Going into the forest is always very fun for me, and yet we've only ventured into it a handful of times. In Pohnpei the thick jungle is never far away. It is so thick that after a dozen steps into it you are surrounded by the canopy and have left 'civilization' behind. Also after a dozen steps you have walked through a river or ankle deep mud and at every turn you are reminded that this is a rain forest. Hence the soggy feet. On this trip we were introduced to a new insect, the aptly named "Biting Miges". These flying bugs are smaller than a gnat and fly very slow. The problem is not their size but their number. You do not hit one mige. You do not slap at a few miges. Rather, you wipe a swarm of miges off of whatever exposed skin their attacking. I would often refer to them as "those $@%# Midgits!". This combined with the soggy feet, helps answer the question of why we've only ventured into the forest a handful of times.
We met the midgits on our first break. During that break I also discovered that a machete that Don had given me to carry had fallen our of my pack. I ran back down the trail to find it but gave up soon after I discovered that I wasn't sure I was still on the trail. Not only that but I wasn't sure where the trail was. I took this time to orient myself and noticed that the jungle floor is relatively sparse. I say relatively because if you were to park you car and not move it for a month you'd need a machete to find it. The sparse jungle floor, I would hypothesize, is due to the complete cover by the above canopy. This canopy is so thick that it is hard to tell what the weather is like. Several times when I would try to take a picture I needed to use a flash even though it seemed sunny. One other interesting effect is that you can't really tell if it's raining. Sometimes you'll think it's not raining only to find out that it is when you are not under the canopy. Other times it would seem to be raining on us and we'd find out that the canopy was just shedding the water of an earlier rain on us.
One of the times we were not under the forest canopy was when we were on top of Nanluad, this is officially the highest point on Pohnpei at 771 meters. There have been reports that another peak is actually 790 meters. Everything above around 200 meters on Pohnpei is engulfed in clouds. Above 500 meters is called the cloud forest. Visibility drops, and the vegetation changes substationally. There is a fine green moss that grows on virtually everything and there are 2 dozen or more species of spiders that are found nowhere else in the world, even the lower elevations of Pohnpei. Here is a view from the top...
We had lunch on top of Nanluad and Oliver seemed enjoy this part of the hike the best. Megan and I don't feed him from our hands but we made an exception and our hiking partners joined in. Oliver got along very well on the hike. He positioned himself very close to my heels, close enough that he was kicked in the face on more than one occasion. Once and awhile he'd venture off for no apparent reason and return after a few minutes. We reasoned that he needed to burn off some steam either from being kicked in the face or from going a snail like pace for too long. On our second day we found out that there might be a little bit more method to his madness. After he'd been gone for a time period we arbitrarily thought was too long I called him and he promptly returned. He had a gift. Seems to me that he felt he needed to contribute more to our pack's nourishment so he found a baby chick, in the middle of the forest, and brought it to us. After I put the ailing chick, one of God's cutest creatures, out of it's misery Don mentioned that it probably didn't belong to anyone and that he'd seen quite a few wild chickens in the forest.
We spent our only night out under a large rock, dubbed "The Rock Shelter". Sleeping here made for lighter loads to carry but as it turns out Biting Miges don't take the night off from biting. We wished we would have carried the tent. The night was miserable. Megan and I slept next to each other on top of a dozen palm leaves and a poncho and underneath an emergency blanket. We wore sock and long sleeves and I even pulled my sleeves down to cover my hands. This left only my face exposed. At at unknown time in the night I got out my tshirt and wrapped it around my head. I tried to position it so only my nose was exposed. For the duration of the night I was wiping miges off of my face and trying to find the perfect position for my shirt. Needless to say morning could not have come fast enough. Here is a pic of Dennis trying to get a GPS reading under the rock shelter...
For most of the second day we hiked next to a small river. I've always liked hiking next to running water. The air is seems very pure when you breath it in. And it a tropical rain forest it's nice to be able to splash some water and keep cool. Right before lunch time we took a break at right next to river and above a waterfall. For the first time that day we basked in some sunlight next to a beautiful stream...
Here is our family portrait next to the river (notice Oliver did not want to be part of it)...
At our lunch spot we walked by another, smaller rock shelter. The bats that called this rock home swarmed above us for nearly our entire lunch break. I tried to catch one on camera but the light was to dark to get anything better than this...
We came out of the jungle around 1600 and walked into the middle of a family gathering. One of the kids was a student of Megan's. They offered us a ride to Kolonia if we'd put some gas in their tank and happily accepted. The road that took us to the main road required a 4WD vehicle. Once I got home home I happily removed my shoes to reveal a large stump of a foot that resembled an albino raisen. Well, I did hike for two days in a rain forest.
View Larger Map
No comments:
Post a Comment