Into the Island Interior

Quite literally, might I say. But first, a quick recap.

Literally the day after I told my parents that we hadn't managed to acquire some sort of pet here, we were adopted by a cat. He's actually been hanging around for about a month now, and would occasionally come and meow at the door, looking for handouts, which earned him the nickname "beggar cat". But he'd always been skittish, and was rarely reliably around, until that day when he decided he was okay with me petting him, rather than bolting if I so much as took a single step in his direction. Since he was hungry enough to be affectionate, I couldn't help but feel bad for him, and went out and bought some cat food. Within days, he was comfortable coming inside the house to eat and hang out, though anyone who wasn't me or Dan made him exceptionally nervous for a while. He's still getting over his fear of us, but now tends to sleep in the garage on top of our mist nets, and has been renamed Julius.

Food exploration continues here as well, as usual. It's incredible how many restaurants this island can support. I have to assume that they all are busy at dinner, because typically when Dan and I arrive for lunch, we're the only people in the restaurant besides the staff, with the two exceptions being the Taste of India buffet (decent, but made me miss Swagat even more) and lunch at FoodTalk, a brand new Filipino cafe that, for $3, will send you to a table with an entree, rice, and soup. I had chicken afritada, which is going to have to become something I will cook for some of you at home if you've never had it - essentially a stew of chicken, potatoes, and bell peppers, but the sauce is one of the few things I've ever eaten that is tomato-based that I actually liked. And then there is the always-popular Thursday Night Street Market, which I haven't been going to lately because I've usually had plenty of food around the house, but I went last night and got two steamed bao, a pile of Cantonese-style bok choy, a cup of ginataang halo-halo and a couple of puto for $3.25 - can't beat that! (And looking for vegetables for one of our vegetarian friends was pretty amusing - she walks up to a Filipino stand with some sort of stir-fried vegetable mix and asks if there's meat in it, and the response was "no meat, just pork!" We laughed. That's pretty standard Filipino food right there, pork in every dish.)

Beyond restaurants, there are always new local fruits and vegetables to try. Taro leaf and coconut soup is remarkably similar in taste to stuffed grape leaves - delicious! Starfruit here are so much more flavorful than they are on the mainland, and my new favorite local fruit is chico, also known as sapodilla, a round brown kiwi-sized fruit with the texture of a ripe bartlett pear but a flavor more like brown sugar. Our garden is always coming up with new surprises as well, and hopefully the banana plants will fruit soon.

Now, onto the main purpose of this post (besides being a general update, which I know I haven't done much of lately). There is a fantastic blog called Saipan Pictures, which is quite simply that, a collection of photos from all over the island, run by Eric Johnson, a local teacher who came to Saipan 14 years ago. The most intriguing page to me has always been Caves in Saipan, because there is only one marked cave here and that is Kalabera Cave, which is pretty neat but not particularly interesting beyond the 40-some foot ladder down into the darkness. Beyond that, you can't go anywhere, as the cave continues only as a vertical pit that requires some serious climbing gear to get into. So seeing the guy's photos had always been tantalizing, as I really wanted to go to some of those incredible places but had no idea where to find them. So I emailed him about them and asked if I could get directions to a few.

Quite coincidentally, the caves I had chosen to ask about were ones that he was planning on visiting with his family just that next day, and he invited us to come along. Being that we simply couldn't pass up that opportunity, we met up with Eric, his sister Jing, and his daughter Ting, at Last Command Post. They all piled into our truck, which has better clearance than his car, and he directed us to a site near the landfill where old bombs from the war are collected. Every few months, apparently, the bomb management crew blows up all of the old artillery shells and grenades and whatever else is found, and spectators are welcome to watch from the overlook at Suicide Cliff.

Just off the road to the bomb facility is a small winding trail that leads to several large limestone caves. Two, Beehive Cave and Honeycomb Cave, are right next to each other - Beehive looking like a fairly standard downward-sloping hole, whereas Honeycomb is a barely visible gap between the rocks that must be squeezed into.

We entered Beehive Cave first. Just like all of the other limestone here, the cave floor was extremely slick where it was damp, which was most places. Unlike any cave I've been in before, though, the inside of this cave (and Honeycomb as well) was hot, and completely still. At the bottom of Beehive, Eric estimated that we had gone down at least two hundred feet, which put us well below sea level, which probably accounts for the lack of air movement. The initial passageway is relatively narrow, but there are a series of slightly broader chambers, and eventually the cave opens up into a terminal large room. Like all caves here, this one is still littered with artifacts from Japanese soldiers during World War II, including cans and sake bottles and the soles of some old shoes.

Honeycomb is a very different cave, despite being right next to Beehive. It consists of several long passages, many of which are still unexplored. We didn't make it very far in, as while we were waiting for Eric to check out one tunnel to see if it was worth going down, he began to suffer from heatstroke - that's how bad these caves can get - so we all backed out and sat down and had some lunch instead. Apparently he's gone as far as an hour in, as has another caver here, but the difficulty then becomes managing not just the heatstroke but also the lack of oxygen that deep, as no air movement means it replenishes very slowly. However, even that far into the cave, he has found artifacts, meaning the soldiers who were there during the war had explored quite some distance themselves.

Japanese soldiers lived in these and other caves and hidden bunkers for up to sixteen months at the end of the war. Some of them died when American soldiers came through looking for survivors and the Japanese dared to peek out and see who was coming, but most of the rest died when the American strategy changed to using flamethrowers at the mouths of the caves, eating up all the oxygen within. The jungles of the northern end of the island are still full of reminders of the war to this day - old fragments of ceramics, Navy ammo bunkers, and even the occasional skeleton.

The rainy season here is beginning to make banding something of a challenge. Today marks the second occasion on which extensive rain and stormy weather meant we had to close our nets before we had a minimum number of hours in, meaning that we have to go back and finish up tomorrow. While closing nets, I had a brief conversation with a couple of tangantangan cutters who we've met before - and there is a job I do not envy, chopping down the spindly little trees to make trellises. It went a little like this:

"Caught in a shower, huh?" He was wearing a bright yellow poncho, and looked quite cheerful.

"Yeah, it's a little wet today." I, on the other hand, was lacking a poncho, and was soaked through.

"Any birds?"

"Just one. The weather's too bad to keep banding."

"Oh. Pretty rainy, will probably rain all day! At least not a typhoon."

Which made me laugh a little. "Yeah, that would be a problem."

"Typhoon? Nah, typhoon, no problem. I've got a worse problem," he says, grinning, and points to the truck that's piled high with tangantangan.

But hey, at least he seemed cheerful enough. Banding here is definitely different from banding in the Oregon coast range, though. There, Aaron and I were miles and miles from anyone else. Here, we have visitors ranging from local farmers and tangantangan harvesters, to lost hikers, to Korean tourists on their off-road monster truck adventures. It's a totally different atmosphere, that's for sure. I think I liked the feeling of being far from civilization better, but having such a variety of people around means there's always something interesting going on here.