Bob in Micronesia
G’day in cyberspace.
Sorry
its taken me so long to update the website, but I had to get the new Les
Norton book Leaving Bondi finished and with all the running around between
Bondi, the Blue Mountains and Victor Harbour I got bogged down.
But its done, its out there and from the letters I've recived so far, its another good one. I also got invited to the Brisbane Writers Festival. It was a lot of fun, and I met some nice people, as was the book tour where I met some more nice people and signed heaps of books. We cleaned one book shop out!
Then when I got back to Sydney I had more interviews and book signings. Mr Laws even interviewed me on his Foxtel Show. Plus we had the book launch for Leaving Bondi at BB's Bar in Bondi. It was a hoot! Michael Chugg (Chuggie) was my presenter. Chuggie couldn't have given me a bigger wrap and coming from someone like him, I was stoked. Everybody had a good time, I filmed most of it on video and when I get the photos I'll put them on the web. In fact, I've got a heap of photos to put on the web over the next few months.
Meanwhile,
in the middle of all this, your humble scribe has been in Micronesia trudging
through the treacherous, steaming jungles of Pohnpei searching for the
mysterious lost city of Nan Madoll. Don't worry if you've never heard
of the place. No one has! I got onto Nan Madoll in an Eric Von Daniken
movie years ago. Its in the absolute middle of nowhere. You go via Brisbane
with a stop-over in Nauru for the night. A horrow show.
If that wasn't a big enough horror show, we flew off to Pohnpei the next day and got there in the middle of a howling rainstorm. The plane was shaking and bumping all over the sky and you couldn't see two feet out the windows. We circled the airport for fourty minutes while the pilot made four aborted landings. I was terrified! My ring was hanging that far out you could have chopped washers out of it! Finally the pilot said "I can't land the plane. Its too dangerous. We're flying on to Guam." So I spent the second night away in Guam.
Anyway
we landed at Pohnpei the next day and it was still raining. This little
island gets sixteen inches of rain a year. Its 85 degrees fahrenheit every
day with 99% humidity. And the "plush" hotel I booked into had
no fridge in the room, no phone, no TV, no A/C, two half-filled water
beds and a gap in the roof so the room filled up with bugs at night! And
it was two hundred metres from the lobby to my room down stone steps through
the bush. I lasted one night and booked into the South Park Hotel.
But my whinging aside, it was worth it. Nan Modall is the spookiest, most fascinating, mystifying place I have ever seen. My photos don't do it justice. Thousands of years ago some ancient civilisation built over 90 artificial islands out into the ocean and then transported over 250 million tonnes of crystaline basalt logs, some weighing over 100 tonnes each, from one side Pohnpei to the other and built these massive stone structures. Apart from the native legends, no one knows how or why.
I
met up with Sarah from California and Shindo who worked at the Japanese
embassy and visited Nan Modall twice. I also met the Australian Consulate
General, and all sorts of people on Pohnpei which I'll tell you about
next time when I put more phots on the web.
So stay tuned because you're going to love it. And a warning - Nan Madoll is definately worth writing a book about!
December 2000