P-MAN VIII Update #25
10 March 2006

We devoted the whole day today to hiking back to the area that our newfound Japanese map identifies as the mountain fortress, or command post. This time we hiked in on the old Airai road, but we approached from the north.

We were met at the entry point by Jolie Liston, an archaeologist who's spent many years living here in Palau while serving as archaeologist for the Compact Road project. She's presently working on a 14-volume (!) final report for that effort. Since the road pretty much circles the island of Babeldaob, it wound up traversing pretty much all of the various ecosystems and cultural areas of the island - so as this report reflects the cultural history of Palau, it should be extremely cool. We met Jolie through Jon Vogt, an environmental consultant for the Corps of Engineers. She had expressed interest in what we were doing, and the trip to the mountain fortress sounded cool enough to pry her away from her writing for a day.

Jolie Liston, who joined us for today's hike. Cool lady and a potentially
valuable contact here in Palau. Very knowledgeable about Palauan
culture and the area around the Compact Road. © Reid Joyce 2006

For those of us still working on our junior archaeologist badges, it was a treat to get to spend some time with Jolie, and to hear her take on the changes that the Compact Road will surely bring to Babeldaob.

The walk in from the north was a bit easier than the walk in from the south had been a couple of days ago. It took about an hour to reach the summit of the mountain near where the map indicates the command post was located. The summit of this mountain is over 210 meters above sea level. The view from there is breathtaking.

The view from the summit, toward Oikul. © Reid Joyce 2006

Breathtaking, that is, until you turn around and look at the only structure near the hilltop: it looks like an old rusty horse trailer, probably left over from the days (long after the war) when this road was a reasonably well traveled way to get from Airai up to the middle west side of the island. The road was abandoned in the mid '80s.

The horse trailer. A real anticlimax, if what you were expecting
was a mountain fortress. © Reid Joyce 2006

We explored the area all the way around the summit of the mountain, then focused on the area across the road to the north where the symbol for the fortress was leading us. We covered the top and both sides of the ridge that leads north from the mountain, until it became clearly too steep to be a likely headquarters site. We found...nothing. Well, nothing except some insulators and copper wire attached to several large trees that had fallen down quite a while ago. And the wire appeared to be simply deployed parallel to the road, far above the ridge that we were exploring. We found a couple of short (~5-ft. deep) tunnels in the sides of the ridge, but found absolutely no other evidence of habitation. The area is certainly a plausible location for a command post, but there's no evidence of buildings, foundations, support stuff like 55-gallon drums or roofing or anything else that would have been associated with a bustling encampment of the size that this command post probably represented. If there was a major encampment here, the area was either completely "sanitized" before the Japanese left, or completely stripped by the Palauans after the Japanese left, or everything is completely buried under leaves and fallen trees, or some combination of these things.

Insulators and copper wire. The wire parallels the road; if there'd been
a command post down along the ridge, you'd expect some of the wire
to run down there. Near as we can tell, it doesn't. © Reid Joyce 2006

We took a break back up close to the road after exploring the ridge where the map indicated the command post to be. It was shady and pleasant, and we were able to coax Joe to tell us some Palauan legends. Joe's a master storyteller; we never get tired of hearing his tales of ancient Palau.

Rest and relaxation with Joe as master storyteller. © Reid Joyce 2006

Well, we're not sure where to go from here on the command-post location. We did stop at Hanero's store on the way back to Koror, and he indicates that there's an area that fits the description of a depot or motor pool between his place and the command post. But it's not likely we'll get back that way on this trip. Maybe next year.

After dinner, while everybody was groggy from the strenuous day, an e-mail came in from Minoru, our contact in Tokyo. He attached four hand-drawn maps that purport to show where several U.S. airmen were buried! We puzzled over these maps, trying to correlate them with real maps, until it became clear that we really needed to sleep on this. We'll keep you posted on this new development.

- Reid