27th February 2007

Hello dear friends,

A few weeks have slipped by unnoticed, and now we enter our 8th week in Pohnpei. The distractions have been wonderful, and the island is now our home. It has been weeks since I have had to make a U-turn after missing our driveway, which at first sight was a nosebleed inducing goat track lurking behind an impenetrable wall of green. Now I approach it with some of the same vigour as the taxi drivers. (I will need years of practise, opaque mirrored tinting on the windscreen, a neuron frying amount of sakau and 24/7 subwoofer powered doof music to approach their mastery of the kamikaze taxi ride from hell though).

The week begins with another cataclysmic collision between our stationary island and the streaming Pacific rain clouds. I have never seen rain like this. For four days the sky has been dark and the rain nearly constant, cycling between moderate drizzle and ferocious deluge. Thursday night just got wetter and wetter, and the roar of the rain on the banana leaves, tin roof of our patio, and miscellaneous noisy when rained on things completely filled our little concrete echo chamber house. There was no point trying to play music, and it was almost too loud to read. Others who have been to the tropics will know this as common, but I find it incredible. For added effect, a banana plant has been blown over to lean against our bedroom wall, the kettledrum-like leaves especially placed under the dripping roof edge.

I am minding the house for a few weeks whilst Jo is travelling to Fiji for work and to Australia for a family visit. For those in Oz, she will arrive in Sydney on the 1st March, and will travel to Canberra and perhaps Melbourne before arriving back in Pohnpei on the 9th March. She will have my Australian phone number, 0402 836 726. Jo’s grandmother sadly passed away a week ago, and thankfully her trip is able to incorporate time in Australia.

Adventures? Tales of mystery and exploration? Some. Lying around? Soaking up the sun? Absolutely. Gin and tonics while watching the best surfers in the world? Almost.

There are few walking trails here which are easily navigated (that I have discovered anyway) without a guide. There is a good walk to the top of Sokehs Ridge which we cover a few times a week to keep body and soul in order, with a good steep bit and magnificent views from the top. I have walked from Kolonia to our house a few times, which is 6km but not particularly exciting. The yappy dogs and fragrant pig sheds add interest, and the taxi drivers keep your senses alert. Rumour (and some hard evidence) exists of a walk, ‘The Six Waterfalls Walk’, which has sparked interest. It apparently involves just a day walk to the central area of the island, visiting the waterfalls of which the title speaks. I have met several people who have completed it, some more than once. I am interested in challenging walks, but I have rarely seen the consistent look of terror remembered when I ask about this one. I wonder…

To have a small taste of what might be involved, I walked Nett Ridge last week, with our neighbour and some friends. It is (as is most of the island) on private land so required 3 machete wielding guides. I was initially a bit annoyed as we were paying each of them, however their trail blazing was pretty helpful , and the quiet one risked his neck climbing a coconut tree hanging over a precipitous drop for fresh coconut juice for all of us. Yum. The view at the top was great, as the entire ridgeline at one end has only a low (well waist high) grass growing on it, so none of those pesky tropical trees get in the way. I don’t think it is a natural clearing, as there are a lot of old WW2 trenches and the like on the way up the ridge, and the Japanese were known to plant rice paddies around the place whilst they were occupying the island. No sign of the paddies, but I think that might explain it.

I was interested to learn (elsewhere, this wasn’t really a botanical eco-tour) that each coconut on each tree requires in the order of 100 litres of water a day to grow. I have heard that on Kosrae, the next FSM island to the east, coconut water is the preferred liquid, and when the fresh water supply has run out in the past, no great discomfort was felt as there were adequate coconuts to use. Coconut trees are the traditional provider of a large number of useful products, fibre for weaving and braiding from the husk, leaves for thatching, shells for making those coconut bras, and the products of the flesh of the nut, which ranges from a gelatinous goop to a hard waxy block depending on the age of the coconut. The milk is also extracted from the flesh, but the only place I have seen it here is in the supermarkets, having been made a million miles away.

There is an industry recently started which processes coconut oil for use as a diesel alternative. A lot of the diesel cars here run exclusively on pure coconut oil, and I have been told there is no noticeable difference to performance or engine longevity. The oil costs 25% less than diesel, and apparently at the low speeds which are inevitably travelled around the island, economy is better than diesel. The oil has a lower octane rating however, so I expect economy may suffer at higher speeds (?) .You know when you are driving behind a car using coconut oil as there is a distinctive candle-waxy smell, and no belching black smoke. Not many places are able to use pure coconut oil, as it solidifies at any temperature much lower than the tropics. Blends of varying proportions with diesel are used elsewhere to keep it liquid. The oil is farmed and refined on the outer islands, and is potentially a valuable cash commodity for them. I do worry however that water and other resources may be diverted away from other food crops.

The power company apparently is looking at converting one of their diesel generators to use the oil. They are the only source of power on the island, and there is a steady creep upwards in the cost of electricity as the fuel costs increase. We prepay for power, and have a small electronic meter which is recharged and keeps track of your usage. The little red blinking kWh meter light is a good reminder of your money floating away. It is really quite confronting to face the real cost of your power usage. Just leaving the airconditioner on overnight costs more than $2 in power. We have to use it however, as the petri dish which is the tropics has spilled into our wardrobe and almost claimed a mouldy victory. Averted just in time, it would be much more expensive to replace all our clothing and linen. The energy saving light bulbs we bought have already paid for themselves. Apart from that the only power we use is the fridge and hot water, which still costs about $20 a week.

I asked a guy I met who works for the power company about other power options, and he just said there weren’t any (he seemed a bit disenchanted, but knowledge able so I decided to believe him, with room for being persuaded otherwise). They have a hydroelectric plant here, but as there are no reservoirs, the flow is very erratic depending on the immediate rainfall and apparently next to useless. Wind power is equally unreliable, as the winds are not really trade winds and we are actually technically in the doldrums. There seems to be very little use of solar power, and I think the regularly overcast days may reduce the efficiency. I am surprised. I wonder if sacrificing some of the land for a reservoir would have a positive net outcome, reducing the need for burning fuels for power? It would also help with the water supply, which again is dependent entirely on river flow. The rivers look pretty full to me, but I have been told that there can be quite dramatic shortages and the storage capacity is very low. It seems that until recently most residences harvested their own rainwater, but this seems to have been neglected since mains water has been made available. Most of the government or NGO owned expat houses have tanks (the Australian navy residential compound has its own water treatment setup), ours has an old decrepit unplumbed one, and they are otherwise dysfunctional or non-existent. Another problem which exacerbates the (until last week anyway) unseasonably dry el-nino affected weather and subsequent drop in river levels, is the recent increase in forest clearing in the watershed of the central mountains for sakau and other non-rainforest plantings. The natural action of water storage which the spongelike rainforest performs is being disrupted, and the water is dispersing much more quickly than usual. The local newspaper reported last week on the complete drying up of an apparently historic river for the first time in living memory. The cause is unclear, with recent land clearing and a new subterranean well nearby being the prime suspects. It seems extraordinary to me that a place which has up to 10,000mm of rain a year would need to contemplate water shortages and dry rivers, but the infrastructure does not exist to deal with, and the landscape is vulnerable to any change in the cycle of constant replenishing rainfall. The skies have come crashing to earth again just now, I can hardly hear the tapping of the keyboard, so thankfully water shortages are temporarily averted.

We had a great trip to Nahlap again with our neighbour, Alison and her two energetic kids Anya and Sarah. The weather was a lot less windy than the first time we went, so the hammock swinging was much more pleasant. I got a good case of sunburnt feet, right where my flippers rubbed the sunscreen off. I have become very good with sunscreen application (ha! I can hear Jo saying), even though I find the sensation of rubbing greasy whale fat sunscreen all over me pretty disgusting. Jo is endlessly exasperated with my whingeing, but I am slowly starting to learn my lesson. The sun here is fierce, and any missed bits are quickly punished.

Alison and David are our neighbours across the road, and their house is directly on the water. They have very generously allowed us to use their kayaks, and we have had a good paddle around the area. There are several islands within the lagoon which beckon, and hopefully we will paddle there soon for picnicking and snorkelling. Timing is important, as the tide sometimes exposes about 500m of mudflats when it is low. It looks like a long disgusting walk to drag the kayaks to the channel. There is coral just beyond the channel, which means easy snorkelling virtually at our doorstep.

We also spent the next day on the water, this time with our other (slightly further away) neighbours, Eileen and Simon. They have a boat, so we went for a day boating. Several hours were spent snorkelling at Manta Road, but again no Manta’s. Fantastic coral and a billion fish, completely unafraid and happy to just potter around right next to you. Very cool. What was also cool, and lots of other things as well, was the shark which also decided that it would just potter around me. It wasn’t exactly within arms reach, but it was less than 10 meters away and longer than me. I have no idea which sharks you are supposed to be concerned about, but as it was the first one I have ever seen in the wild I decided not to try and make friends with it. The well known profile and lithe movement causes a deep automatic sense of foreboding, tempered by the knowledge that the sharks on the reef aren’t particularly interested in you. I gasped a little and missed a few heartbeats when I first saw it, but it really just went about its business and swam away a few minutes later.

The next venue for the day was Palikir Pass, where we hoped to see Kelly Slater surfing (the Pohnpei grapevine had reported he was on the island). A great boat trip across the north of the lagoon, past the anchored international tuna fleet, the airport runway island and Sokehs Rock brought us to the mooring. The surf spot is several kilometres from the shore, created by a break in the fringing reef. There are buoys (say boowee like they do here and try not to laugh, I can’t) to tie your boat to, and the break peels off the end of the reef just a few hundred metres away. We were there for an unusually high tide, and as such the waves were smaller than usual (about 1 meter) and no tubes were forming. I have seen many photos of tubes here with surfers in them, standing upright with plenty of space to spare. Whilst small, the waves were perfectly formed and I looked on longingly. It was only the reef a few centimetres below the breaking waves which stopped me from jumping in for a bodysurf. Kelly Slater was nowhere to be seen, but there was a guy named Dennis surfing there so we watched him and drank very good gin and tonics. After a while the tide began to turn, our journey home through the mangroves required high water, so we left and ended a great day on the balcony watching the sun set over the ocean.

We are happy and healthy, settled into our house and work well. Jo is enjoying her work, and I am starting my online masters in toxicology today. I expect it will eat into hammock swinging time, but there is a lot of that to go around.

We hope you are all well, you are missed greatly and thought of often. (really. the group email thing is kind of impersonal I know, but reading my address book brings a smile each time I send them ).

Ben and Jo (in absentia)