Okay, we still haven’t made it to posting about our surf trip to Pohnpei in October. This will be the fourth installment of our week-long trip to Pohnpei back in July.
Yeah, I know. I have been terrible about keeping up, but there was a lot of pretty cool stuff in Pohnpei.
We took a really long hike through the jungle, again in the pouring rain, to get up in the mountains and listen to the birds and see, well… trees.
When you spend enough time on Kwajalein, you forget about these basic things. The highest point on the island is six feet above sea level, so you can see clearly from one end of the island to the other in any direction. There are only three types of birds that live there and they are not very musically inclined (they make more of a screaming type of sound reminiscent of a scared nun). There are only about six different types of green things growing there. Not much else can make it there. It’s a tough environment.
You get to missing hills and trees.
So we went to Pohnpei and took a long hike (actually quite a few long hikes). And it rained. A lot. As a matter of fact, it rained a lot every day of the week we were there. It was good mud-squelching, slip-and-sliding falling-down muddy fun hiking. The birdsong was deafening to our Kwajalein-coddled ears. The rainforest canopy far above the trail blocked out a great deal of the sun, though, inexplicably, without blocking the slightest bit of the rain.
It was beautiful.
At the end of the hike, probably the last two hundred yards of the trail, the rain stopped and the sun came out with a worthy effort to make up for abandoning us all day in the jungle.
The last bit of trail was overrun with wild, flowering plants.
I don’t know any of the names (and I don’t believe that my enjoyment is any the less for my ignorance), but here they are.
The light was really pretty, and they were all so alive.
And there is Tam, being silly with a stick.
I think she may have gone a bit troppo out there in the jungle.
Wind, Water, Waves, Wander 