4/14/2012 - Leaving Kosrae

Our friends Sarah and Craig swam out to the
boat and brought us two huge mangrove crabs.
Delicious!

It’s been two weeks and I guess we’re ready to leave…maybe.  This is on my list of top places we’ve visited and we’ve met a lot of people here…it’s kind of hard to leave.  But we know from experience, it’s best to leave while you’re still having fun. 

Ken, Emily and Sammy

We’ve met a lot of Americans (and a few Aussies).  We didn’t make any special efforts, it just seemed to happen that way.  The newest of our new friends is the local dentist.  It was that time for us…to get our teeth cleaned…and we heard there was an American dentist here.  So we went to the hospital, paid our $5 each (yes, I said $5), and got our teeth cleaned.  It turns out Ken (the dentist), is really into sailing as well.  So we invited him to see the boat (incidentally, our boat has stayed pretty darn clean here as we seem to have an enormous amount of visitors!).  He brought his two kids with him this morning and while Ken and Andy discussed boats, Jake had some additional, much needed, play time with other kids.

But as I said, it’s time to move on.  We’re heading to Pohnpei in the morning.  It’s 350 miles give or take so we should be there late this week.  The winds have been pretty variable lately but the forecast calls for them to pick up just a bit, so hopefully it holds out for us.  For any of our new friends reading this…thank you for making our stay so welcoming and fun.  We’ll miss you and hope our paths cross again someday soon.

Jake driving us back to our boat after
a nice sunset cruise with the folks from
Bully's Restaurant.

Hiking the Olum Waterfalls

While this wasn't taken on our waterfall hike,
we found it to be neat anyway...it's the
Rainbow Tree...a type of Eucalyptus.

Yesterday we were picked up by a man named Hamilson and he gave us a ride to the restaurant we were going to for lunch. We found out Hamilson is a guide here in Kosrae.  We knew he was legitimate as we had seen his brochures in several of the hotels.  So we decided to take him up on his offer to guide us to the Olum Waterfalls (for a not so small fee).

We met him this morning at the hardware store where he picked us up and drove us to his house in Malem, where the trail starts.  We met his wife, Esther who is originally from the Marshall Islands but has lived here for 35 years.

Before I get too into this, I’ll have to admit that I screwed up with the camera.  I took it…but I forgot the memory card.  I had taken it out and forgotten to put it back in.  (no way the photographer of the family could have brought his camera though, huh?) 

It started out straight up a flight of stairs naturally carved into the hill.  Then it went straight up a flight of stairs made out of roots and mud.  Then it just went straight up.  I found out exactly how out of shape I am in.  It wasn’t my legs that were hurting, it was my heart!  I was so out of breath.  But Jake wasn’t complaining and if his little legs could do it, then I could too.  We learned about many trees and nuts along the way and what their uses are…most of which I promptly forgot.  One was kind of neat though…the nut is cut open and the inside is used to patch up cracks in wooden canoes.  If you work it long enough, it gets kind of sticky and you just stick it in the cracks.  Jake wanted to collect enough of these nuts to ensure we could fix Savannah should we spring a leak.  He’s got a little of the planning gene from his mom, I can tell.

After 45 min or so, Hamilson showed us some old Japanese tunnels that were built back in WWII.  The Japanese used them for hiding out as well as storage.  He took us through a few of them and it was one of the highlights for both Jake and Andy.  I have to say I was a little creeped out.  Following the caves, we went straight to the waterfalls.  Jake swam around a good bit at the pools and eventually, I got in with him.  It was COLD…but perfect since we literally had sweat dripping off of us.  I use the term waterfall loosely here…it’s not Marquesas waterfalls, or Victoria falls…it’s more like a really nice hotel swimming pool waterfall…but beautiful just the same.

The rest of the hike was beautiful, but uneventful except for the lack of my son’s ability to stay on his feet.  I think he did a quarter of the hike on his bum.

At the bottom we were met by Esther with oranges, bananas, papaya, tangerines and drinking coconuts.  Not a bad ending to a beautiful morning. 

Hamilson and his wife have a pretty good set up going.  He does the tours while she does the hospitality.  He seems to have fun and make money at the same time.  That’s what we all wish for, right?  Anyone in Kosrae should definitely take him up on his tours.  We thought it was worth the money.

Diving in Kosrae

Our first Leaf fish

Despite the rain today, we’ve had a lot of fun.  We took a dive boat out on the reef and did a two tank dive with the Nautilus Resort.  It turned out to be quite the trip as we were the only people on the boat!  The coral here is absolutely beautiful – kind of hard to even capture in pictures – and it’s everywhere.  The fish are not huge but there are lots of them and we even saw a few things we’ve never seen before (our first leaf fish!).  We don’t splurge on this too often because it is quite pricey to go out with a charter service and when you have your own gear and even a compressor, it’s hard to make the case for it.  But we decided to go ahead and do it as our engine on our dinghy isn’t the strongest and we didn’t want to miss out on this great spot.  The icing on the cake was that they would pick us up (no lugging our crap across town) AND Jake could sit in the boat with the driver while we dove (free babysitter!).  Enjoy the pics…

The clown fish were a lot bigger here than anywhere we had seen.

These are clown fish eggs...just like Nemo!

Peacock Anenome Shrimp

Same leaf fish, different angle

Clown fish guarding their eggs

I was having a bad hair day.

Kosrae, Micronesia

The biggest banana we've ever had!  It didn't
even fit in Jake's mouth.

We made it to Kosrae in exactly four days, arriving at the harbor at 9:00am.  This was one of our better, more comfortable passages although we did run into quite a few squalls.  When we arrived, we called Marine Services on channel 16 and they arranged for Customs, Immigration, Health and Quarantine to come out to the boat.  We temporarily tied up to the concrete pier and waited in some of the hottest, muggiest weather we’ve seen in a while.  While there was a good amount of paperwork, it all proceeded pretty quickly and we were done in a matter of two hours.  Our first impression was that these were the friendliest people we had ever met on our travels.  The way Andy put it was “they had life!”  So many of the places we go to, the people are either shy because they don’t speak good English, or for whatever reason, they just don’t talk much.  These guys told us where we could go eat, where we could snorkel and dive, and even made a few jokes.  The quarantine guy allowed us to keep our veggies but made us promise to eat them before we get to Pohnpei.  After we finished with them, we untied from the pier and anchored in about 35 feet of pure mud between Ace Hardware and what used to be the church.

If you look close at the landscape you can see the "Sleeping
Lady".  Her head is to the left of Savannah, laying on her back.

Our first day out was eventful.  We had to make our way to Immigration because they forgot to bring the stamp for our passports to the boat.  It was easily a 2-3 mile walk, but we were picked up by a nice retired policeman and his daughter after the first mile or so.  Evidently, it’s very common for people to give rides around here.  Then we went to a resort called the “Treelodge Resort” (caught another ride) and had lunch.  It’s owned by an American man named Mark and his Italian wife, Maria.  The resort itself didn’t impress much, but the restaurant is very quaint sitting on the edge of the mangroves and they had pretty good food as well.

We’ve done a lot of walking and packed in a good amount of stuff in the last few days.  We’ve gone to the Aquaculture Center where they spawn and raise a large number of giant clams, mostly for food consumption but they also sell to aquariums in the US and Europe.  We also went to the little one room museum and learned about some of the original ways of life here on Kosrae.  We tried to have “dinner and a movie” at Treelodge Resort.  Dinner was excellent (fantastic pizza) but the movie was rated R and not appropriate in the least bit for little Jake so we made our way back to the boat in our dinghy.  We got stuck in the low tide in the mangroves!  We thought we would be fine since the movie would last two hours, but since we had to leave early it didn’t give the water enough time to get back up…oops.  We made it back ok it just took a little longer than usual.

Each of these concrete tanks were filled with tiny "giant" clams.

This guy was scrubbing the tiny clams to get them ready to sell to
aquariums.

These clams are about a year old....3 inches or so.

Mangroves

The happy skipper

"Bully's Restaurant" at the Treelodge Inn

Jake is the one on top of the boy's shoulders.  They were
having "chicken fights."

Today, we rented a car and drove around the island (as far as the road will let you go….it doesn’t go all the way around).  We can’t get over how stinkin’ pretty this place is.  Flowers everywhere, banana trees, citrus trees, palms, Mangroves, Mango trees…  We met a great American couple that is here volunteer teaching at the highschool, Sarah and Craig.  They went snorkeling with us today and showed us the good places to go.  The water was a bit rough for me, but we did see some impressive coral and Jake got to play with the local kids again…chicken fighting, throwing seaweed on each other, etc.  Just seeing him come out of his shell the past few weeks with the kids is really cool to watch. 

Tonight we’re settling down and relaxing (we had a late night with Sarah and Craig on the boat last night so we’re kind of dragging!), planning the next fun thing for tomorrow.  I’ll try not to spill it all in this one post and save some for later.