We drove around the whole island of Pohnpei today. It was fun, though I felt anxious about not squeezing enough nature in, it's a bit of a downer to be in a car and I was in the car a fair amount yesterday. The green jungle mountains of the interior beckon, I guess I'm not really going to get very deep in there. One practical problem with land excursions is that if you walk more than half an hour in this intense humidity and heat, you're limp with exhaustion.

It was exceedingly hard to find the sights confidently enumerated in a booklet I got at the Pohnpei Tourism office. Despite what the booklet says, there are no road signs of any sort whatsoever. Not a single road is marked in any way. And the booklet is always, like, “turn at the Nan Midol sign.” The island isn't set up for tourists, it's set up for the people who live there. Maybe they took the signs down because they're rebuilding the roads. The People's Republic of China sprung for a new road all the way around Pohnpei, Embry says the PRC is giving lots of aid to tiny countries to help their standing in the votes at the UN.

In any case, you have to stop and ask questions over and over, and it's fun at first to talk to the islanders, but after awhile you begin to feel like an idiot, like the annoying three-foot-tall green alien from the UFO, and for that matter, the islanders don't necessarily like giving out information, it could be that they like to hoard their info, as they don't have many possessions. They're friendly enough, but sometimes they burst into laughter at you, all white and oddly dressed and solemn, and it can get embarrassing.

Anyway after asking seven or eight people, we found our way to an enormous rock, smooth to the feet, a hundred feet long, in the jungle beside an open field with green interior mountains beyond, heartbreakingly beautiful tree crowns against the pale blue sky. The rock is covered with petroglyphs, more or less like in Hawaii, designs carved into the rock, quite old, images of paddles or knives, perhaps a woman's vagina or a shield, some bow-tie shapes, the outline of a whole woman. To find this site we'd asked at a house near it and a betel-nut-chewing guy offered to guide us and we were glad to have him along for a few bucks. Wiley. He banged one spot on the big rock and it sounded a bit hollow and he said, “There is a door in the rock here, and the brothers went inside.” What brothers? “Two brothers came from far away — ” he points to the other side of the island across the interior mountains, maybe ten miles away. “From Kiti. They made these carvings. A giant came, and they hid inside the rock. See here, it's a picture of a lock and a key.”

I told him Embry and I were brothers, and then a little later I told him we were from Kiti, which got a good laugh out of him. It was fun to think of Embry and me as archetypes, as from a legend. Then in a field nearby Wiley showed us a “woman rock” which had a crotch and slit like a vagina, really quite graphic. He touched it for good luck, and I did too. Hoping to see my woman soon.

There were other boulders in the field, and Wiley said they were people too, he said this was his land, and the land was a storyboard, which is the name of a wooden bas relief comic strip of one or more frames that Micronesians carve to preserve legends, e.g. in the Yap airport there's a large storyboard showing three stages of the Yapese getting stone money from Palau. Wiley's rocky field is a storyboard, I love that. Living mythically and in depth.

We got lost again trying to find some Japanese cannons, stumbled upon a clearing in the jungle, a woman sitting there on her steps, two houses and a tiny graveyard with four raised mausoleums, perhaps her family's been in this tiny Eden for generations. She kindly showed us the way to the “sight.” It was like meeting Eve.

Later I swam in a pool in a river by the road with twenty small children. Their mothers were doing laundry the old-style way, beating the clothes with a stick on a rock. Kind of a fountain of youth. Embry just watched. Later I had a feeling the water had been none too clean, for surely there were many houses upstream from the pool.

We encountered a huge traffic jam, cars parked on both sides of the road, creeping along. The pickup in front of us held some enormous ball of roots and dirt attached to a carrying-pole. It was raining, we were at a standstill, I studied the object, it seemed to be a bundle of linked tubers, finally I got out and asked the eight guys riding with it what it was. “A yam.” Pohnpei is known for producing enormous yams, and this yam must have been four hundred pounds, the eight guys could barely carry it, all of them straining at the pole. I'd visualized the giant yams as being oversized perfectly shaped individual supermarket-style yams, but this big fella was more of a lumpy gnarly cluster. As we inched closer to the center of the crowd I saw a pile of freshly slaughtered piglets, a mound of breadfruits, hundreds of natives, many of them carrying plastic plates with rice and roast pig. “Is it a feast?” I asked someone. “It's a funeral.”

All fascinating, but by the end of the day, I'm tired of being so white, so alien, so full of unanswered questions. It'll be good to get back to where I know what's going on.

Last night we went to a party at Elizabeth's, the Pompeian woman we met the other night. A couple of shirtless guys were sitting in the open pavilion of her cook-house with a big flat rock resting on a pair of old tires; they were pounding a large mound of pepper-root with rounded stones: sakau. The big flat stone must have been very hard, for it rang like metal. I was of course fascinated by the drug preparations, so talked to the main guy, he had a mustache, reminded me a bit of my Filipino friend Bataan whom I got high with at Naropa some twenty years ago. He said the Pohnpeian sakau is better than Fijian kava; it's the roots of a slightly different pepper plant, also in Fiji they dry the roots and grind them into powder which they squeeze in a cloth back in a bowl of water. But in Pohnpei, they make their potion right from the roots, albeit moistening the roots with a cup or two of water. “Bataan” (I forget his real name) and his partner pounded the big flat rock for a long time when they were done pulverizing the roots. Like a dinner bell. A few people drifted into the cook house, though many others were circulating in the yard, drinking wine, sodas and fresh coconuts. A long table of food was nearly ready to be served.

Bataan laid out a long strip of fabric-like hibiscus bark, mounded a couple of pounds of pulverized pepper root on it, wrapped the bark around the root making a kind of tamale the size of his arm, then twisted the bark to squeeze out thick slimy juice. He mixed the first bit of juice back into the pepper pulp, added a cup of water to the pulp, wrapped and squeezed again, this time catching some of the juice in half a coconut shell. He offered some to Embry, the oldest guest, Embry had a sip, and a little later I got a couple of sips as well. I'd been wondering if I should have any, what with wanting to stay sober, but in the end I just had to see how it was.

Thankfully the effects weren't very strong for me. I felt a little tired, a little more relaxed, and just a shade zonked. Rather than wanting a whole lot more as I would have in the old days, my reaction was to remember that I don't like feeling zonked anymore. So I left it at that. They guys doing the squeezing were goin' for it for sure, they said they could get visions from it. They continually squeezed the roots for next several hours. Two American ex-pat guests were really into it, said they'd been doing sakau for years, I'd been talking to them beforehand, they had that weathered slightly off-kilter vibe of long-term stoners, like some interplanetary probe ship whose skin has been pitted and etched by the dust and hard radiation of outer space. Watching the world on instant replay. Calling mission control.

The sakau makers had repetitive chanting music playing on a boom-box, it was special music for a sakau party, and in fact the music was recorded by a local guy called Lorenzo, who's said to have a chance of becoming the next king of the Nett district of Pohnpei. A very dignified older native lady was there, she was the mother of this Lorenzo, it turned out. She'd look at me with level eyes, but wouldn't bother to smile. I'm like this three-foot-tall green alien from a UFO, an interloper in her court. Actually at the end, she smiled very pleasantly when I managed a native word which means hello or goodbye: kasalehlei.

The food was amazing. A suckling pig, a steamed fish half as big as a pizza, a mound of tuna sashimi, a mound of grilled chicken, white yams, taro, breadfruit, pineapple so ripe that even the centers of slices were soft and sweet, curried chicken, red and white rice, pickled cabbage, and three kinds of bananas: boiled in coconut milk, fried, and mashed. No green vegetables; maybe they don't matter after all.

Embry and I really were quite tired after a while, what with the sakau and my triathlon; we went home about ten. I let Embry drive.

I took the next day off from diving and drove downtown alone where I climbed this high ridge overlooking town. Saw a bunch of Japanese anti-aircraft guns at the top, rusted amidst flowers. A nice view of the large volcanic Sokehs rock. View of the lagoon and the outer reefs. A flock of red parrots, the name is lory, was squawking at me from a papaya tree, I pushed into the undergrowth to see them better and spent a half hour surrounded by the cries of birds. There were four different kinds, all aware of my presence and making noise about it. Coo-coo-coo, squawk-whistle, gahr-gahr. One of them flew down to get a really good look at me, he was black and gray with a fanned-out tail.

It felt a little melancholy up there, a bit pointless and lonely, I was thinking about my time here in Micronesia running out, and was concerned that I wasn't doing the best possible thing, as this ridge was noise-polluted by some vast machine in the harbor, and had a radio tower on the top, civilization, ugh. An attack of tourist anxiety, the greed to engulf more and more. I could have gotten a guide to take me deep inside the island, but that had seemed too hard.

I drove around the harbor area after the climb, expecting to see some natural glens, but it was pretty densely inhabited, lots of people out and about, it's a Saturday, a lot of them are getting out of church. Some boys standing by the church drinking sakau (?) out of little wax-paper cups. I see more houses like open pavilions — what you might take for a public shelter, until you notice the bedding and the kitchenware. Actually, talking to a Pohnpeian, I learned that often these are cook-houses, and that the family also has an enclosed house where they keep their valuables and sleep when it's wet. The pavilion without walls is cooler; it gets very close in a house when it's hot and raining.

I went back to the hotel and rented a kayak, which was better, I paddled about a mile against the wind to get to Mwahnd Island, completely edged by mangroves. Here and there were breaks in the mangroves and I could paddle in through channels — which turned out to be entrances leading to native huts.

One hut's image sticks in my mind: painted two-tone, dark blue on the bottom half of the wall, light blue on the top, a roof of corrugated tin, with some patches of red-painted corrugated metal. A hill behind it covered with palms halfway up, and big leafy trees on top, maybe breadfruits. Above the trees a fat white cloud echoing the shape of the forested hill. The kayak quiet in the calm, silty water, mangroves on either side, quivering schools of tiny pale blue fish. A family is outside the house, a naked boy covering his crotch with both hands, the women in tropical skirts, the men working with their boats. Another entrance leads to what must be the village center, I hear voices chanting in unison — church? A group of girls peers at me from a porch glimpsed through mangrove branches, a bit like the way the parrots had peered at me from the papaya tree, profiling their hooked beaks as they eyed me. I wave to everyone I see, they wave back in a friendly fashion. I'm in a raspberry pink plastic sea kayak, wearing swim-suit, print shirt, my constant Tilly hat, my shades.

On the way back I tied up to a channel marker and wallowed into the water with my snorkel gear. My final farewell to the fish of Micronesia and the pale green, pale lavender, pale pink soft corals. A triathlon day: mountain climbing, kayaking, snorkeling.

Embry and I rented a car and drove to Liduduhniap Falls near Kolonia on Pohnpei. Not that near actually, it was up a long dirt road that was hard for us to find. The guidebook had said there was a store at the end of the road by the falls, and that you should pay a dollar to the storekeeper to use the falls. So we get up there, and there's not a soul in sight, a pair of rudimentary Micronesian buildings, though none of them looks particularly like a store. There's the sound of a radio or TV from one of the buildings, we walk over there, and there's a bare-breasted brown-skinned woman asleep on the ground. No matter how low you set your expectations of formality, the Micronesians continue to slip under it. We went swimming in the waterfall pool, which was great, exciting to have the water beat down on you, a feeling of healing there, the two old boys together in the swimming hole.

When we came back up it was raining and we ran under a kind of pavilion across the street from the house where the woman had been sleeping on the ground. Standing in the open pavilion we realize its a house. There's a raised U-shaped concrete platform, with tree trunks set into it holding up the slanting roof of corrugated tin. Along one side is a counter holding pots and pans — a kitchen. On the rear side is a mattress. The sleeping quarter. This is a house. Some people come out of the house across the street, and now the sleeping woman is up and at 'em. She's pulled her elastic-waisted flower-printed skirt up a bit to cover her breasts. (These skirts are what all the women wear, very brightly colored, usually with a zigzag edge at the bottom, made in the Philippines. I ended up getting two of them, one actually locally made by the cousin of the girl I bought it from.) We give her the two dollars, she's friendly. Her son lives in Arlington, Texas, she says. I don't have the heart to ask if he's in the military, who seem to scooping up so many of the Micronesian youths. It's maybe one of the only ways out into the wider world for them.