story@calma.UUCP (Glen Story) (03/02/86)
The following is a journal I kept on a dive trip through Micronesia last autumn: Tuesday, October 16: Yesterday we returned from Okinawa to Tokyo. Today we left Japan. It's hard to believe that after two years, we have finally left it behind. We are now on our way to Truk, with intermediate stops in Saipan and Guam. Our travels in Japan were for sight-seeing. Our travels in Truk and Pohnipei (our next stop) are mostly for lie-on-the-beach vacation, or in my case for scuba diving. Evening: We have now arrived in Truk. The airport, and the island in general are more primitive than I imagined. For example they just backed a pickup truck to a long low table and unloaded baggage--no revolving conveyers. The terminal building is so small I had trouble spotting it when we got off the plane. Mind you, I'm not complaining: I find it fascinating to visit places like this. Anyway, the hotel is fairly nice: we have an air-conditioned room and the restaurant seems decent. [After staying at the Village in Pohnipei, the hotel and restaurant in Truk won't seem so great.] It would appear that almost everyone here is here to dive. But there is no obvious way to set up diving trips. So I asked at the front desk and he called someone on the phone, and after talking with him for a few minutes in the local language, he passed the phone to me. I set up for his "boy" (probably the owner's son) to meet me at the hotel tomorrow at "8 or 8:30"-- time doesn't seem terribly important here. It is so dark here that I cannot tell any details of what surrounds our hotel. All I an make out are some palm trees around us. (We saw coconut palms and banana trees on the road from the airport.) Wednesday, October 16: Today I went diving. I ended up going with a group of Americans from Guam. I found out when I got to the dock that they don't supply lunch, as I had thought, so I ended up with no lunch. In the morning we dived down to the wreck of the Shinkoku Maru, a Japanese tanker sunk by an American air raid in 1944. Truk used to be the largest Japanese naval base in the Pacific, protected from both the weather and sea attack by the 40-mile diameter coral atoll that surrounds it. But the atoll is no defense against air attack, and the Americans, in a wave of air raids, turned the Japanese naval base into an undersea junkyard, with some 60 ships on the bottom. For the marine life here, these ships have been a real boon. Coral, and many other kinds of marine life cannot grow in sand such as what is found on the floor of lagoons like Truk. Now, the sunk ships and airplanes form a substrate upon which coral and other marine life can grow. Thus, diving here among these wrecks presents two equally fasci- nating subjects for divers to observe and photograph: the remains of the sunken ships and the amazingly abundant life that is now growing on them. In the afternoon we dove on the Heien Maru. This ship is lying on its side. The side of the hull which now faces up is free of coral but there are a few strange growths here and there. How- ever it is clear enough that I could easily see the name of the ship on the bow, written in both Roman characters and kanji. When I swam down the now nearly-vertical top deck, I saw a profusion of life: hard and soft corals, tube sponges, and myriads of fish feeding on the coral. At one point I spotted a shark about five feet long swimming around thirty feet away. A more pervasive, although minor, danger are jellyfish. I saw hundreds of them while snorkeling between dives. They are a lovely shade of pink, and so graceful as they undulate through the water, but they sting when their tendrils touch you. (Our guide got stung on one of the dives: he wasn't wearing any covering on his arms, and brushed up against one while we were on the surface preparing to descend; he cursed, rubbed his arm and went back to work--so the sting isn't too bad. Another danger I'm told is here, although I haven't seen any, are poisonous lion fish. We came back early from our second dive in order to be ready for a night dive. But the wind came up and the sea became rough, so the boat operator doesn't want to go out. There are some shallow places which could be treacherous to boats on rough seas at night. Friday, October 18: Yesterday we made two more wreck dives, to the Rippo Maru in the morning and the Fujikawa Maru in the afternoon. There were just three of us: myself, one other American, and the native guide. I liked this much more than going with the group--I could follow the guide around and he showed us lots of interesting things on the sunken ships: old sake bottles, a Japanese-style bathroom, and even some human bones. This morning I made one more dive with the guy I dived with yesterday. (I found out he lives only a few miles from where I live in California, so we exchanged addresses. He has an underwater camera, and took several pictures of me, which he said he would give me--I can hardly wait to see them!) After the one dive we went back to the hotel to let the other guy off, and pick up two new people. It was too soon for me to make a second dive, so I stayed on the boat while the other two made a dive. We then went to the island of Deblon (one of the islands in the Truk lagoon). Deblon seemed more primitive than the island we're staying on (which is called Moen). We saw only dirt roads, and no electricity. Children run around naked under the coconut trees, and every family seems to own a few chickens, a pig, and a dog. (We asked our diving guide if he owned a pig, and he said "of course" as if to add, "doesn't everyone?") After lunch we went to the Hencho Maru. Saturday, October 19: We are now sitting in what passes for the Truk airport. It consists of one check-in counter, which is in a small shed. The "waiting room" is outside with a few concrete benches and a wooden roof. The roof keeps the sun off and the lack of walls lets the sea breeze through. It looks strange to our "civilized" eyes--but it makes sense in this hot tropical climate. In about an hour the plane will be here to take us to Pohnipei. Someone is playing the local radio station--a Christian station. The schools on the island are also run by various churches. I saw Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses. Thus, the missionaries are still here in Micronesia. (So far as I know, none of them has been eaten lately.) :-) Evening: We are now in the Village Hotel in Pohnipei. Truk was your typical pacific island, with coconut palms and banana trees. Pohnipei, is your typical jungle, with dense undergrowth, vines on most trees, plants with huge leaves, etc. I understand it rains 400 inches a year on some parts of Pohnipei, which certainly qualifies it as a rain forest. The airport is similar to that in Truk: small, primitive, mostly outdoors. We were met by someone from the hotel and began the drive on a good asphalt road. The buildings along the way looked less primitive than those in Truk. The gas station, for example, actually has pumps. (The gas station in Truk, in contrast, was a tin-roofed shack, indistinguishable from the other shacks around it, except for a hand-lettered sign: "Gas Sta. -- No Smoking".) After a while we left the paved road and continued up a poor dirt road. Then we reached a narrow one-lane dirt road marked with a sign, "Village Hotel". After a short climb we arrived. It looks for all the world like its namesake: what we saw was a series of grass huts. We are now staying in one of those huts. Outside, the walls are made of wood and the windows have no glass, only screens. Inside, there is a comfortable rattan couch and chair, a modern bathroom with hot and cold running water, and two double beds--*water*beds no less! The main building is reached by walking down a path through the jungle. That building is longer than ours of course, and also more open. There one finds the check-in desk, a bar and restau- rant. These are covered by a wooden roof, but are open to the breezes. One can eat dinner while being cooled by the tropical winds and while enjoying a breathtaking view looking down onto the sea some distance below; beyond that, other islands, and beyond that, the sun setting through the towering cumulous clouds one finds around Pacific islands. The food was superb. I had sashimi made from locally caught fish, and sweet and sour chicken. Delicious! Now we're back in our room. It has started raining very hard; the sound is so loud on our grass roof that I can't hear the conversation a few feet away between my wife and daughter. Tomorrow, I am told, there will be no diving--it's Sunday. So I plan to explore the many paths leading in various directions. Monday, October 21: Yesterday we explored around the hotel, and otherwise did nothing. It was great. Today I went diving--in the rain. We went out to the reef. The coral was spectacular and there were lots of colorful fish. Between dives, we went to one of the small outlying islands. We found a World War II Japanese seaplane base. The hanger had been hit by two U.S. bombs, and all that remains today is the twisted wreckage of the frame. It is almost completely hidden by the growth of vegetation. After lunch we made another reef dive, this time on a channel opening in the reef. The boat went to the outside of the opening and let us off. We then floated on the current caused by the incoming tide. It was like riding on one of those moving sidewalks they have at airports, only three dimensional. When the current stopped we looked up, and there was our boat, anchored and waiting for us at the inner end of the channel. If we weren't wet already, the pouring rain would have drenched us coming in. The rain really doesn't spoil the diving--out on the reef there is no mud to run off and lower visibility. The cloudiness cuts down on the colors (although that's hard to believe, considering how colorful the marine life was today)! But it also keeps us from being "cooked" by the sun while in the boat. If the weather is poor again tomorrow, I plan to go diving again. However, if it's sunny, I plan to go on a tour of the island. Tuesday, October 22: We did indeed take the boat tour today. First we went to a small islet in the lagoon. I went snorkeling and my daughter swam around with me. Then we anchored our boat on the main island and hiked inland to a spectacular waterfall where we swam and ate lunch. Then back to the boat which took us to the ruins of Nan Madol, an ancient city of unknown origin, constructed of immense stones and containing a number of canals. Between poking around the ruins and hiking through the jungle to the waterfall we felt like real explorers. Thursday, October 24: We are now on our way from Pohnipei to Honolulu. Since we will only spend on a day there (to break up the flight), our trip is now all but over. Yesterday at breakfast we were told that the Pohnipein Cultural Center would be putting on one of their irregularly scheduled shows. So I ended up going to that instead of diving. The show consisted of native singing and dancing (yes! naked native danc- ing girls!) and sampling the local recreational drug, called sakao: it looks like mucus and tastes like mud; it makes your lips tingle. They also demonstrated how they can make fire without matches. Originally they wanted to charge me $100 to video tape the show, since the only video equipment they had seen before was professional equipment from Japanese television sta- tions. The guy from the hotel argued first in English and then in Japanese and talked them out of it. I never figured out why "It's home video" didn't convince them, but "Home video desu" did. Anyway, they finally said "daijobu". (Japanese fluency is very common here, since this island was under Japanese control for several years from World War I through the end of World War II.) Since I missed going diving in the daytime. I arranged to go night diving. It was spectacular. And it was amazing how the guide could navigate through shallow water of the lagoon at night, using only a diving light for illumination. Today I couldn't go diving because I'm flying tonight. So my daughter and I went out snorkeling. In the morning we joined a couple from Hong Kong who were taking the same tour we had taken two days ago. The hotel loaned my daughter a child's swim mask and she and I swam around the boat looking down at all the fish and coral. She was thrilled. In the afternoon they dropped us on a small island and took the other couple off to the rest of the tour. Meanwhile we waded out into a small sandy bay. The water was even warmer than usual--downright hot. At first we didn't see much life underwater, except an incredible number of sea slugs. When we got out to deeper water (about 10 feet) I saw several large manta rays. There was one who appeared to be asleep on the bottom that was about 8 feet long. So now we're enroute to Honolulu--the end of one of the most exciting trips I have ever made.