LOST!

From glory. . .
. . .to ignomy


I wasn't as scared as I look in the picture above. Really! By the time I took this photo, I was reasonably certain we'd make it back. What you see in that photo is utter exhaustion. So what happened? Here's the story:

On Friday, November 24, the day after Thanksgiving Grant and I decided to bike around Saipan. I’d done this once when I was living in Chuuk and loved it. The trip is a pretty easy proposition. Well most of it is a pretty easy proposition. It's all road except for one stretch of less than a quarter mile on the northeastern side of the island, out past Talofofo. Windward Rd, a rutted dirt road (on which I fell and broke one of the brake handles on my borrowed bike--ouch) runs out and then starts again less than a quarter mile away meeting up with Kalebera Road which will take you to Bird Island. From there the path home is easy. Well, our problem was in that elusive quarter mile stretch. We knew we'd have to carry our bikes and kind of hack our way through the jungle. We figured we were MEN, we were TOUGH, we could handle that. What we DIDN'T know is that you can get completely and utterly lost in that less than a quarter mile. After all, it's less than a quarter mile if you're going straight from point to point, but if you get off track you've got trackless jungle, thickets of tangtangan, steep ridges and ravines, and other natural horrors for what seems like miles. So we got lost. Totally lost. We went into the jungle around 12:30 P.M., we got out at 7:00 P.M., and not on the other side. No around 4:30 P.M. we gave up and tried to backtrack, but we couldn't find our way back. At 5:30, with the light rapidly evaporating, we abandoned the bikes and struck out for the ocean, hacking through this thick mangrove-y stuff. . .it felt like we were walking on the tops of trees because we couldn't feel or see the ground beneath us except for the occasional rock. Eventually we got out to those really sharp, volcanic type rocks like what you find on the cliffs at the edge of the ocean and we crawled along those till we got back to the place, a lonely little cove called San Juan Beach, that we started from. By that time, Babs had called the police--(What a blessing! My cell phone never lost it's signal and I was able to call her and tell her that we were stuck and needed help). The officers were able to guide us down from the cliff. I wasn't scared about dying or anything, but I did worry that we'd have to spend the night out there and while we had food, we were running low on water and had no flashlights. It was quite an ordeal. We came out absolutely filthy, exhausted, blind in one eye (well, not really. . .a branch swiped me in the face and swished out my right contact), covered in scrapes and sores. Grant got stung on his face, ears, chest, arms, and shoulders on four seperate occasion as by wasps when he ran into nests. I'm still really achey and sore.


Immortalized in songs from "Running Down A Dream" to "Life is a Highway" there's just something about the open road.

In hindsight the trip seemed ill-fated from the beginning. Within in minutes of the beginning of our ride, I was in agony. I was struggling to make it up the slightest inclines and even on the straightaways I seemed to be working so much harder than Grant, who seemed to be effortlessly breezing along, while I was huffing and puffing
and wheezing and feeling faint. I seriously wondered if I could really make it all the way around the island feeling as terrible as I was. What was wrong with me? I'd been on the verge of being sick all week, perhaps that was it. Maybe my body just didn't have the stamina for this kind of workout? Or maybe I was just a weenie who couldn't HANDLE it! I shuddered at the prospect. Well, among my many ailments was the incredibly painful seat. The thin seatbike seat was punishing my equally thin behind, and finally because of the seat, Grant and I traded bikes for a bit, and the difference was magical. Not only was the seat more comfortable, but biking was easier, less draining, yea, even FUN! It turned out the seat on Ken's bike was way too high for me making it far more uncomfortable for me to sit and forcing me to work much harder than necessary at pedalling. That, and I was still figuring out how to use the gears properly. We stopped at an Ace Hardware in San Vicente and one of the employees helped us lower the seat on Ken's bike, after which riding it felt normal.

I remained tired throughout the rest of the journey though, the early exertions plus my ill health taking their toll, and I found I ran out of energy on the hills much more quickly than normal. On many of the longer ones I walked the bike, and even that was very demanding physically, and I'd occasionally have to rest from even that! Good thing I had no idea what was yet to come!

At the start of the road leading to Lau Lau Bay.

The Lau Lau Bay Vista.

I took this self-portrait when I stopped to catch my breath on the long rocky hill out of Lau Lau Bay.

We stoppped for a breather on our way up the road that leads out of the Kagman area.

This is the view from the Mobil gas station at the top of the hill leading down into Kagman. This was our fateful last rest stop before we disappeared into the jungle. After this we pedaled over a few more small hills and then raced down Talofofo Road. On that particularl downhill stretch I reached speeds of close to 40 mph on bike according to the spedometer on Ken's bike. What a rush!


"Time to saddle up and ride." Last rest stop before the boonies.

Here I am at our last rest stop, juiced up on gatorade and water and ready to go.

Looks simple enough doesn't it? But looks can be deceiving. This was the stretch of woods we would attempt to traverse.

Graves about to make the descent to San Juan beach, seen behind him.

Grant eases his bike down the path to San Juan beach. This was easy stuff compared to what we would have to do later.


Hubris.

Me in the jungle, still looking hopeful. At this point, we still thought we'd just carry the bikes over this ravine, manfully chop through some jungle for a bit and then find the road again on the other side. Instead we encountered multiple ridges and no sign of the road. On several occasions we left the bikes, went ahead on foot trying to find the road, but to no avail. At least once, we lost our way back to the bikes as well. Out there everything looks maddeningly the same and strangely different at the same time. It is very disorienting. Perhaps our biggest mistake was not to carefully mark our trail so that we could backtrack if necessary. When the time came to try to retrace our steps we couldn't do it.

Here's Grant hauling his bike over the first rather small ridge. This was easy compared to what was to come later. Once we got lost, we didn't take many pictures, since we were too busy trying to find our way out to think about photo ops, and even if we had thought of taking pictures I'm not sure we really wanted to take a lot of pictures of our ineptness. "Here's another picture of us. . .well, not sure where we are" just doesn't sound that appealing.


Grant taming the jungle with his trusty machete.

Right at the cusp of realizing we were truly in trouble we had this unique experience. We found a monitor lizard hanging out right by my bike! It was relatively small one, but it was still neat to actually see one in the wild.



Grant on the jagged rocks, after nightfall as we try to find our way home.

Grant weilds the machete, no longer necessary as we navigated away across the rocky cliffs near the ocean back towards San Juan Beach, our starting point. We arrived back on a rocky outcropping at San Juan, much closer to the ocean than our initial starting point. Within moments, we saw flashlight beams on the beach below and hailed our rescuers.


I guess the shutter wasn't working properly on the camera so Grant and police officer Nick Deleon Guerrero's heads are cut off and you can see a little of Officer Kevin Maritita and me.

So we were safe and sound. But it wasn't over yet. No we would have to go back in, to get the bikes we left behind. I already dreaded telling Ken I'd broken his brake handle. I dreaded even more telling him I'd abandoned his entire bike to the boonies. No, we had to go back. And so today, Sunday, November 26, we did. This time we went armed with lots of extra water, glowsticks, flashlights, ribbon for marking our trail, and long pants to protect our legs from further flayings. I've since caught a full on cold so I definitely needed for this to be a short adventure. And by the grace of God, it was. We found the bikes in about 20 minutes and were able to get them out of the jungle in less than 15 minutes. We were very close to finding our way back out that Friday it turned out, but the fading light and our failure to pay close attention to landmarks along the way earlier in the day prevented us from doing so.

Can you spot the bikes? After spending many hours in these jungles, my eyes were accustomed to them and we found the bikes easily. This is a picture of the moment we found them.

Grant checks out the bikes which turned out to be none the worse for the wear after their weekend stranded in the boonies.

The bikes safe and sound in the back of Grant's truck, we're ready to head for home.