| P-MAN X Update #22
- Serious hiking A few days ago we met and interviewed a hunter in Ngchesar who described a site that we've come to know pretty well. We first visited it in 2000. It's in Ngeremlengui State, way back in the hills. JPAC did a dig there in the spring of 2005 (Grover was the JPAC Recovery Team Leader on that dig), but did not recover any remains. The hunter said that he knows where there's a pretty large piece of wing that evidently had not been discovered either by us or by JPAC, and the possibility of extending our information about the debris field was just intriguing enough for us to be willing to go back there, even though in JPAC's mind, the site is closed. Problem is, access to the site traverses about 4 km (as the crow would fly if there were crows here) of up-and-down jungle, crossing many muddy steep-banked streams, where even the hunters get turned around and have to search for the trails from time to time. It was about a 2.5-hour hike in (including a couple of "Oops, we need to backtrack and get on the other side of this hill" moments), with 1.5 hours of climbing around in the hills behind the site, and then a 2-hour hike out. Wanna guess what we found? No new wing. Possibly another couple of pieces of the aircraft, but nothing that would help to build a strong case for re-opening this site. Japanese records indicate that a body was buried near this Corsair crash site, but they don't say who did the burying or where they interred the airman's remains. While we were at the site, it rained harder than I've ever seen it rain in the jungle. We were all soaked through. It continued to rain more lightly over most of the hike out, but to be honest, except for the slippery mud that the rain created everywhere, the rain was far preferable to the heat and humidity that we'd have been stuck with if the rain had stopped abruptly and the sun had come out. We weren't nearly as hot and exhausted by the time we made it back to the road as we'd have been if the weather had transitioned directly to sauna mode. - Reid |
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