Hike up Manaro
In late August, Caroline and myself, along with many other friends/volunteers were in Ambae for a Gender and Development workshop. We brought counterparts from our villages, and together had a busy week talking about uncomfortable topics, playing sports and games, and having a good time. After the workshop, a large group of us decided to hike the nearby dormant Manaro volcano. It's a popular Peace Corps tradition whenever volunteers are on Ambae. So Saturday night, after getting custom tattoos and penetrated by a orange tree thorn needle in the library of a school, we awaited a truck that we thought would pick the 21 of us up at 5pm. 530pm rolled around, nothing, but the friendly tattoo artist asks me in particular out of everyone to come "visit" his house. Thought bubble: weird, but sure. They were having a 10day celebration of the death of his uncle. This means a modest celebration and lots of kava and pork. Score! I grub and chug, stumble back to the school, it's 630pm, no truck. Pitch black dark. 7pm we've resorted to just waiting in the road more or less for a ride. Finally gather up two trucks and have to pay them $100 for a 30min ride up this giant hill to the bungalow where we'll crash at for the night. Oh, and it's pouring rain. We arrive at like 945pm. We thought we had the whole bungalow rented, but the owner assumed since we didn't arrive at 5pm that we weren't coming and he gave out the house to some scary looking french dude. It was his job to send the trucks at 5! Anyway, all the men just planned to sleep in the small church on the ground and the girls triple up in the bungalow on mattresses. Inconvenient but whatever, it's now 10pm, we are cold, tired, and hungry. The dinner they said they'd have hasn't even been started, and to continue complaining, it was pouring rain and very cold. At 11pm we finally get "dinner", taro and island cabbage with rice. All covered in tin tuna. Moving on, we slept for 5 hours on the floor next to snoring Ni-Vans and Americans alike, and wake up at 445am. It is raining harder now. We pack up our stuff, eat some homemade doughnut like bread and wait for the guide to show up. We wanted to leave at 5am, but the guide shows at sunrise at 6am. The guide is a older woman, barefoot, in a skirt and a tshirt with a big bush knife. That's all. It's pouring rain, muddy as hell and really cold. We finally set off, all 22 of us, in decent spirits. Hiking up a bad trail through mud getting poured on, but chatting and singing. The big group breaks apart, some fall in the back. 9am, 3 hours in, and we told by the nearly mute guide that we are half way up. Whhhat? Halfway. We been climbing for 3 hours in the mud and rain. Well, nothing else to do but climb on. I drop back to the middle of the pack to spend some time with Caroline and friends who fell in between the two groups. At 11am, word travels back from the guide that we can longer speak to each other. It's custom on top of the volcanoes to be silent in respect of the souls up here. At 12pm, six hours in, we were still climbing with no end in sight. I'm thinking, this barefoot lady is lost. Then it's released that she's only climbed the mountain three times in her life, the last time was TEN years ago. I run ahead to tell her and the front group that we have to consider turning around. It was 6hrs up, would be about the same down, and we had to still find and take trucks back to the school we had been staying at for early morning flights Monday. When everyone agrees with me, we turn around without seeing the two giant lakes on top of this dormant volcano. We are pissed, but glad to be turning back at a decent hour. The guide lady just runs off whacking herself a new trail through the bush. We are convinced she's a ghost because she doesn't make noise when her feet hit the muddy ground and she has the ability to just sneak off unnoticed. No disrespect to her in particular, but she's the worst tour guide in the history of tour guiding. We are 10 minutes hiking down the mountain, and she catches up telling us she found the trail and the water is so close. Half of us climb down this nearly straight down mud wall for 10min only to arrive at this tiny creek...and the ghost guide had disappeared again. After this most recent frustration, we finally give up. I stood waiting for 45min for her and two friends who had gone with her to return near the creek. Finally I called it and assumed she had eaten them and we should get the hell outta there. So we climb up the cliff side, then start down the mud trail again, leaving some cookies and a solar lantern just in case our friends hadn't been sacrificed to the volcano gods. Immediately when we start descending, Caroline's chronic knee problem that was never appropriately treated starts killing her. We have to move at a snail's pace, and I have to help her down every large step. One hour in, our small group runs into another group that turned around early. One of our friends had shut down. She was sitting in the mud hyperventilating and saying she couldn't continue on. We had to convince her that wasn't an option. There is no shelter up there, it's far too wet to make a fire, and no one is coming up there to get you. She finally got her butt up and we slllllllowly trek down the mountain with injured Caroline and our ragged group of defeated climbers. It gets dark at 6pm and we have one flashlight between 10 people. Caroline's pain is at like a 9/10 (or she's faking so I'll continue to carry her down...?). The guide is behind us all, and won't say a word about anything. We are having to choose our own paths, second guessing ourselves the whole time, but she won't say a damn thing. One hour with complete darkness, all of a sudden, this guardian angel shows up with a new light, bread and tea. He said they were all worried about us and came to bring us food. We told him he had to help get our friend down the mountain, so he stuck around helping us find the path since ghost guide went silent. Another incredibly long hour later we made it out of the mud trail and back to the bungalow. Even though she wasn't worth a dollar, we paid her the previously agreed upon $20 for her "services". We grabbed our bags and walked down to the nearest truck road. Thank god the trucks braved the awful road to come up to the bungalo, because hiking down to flat ground would have been another 2-3hours. We joyously rode in the rain in the back of the truck to the school, took cold showers and popped pain killers, ate a late meal of rice and taro again, and went to bed, only to be crippled and sore for the next 3 days. There is very little exaggeration in my words, and I don't think this can explain how long of a day our Manaro hike actually was. In nicer conditions, it would have probably been a 8 hour hike, maybe 4/10 in difficulty. But with all the hardships faced it doubled in difficulty. I did learn or was reminded that you never really realize some things until you're totally miserable. Taking off my wet muddy hiking shoes was maybe the most wonderful feeling I've ever experienced. Looking back it was an experience, and maybe next time I'm in Ambae (and the weather is good!) I'll give Manaro another shot.
