CRUISE VIGNETTES 16, Enna G

THE RUIN OF NAN MADOL
Ponape is about 16 miles around, and the very unusual ruins of “Nan Madol” were at the far side of the island, a two-hour, very scary, very wet, very fast outboard motor boat ride away. Combined with the wind and the waves, we got wet, but it was a warm wind and warm water. The people who took this ride the following day got caught in a storm, and it rained and stormed so hard they didn’t get to see much. They were not only soaked to the skin with the cold rain, but being in the small boat in the bad storm, they were almost scared out of that skin!

At Nan Madol we found walls of several buildings (temples perhaps), made of basaltic (dark volcanic rock) columns, or stones, about 10 feet long, maybe 12 inches in diameter, with 5 or 6 unequal sides. These columns are stacked like firewood, making very thick walls, but none of the “buildings” have a roof. That’s all there is, there’s not much to it, and it only covers a few acres, but it is a very unusual, unknown ruin.

According to the people in Ponape, several reference books, and TV travel programs, no one seems to know, not only who did it and when, they don’t know where the stone came from, and no one knows what the original idea of Nan Madol was. By 2005, Google has over 12,000 hits for Nan Madol. By mid-2006, there are 36,000 hits, but I bet Nan Madol hasn't changed a bit.

At least one book says they can’t find any stone like this on any nearby island. But these stones must exist somewhere out there in this natural state, it didn’t look like anyone had “cut” them to this size and shape. We haven’t done any great research on such things, but somehow, these stones do remind us of the stones we saw many, many years ago in the Devils Postpile National Monument, near the Mammoth Mountain ski resort, located on the slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains. So I would bet it has something to do with volcano eruptions.

KEPIROHI WATERFALL
After we left the ruins, our outboard motor boat continued through water channels in the reef, and to the very fascinating Kepirohi Waterfall. While it is far from the largest waterfall we have seen, Kepirohi was indeed about the most unusual and extraordinary of the dozens of waterfalls we have visited in Hawaii, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Niagara, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Plitvica National Park in Yugoslavia, and many other places.

The boat ride to and from Ponape and Nan Madol, was much like the Disneyland Jungle ride, but this one was for real. For those who remember what a Disneyland E-ride was, this would be an EE-ride!