Micronesia
Pohnpei Highlands
Waterfalls spilling from cloud forest drenched by three hundred inches of rain each year.
Rain arrives warm, vertical and almost daily, and the forest answers: ferns rising over head height, basalt glowing under clear pools, water moving in every fold of the hills. The Pohnpei Highlands in Micronesia rise from one of the wettest inhabited places on Earth, and you feel it with every breath.
Pohnpei takes more than 300 inches of rain in an average year, and the official count of named waterfalls passes forty on an island roughly twenty kilometres across. The Watershed Forest Reserve has protected over 5,000 hectares of the interior since 1987, climbing through upland palm forest into true cloud forest beneath the 795-metre summit. Thirteen of the island's bird species live nowhere else, the Pohnpei lorikeet and Pohnpei fantail among them. There are no paved jungle trails here; routes are steep, muddy and crossed with landowner boundaries, so a local guide is part of the walk, not an accessory to it. Kepirohi, the most visited fall, pours over a 20-metre basalt face into a natural swimming pool, while Pahn Takai hides a cave more than 300 metres across behind its drop.
Solo
With a guide booked, a solo walker can chain waterfalls and ridgelines all day and still be down in Kolonia for a sakau bar by dark.
Couple
Couples can take Kepirohi at an easy pace, swim beneath the fall and sit on the warm basalt before the afternoon rain moves in.
Friends
A fit group can ask their guide for the harder country: six-fall river days, mud to the knees and a proper story to carry home.
- More than 300 inches of annual rain feed over forty named waterfalls on an island about twenty kilometres across.
- The Watershed Forest Reserve has protected more than 5,000 hectares of interior forest since 1987.
- Thirteen of the island's bird species live nowhere else, the Pohnpei lorikeet among them.
- Kepirohi waterfall pours over a 20-metre basalt face into a pool you can swim in.
Pohnpei pepper is grown without chemicals and picked corn by corn; find it crusted on a tuna steak in Kolonia.
Karat bananas hide creamy, almost orange flesh under black skins; eat them chilled with lime squeezed over.
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