Family Photos December 2007

Saturday 15 December 2007. A hike into the forest including moving off-trail, clambering up and down jungle clad ravines.

Up in a patch on their first off-trail adventure

Buried under leaves and Asplenium nidus in an ancient and forgotten place

In the midst of the forest, a peitehl

A map of our adventure:

At the lower right is the family car parked at the houses in Wone, Luak seen on the lower left. Above the word start are srifacf nuts - a type of tropical almond (Terminalia cattapa) that we found behind the family home and snacked on after our hike. Above the srifacf is a palm I could not identify in the forest.

Above the T in the trail is an ivory nut palm (Metroxylon americarum) with three ivory nuts under the tree that we collected. The black dots along the middle of the right side are another nut without a name. The nut has a very dense outer shell. When rubbed on a rough surface like cement the shell resists abrasion, but becomes very hot. The kids call them "burning nuts" as they burn if you touch them after trying to abrade them.

The round water pool is a place we washed our feet. It is actually far from the river it is drawn next to. The river is the stream we crossed. The black circles in the stream are the rocks which we walked on in the river. The river is crossed by a log bridge (pictured near the pool).

Across the river at image top is a sakau patch and the stones in the forest we found and by which we had lunch. One stone can be seen on the web page. On the right side are small magenta dots, these are kaikes, a small red hard shelled pea sized nut from a tree in the pea family. These too are edible.

The adventure was very much in the spirit of Man versus Wild on Discovery. What you can eat, what you cannot, what plants are which in the forest. How to get unlost, where to look for old hunting trails, how to read the lay of the land, learning to recognize plants brought in by man. Bamboo is a sign of a Japanese introduction for example.

I'd been waiting for the kids to get tall enough to get their eyes clear of the worst of the eye-poking jungle brush. The best part was sitting in the forest eating lunch and listening only to the birds and streams. No cars, no washing machines, no televisions, no sounds of people, only the wild. And yet sitting in the middle of ancient hearth, a stone age home, that was once there. The sounds of home 200 years ago on Pohnpei.