Yesterday brought many things. Beautiful dreams before a delicious breakfast, subtly diffused sunlight and a gorgeous swim in churning blue water, beers over a pick-up bed under cracking rain. All these things made for a lovely day, but there was a piece missing. A Forbidden Island shaped piece with a little label affixed reading: Terra Incognita.
Our expedition party started on Saturday night and it was late Sunday morning before the drink rations ran dry, after a brief rest more than half of our team came down with a mysterious illness. They reported a general malaise including nausea and hyper-sensitivity to light and sound. In other words, no one much felt like plodding through the jungle (next to a golf course) to a hidden island (follow Forbidden Island Rd.) for a day spent in the heat and sun.
Grotto Cognita
The Grotto is a cave washed out on the dry side of a volcanic sea cliff. It’s protected from the sun and rain by a thick green canopy. The slopped ceiling drips with white roots and a few limestone stalactites, the whole covered area being about equal to a basket ball gymnasium’s. The most notable feature of this place though are the underwater tunnels that open up onto the sunny side of the cliff. Luminescent sapphire light shoots through the water, from the entrance it outlines the openings and schools of silhouettes dart through it, but swim deeper back into the cave and look out from the back wall, you’ll see the whole pool is bright with complex variations of this gem-blue sea-light.
Even better yet!? Hold your breath and swim straight down, four or five body lengths, down here the floor is variegated royal purple, lavender, brick red and black. Spin onto your back and float up towards the electric blue liquid mirror of the water’s surface. Maybe there are Scuba divers blowing their bubbles (tiny glimmering jewel-mirrors and silver doubling jellyfish) underneath you to tickle your skin and brush through your hair.
After an hour’s swim the water turned rougher and more people piled in. After a few flying leaps from the diving rock, PJ and I trudged back up the long staircase to the parking lot. There we met the rain and Dale, a solo scuba diver and co-proprietor of Speedy Tërtle/Turtle Scuba, who shared his beer and stories with us as the rain poured down. Having no tourists to tour today, he’d spent the afternoon underwater spotting rare sub-species of nudibranch. Imagine if butterflies never found wings and all their rich morphological variation was concentrated in their soft larval bodies, that’s a nudibranch, and there are many rare varieties of these naked snails in the waters off Saipan, even in the most popular swimming holes.