Kosrae, the Island the Internet Forgot

[Now you can click on the pictures to see bigger versions]

The view on the flight to Kosrae. The internet looks fine from up here!

At 8 cents per megabyte, internet on Kosrae would be expensive except for two factors:  1) it is nearly impossible to connect, and 2) at the speed available, the 64 megabyte card they sell could last weeks.  Which matches the speed of everything else on the island, making for a very pleasant, relaxing time – unless you actually want to do something.  And if time moves slowly the rest of the week, it absolutely stops on Sunday, when the whole place shuts down for the Sabbath.

So we went to church along with everyone else.  Each village has one Congregationalist church (the main denomination here) with a few Mormon, Baptist, Seventh-day, and Catholic churches sprinkled about.  The Congregationalist churches – really church compounds – are impossibly large, easily the biggest structures on the island, and certainly the best kept.  The main building in “our” local church in Lelu had 600 seats with room to spare, with several break-out services in other buildings, in a village of maybe 1000 people.

Going to church in our Sunday Best

Following Texas Sunday tradition we went out for breakfast first, for the famous banana pancakes at the Nautilus resort, a nice change from the Malt-o-meal Cocoa Dino-bites we’d been eating for days on our porch (though it would take me much longer to tire of the sides of fresh coconut and local bananas).  Church started at 10 (“The one thing that actually starts on time on Kosrae”) and goes for precisely an hour, alternating between sermon, singing, and readings in unison, and finishing with the passing of the plate and blessing of the congregation.  Men wear business casual, though favoring muted Hawaiian shirts, and women wear loose floral print dresses, with many of the girls in white.  Genders are separated, with women on the left and men on the right, which seems designed to facilitate the singing more than to enforce any propriety.  After a few songs from the hymnal, the choirs get up to sing in a series of progressively older groups, punctuated by speeches from the two pastors.  The service closes with the elders’ choir, after which people break up for Sunday school.  The singing itself is the highlight: the hymnals show the crazy attempt to transcribe the traditional melodies into western notation, with 8/6 and other odd time signatures and a staff full of sharps and flats on every line.  While some of the melodies are vaguely familiar, the overall effect is novel, with minor chord progressions that sound like nothing so much as the Doppler shift of music from a passing car.

[One of the Lelu Choirs singing; starts after about 10 seconds]

Much of the rest of the week was spent trying to arrange to go diving.  I was under the impression that that was what people came to this island to do, and people we had met on Palau had just spent last week diving here.  The details would sound familiar to anyone who has tried to get something done in a place where everyone is very nice but no one wants to do anything – a lot of yesses followed by problems and apologies – but in the end we got to do a single dive (of the 5 we had hoped for).  Visibility was poor – for here – at 50 feet or so, but there was a ton to see, including several new fish we hadn’t seen on Palau, and Ethan’s and my dive skills have improved dramatically.  We spent much of the rest of the time snorkeling, both from boats and from shore at a place called the “Blue Hole” where ankle deep water suddenly drops off to infinity, forming a pork-chop shaped pool a couple hundred yards across.

The Blue Hole (dark area in the center of the bay)

Over the last few days, we saw cuttlefish shimmering and changing color, a turtle, small jellyfish; I swam with a ray wider than my outstretched arms, and Suzie scared herself by swimming up to a large black-tipped reef shark while she was off on her own.  Aaron found an eel that came all the way out of its hole, swam around, and went back in, and Ethan and I watched Nemo, his dad, and his pink and pastel colored friends hide among the anemones.  Despite the one-tank week, it’s hard to complain with a list like that, especially when we get back “home” and our neighbors come by to give us a home baked Kosraean banana pie (just like an apple pie, but with bananas).

White sand, blue water, great snorkeling, and fresh coconuts. What’s there to complain about?

Of course, when we first decided to come to Kosrae it was before we’d even decided to learn to dive; I chose the island largely because of what was above the surface.  So between the lazy days of island life, our too-comfortable home base with friends for the kids to play with, and our rental car which we were too lazy to return, we had all we needed to fill our time.   We spent time playing on the beaches, which had not only white sand and palm trees, but an endless supply of (dead) coral for the kids to break apart and build homes for the small crabs and other shore creatures they found (Aaron’s quote of the day: “What we really need now is a snail dungeon!”)

Stairs to Nowhere

About halfway around the island we found a long stone staircase next to someone’s house, leading up into the jungle.  A local tour guide offers, among other things, “stairs to nowhere;” this was clearly it.  They turned out to be built by the Japanese in preparation for an American attack, leading up to long-since crumbled fortifications.  The story of the Japanese conquest of these islands, and especially their later role in the pacific theater, would become far more meaningful to us when visiting the history, war, and art museums in Tokyo.  But even without context (or any meaningful understanding of history) the remains make a strong impression: Japanese cemeteries, fortifications, boat ramps, military hardware, and especially the tunnels.

Ethan holding up what remains of the Japanese fort above the stairs

For a tiny island in the middle of the pacific, there’s a surprising amount of surviving history here.  While WWII looms large, and the modern island is all but defined by the resulting decades of American stewardship, there are significant pre-historic ruins.

Indiana Jonesing around the corner of a 600 year old wall. The Kosraeans carved the basalt into hexagonal log shapes and stacked them a la Lincoln

In the center of our home-town of Lelu (“Leh-Luh” – the American who singlehandedly transcribed the local language must have had too much of the local moonshine) are the ruins of the capital, established around 1400, with streets, plazas, houses, and tombs.  This was the center of power in the pacific until contact with Europeans, from which they launched expeditionary forces to conquer other islands that are an unimaginable distance away.  Though the ruins are typically mentioned in the same sentence as Easter Island, what’s left is mostly the city walls and foundations.  The ambiance is greatly enhanced by the setting, with the jungle constantly encroaching as though you had to machete your way for miles to reach it (in reality, you just walk along the fence protecting the freezers at the back of the supermarket.)  And unlike a sterile museum or national park, the ruins are in the center of a largish village; as you walk around taking snapshots, the locals – descendants of the builders – are using the ancient paths to move around town, making it far easier to imagine the original city.

Walking across an ancient floor, past a high wall on its way back to the jungle

Returning “home” we found that the three other rooms of our once quiet motel were now packed, and a gathering of 30 people had formed outside.  It turned out that this was the week for a pacific island education conference, and the Tradewind Motel was the new home of the delegation from Pohnpei.  Pohnpeians, and others in the pacific, favor a drink called Sakau (kava), made from a root that is said to grow best on Kosrae.  Kosraeans abstain, but the visiting Pohnpeians were not going to miss an opportunity to enjoy the best right at the source.  We wandered over after dinner and were invited to join in.  “We didn’t come ask you earlier, because with sakau, everyone is always welcome, so there are no invitations.”  The ritual consists mostly of everyone sitting around in a big circle, staring into space.  Conversation is not taboo, it’s just not what people are there for.  The experience is dominated by the sound of the root being crushed: two men, each with a large stone, alternate pounding the mass of roots in a smooth rhythm, endlessly.  The base is a table-sized stone, supported by old truck wheels, with a shallow well in the center and a small channel leading off the edge to catch the extracted juice — almost identical to the 600 year-old stones we had seen in the ruins earlier that day.  The juice is available in two forms: straight from the root, passed around the group in a half coconut shell, or cut with water in a standard-issue football team sized Gatorade jug, periodically re-mixed before dispensing into one of two Styrofoam cups.  The cups are then poured, one into the other, six times before being passed around the assembly.  None of this is sacred or even really ritualized; it’s just well ingrained habit.  The drink itself is bitter and earthy, clouded with bits of pulverized root.  It’s said to be calming without any intoxicating effect.  The gathering was certainly sedate.  But I suspect that sitting in a plastic rocking chair after dinner on a warm, humid summer evening, at the edge of the pool of light from the porch lamp, while listening to the rhythmic pounding accounted for the mood at least as much as the kavalactones extracted from the roots.

Aaron tackling the climb

On our last full day on Kosrae, we decided to hike to the top of Mt. Oman, the second highest point on the island.  We were warned several times that there was no trail, that it was 1700 feet up, very steep, and that there is a nice waterfall partway up that makes and excellent consolation prize.  Mostly this was on account of the fact that we were with a 7 year old.  Our advisers were failing to account for the fact that a 7 (or 11) year old likes nothing more than climbing.  A hundred yards down a flat path and they are bored, tired, hungry, thirsty, and their feet hurt.  Scrambling straight up a mud slope, clinging to roots and pulling down rocks, and they can go all day.

And go all day we did.  Following our machete-equipped Jr. High School guides-in-

Shhhh! He thinks you can’t see him

training we walked up a steep stone path, up a switchback trail, and up an endless series of ever steeper knife-edge ridges through the jungle; crossing small streams; passing frogs, giant salamanders, moss covered vines, and strange sour cherry trees where the fruit grows straight out of the trunk; and up to a small clearing at the top, with views of most of the places we’d visited during the previous week.  The view was nice enough, but the highlights were on the way down: first exploring a few of the dozens of WWII Japanese tunnels; each far deeper than I’d ever suspect, and branching off in a maze of confusion.  Once we learned to recognize the openings, the tunnels were everywhere.  The kids loved running around getting lost and scaring themselves trying to find the way out.  For me, my stoop-induced neck ache was a reminder that I would be tall in 1940’s Japan.

Aaron entering a WWII Japanese tunnel

Suzie emerges back into the jungle

After the tunnels we went to the promised waterfall (once the “guides” managed to find it) and took a refreshing swim.  We were already completely soaked from the humidity of the jungle, so our lack of bathing suits and towels wasn’t an issue.  But daylight was (as always), especially with Aaron’s careful descent of the steep muddy slopes.  So we headed back, and were met at the bottom by Hamilson (the official guide, by virtue of the fact that the mountain is his literal backyard) who supplied us with coconuts to drink and lobster and reef fish that he had caught spear fishing the previous day.

Our own private waterfall in the jungle

And then it was time for goodbyes, and time for Tokyo!  (after 4 flights and an evening at the Guam Liberation Day carnival en route…)

Aaron helping himself to some breakfast

Who needs sand and water when there are rocks to jump on?

I’ll have the tuna sashimi again.

An evening at the Pacific Tree Lodge