A 2010 recap video

Back home for Christmas, and hoping to post soon on a new computer. In the meantime, a good review in honor of the season:

Coconut Oil, you tell LIES

Traditional Stick Dancing

where have i been?

working on this project:

www.pohnpeihiking.blogspot.com

check it out!

i'll be back on here soon, though, with more frequent and less hiking-centric stories from the pacific.

hiking: nett ridge

nett ridge is a great hike that starts just outside of kolonia. its a great workout - very strenuous. it climbs to the top of the ridge behind us in the first photo, and offers a nice view of the river on one side, and of the reef on the other. this is one of my favorite hikes, and we had great guides this time - a group of young teens who husked coconuts for us to drink and fetched cacao for us to try out. the ridge has several japanese tanks and guns - given how much effort it is to walk myself up to the top, i'm at a loss to imagine the labor required to get such equipment so high up.

relatedly, we just celebrated liberation day this long weekend. it's a state holiday commemorating the end of japanese occupation during WWII. i just learned that pohnpei's holiday is three days after kosrae's because of the delay in passing the message of liberation from one island to the next. whether you've just celebrated liberation day or labor day, i hope you had a great long weekend!

hiking: pahn tikai

pahn tikai is a beautiful hike in u. it's mostly a steep climb up a paved road, but ends with a short jungle scramble. the waterfall is in front of a bat cave - you can climb up to it, but i passed on the 'guano scramble' as i've done it before. i'd meant to take a photo of the reef on our way back, but we got drenched to the bone by rain instead.

angkor wat

our last stop was cambodia. we flew to siem reap, the town just outside of the ancient temples of angkor wat. i can't say that we got a true taste of cambodia - siem reap is quite the tourist town - but angkor wat was well worth the stop. below are a handful of photos from the hundreds i took on our single day visit.

after angkor wat, we made our way back to bangkok by bus (if you try this route, schedule yourself a full day of miserable travel, by the way. you'll get to take exceedingly long and completely unnecessary travel breaks to your heart's content). after a night on khosan road (yowzas) and an afternoon at the movies, we caught our flight back to d.c. wonderful trip, though fast-paced and too too short. if you have any questions about anywhere we went or my experiences travelling the connections i mentioned, leave a comment and i'd be happy to answer any questions.

as for now, i'm back in micronesia getting started on another year teaching public health at the college of micronesia. look for some posts from the pacific in the near future.

ps - on all these travel posts, you can click on each photo to see a larger size!