellyfish! We embarked and started hiking without further incident, however, and Andrew was fine.

These are plants that are sold as plastic floral arrangements! I found that very funny. Here are the real ones. They still look fake.

The falls were . . . unreal in their realness.

 While we splashed around, I noticed Jay preparing a betel nut for consumption. I asked him how he did it: you climb up a betel nut tree (there were some on either side of the path on our way up to the waterfall) to get a green nut, then you split it open, pour lime powder into it, smash a cigarette in it, close it, and pop the whole thing in your mouth to chew. Jay's teeth were a pinkish red with deep grooves. Betel nut is known to be a carcinogenic (apart from the addition of the tobacco!), as well as lesions and other things. Jay said it gives you a high for about three seconds. I think I'll pass, seeing these images.

 I couldn't get enough of mangroves growing out of the salt water. Phenomenal.

 Entering Nan Madol.

Nan Madol is a series of 98 islands, our guide said, separated by canals. Nan Madol means "spaces in between," which I think is really, really cool. These human-constructed islands on the reef of Pohnpei was in honor of dynasty royalty that controlled Pohnpei around AD 1100. Two brothers, "Oleseepa" and "Olesoapa," as I phonetically spell them, came from the west and ruled the island. After that, our guide said, there were 12 bad leaders who like to eat human flesh and the dynasty decayed after that, leaving these astonishing basalt islands. There are millions of these columns, and it's still a big mystery as to how they came there.

 Nan Madol is well preserved since most of the islanders believe that it is still haunted. As proof, Jay cited the fact that both the Japanese and the German archaeologists who studied Nan Madol died after they were done, and another group that had come to disprove that it was haunted had a member of their party die as well.

 The construction of the central temple walls are fascinating in that the builders stuffed coral in between the rocks as fillers. Coral shrinks over time, and the way they built the walls made the rocks lean in on themselves, causing the structure to be even stronger. It is very well preserved and would be totally roped off to tampering tourists in most other places in the world. Why does nobody know about this? It ranks with Easter Island and the Great Pyramids in its structural achievement. I'm curious as to why tourists don't flock to Pohnpei, and the only reason I can think of is that it is so far away from mainland life and notice (that, and the attending tropical diseases that some poor saps get, ahem) that most people never consider Pohnpei on their tourist destination radar.

 Central burial chamber within the temple.

 Inside the burial chamber.

 There are two other burial chambers on either side of the main enclosed area—the place is shaped like concentric squares. Behind the central burial area was this chamber in the ground—four feet down and six feet deep. Jay didn't know if it was for meditation or acted like a jail, but the basalt column (at the top of the image, center) could be rolled into the opening and fit very nicely there. He said that on Pohnpei some believe that you can't meditate in the presence of others because your magic conflicts with theirs and causes a power struggle. Good to have some alone time, then.

 Some parts have fallen down. It would take a lot of effort for humans to destroy the walls, though. The columns are really heavy.

Path along the outer wall. It was so beautiful, all of it.

 My recently de-fevered self.

 At the entrance of the temple.

 Women who came to collect our $3 each (although Max was only a $1.50). I would gladly pay a lot more than that to see what I saw (The Village tour itself was $150 for the three of us, including lunch—a steal of a deal considering how long we were out and all that we did).

On the way back Jay showed us one of the entrances; invaders of Nan Madol could not see the underwater wall that blocked off most of the water path coming in—Jay had learned from other guides where it was safe to cross. He said that sharks—mostly black tip—would swim in the canals and the people would jump in with them to prove their bravery. He said he still sees sharks swimming in "the spaces in between."

Returning home, seeing the sun behind the mountains. So happy that I got to go.

 Leaving Pohnpei . . .

 . . . and its mysteries. And that, my friends, is the story of one of the coolest and wildest trips I have ever taken in my entire life.