Menke Ruins

The hike to the Menke ruins started down the dirt road that will, some day, connect the remote village of Walung to the hub of civilisation that is Utwe. [The construction speed of this roads appears to be similar to that of the railway line here in Okinawa, so I wouldn't be too worried about any sudden changes in the near future].

We turned at an unremarkable grassy area between two banana fields, and a small trail led up into the jungle.

After having attempted the city style for a couple of meters, I quickly gave up and went barefoot through the jungle. Having made perfectly sure there were no poisonous snakes or such, I assumed that if the locals went barefoot on a regular basis, it couldn't be that dangerous.

It wasn't.

But it was quite muddy….

The Menke ruins are a very old complex of houses, possibly temples of sorts, that are located some way into the jungle, but not on what anyone could call 'high ground'. Believed to be much much older than the Lelu ruins, an abundance of heat, humidity and weathering acid basalt has drastically reduced the chance of finding any relics and has even made dating the structures themselves difficult.

Still, with the help of some enthusiastic jungle cleaning by the Waguk family, the complexity of the housing complex is slowly starting to emerge from the undergrowth, and several teams of archaeologists are regularly up there mapping. Each structure is composed of a main room containing a square altar in the centre, with a series of antechambers leading into it. The roofs, if roofs there were, were probably light thatch, as there is no evidence of beam support structures on the walls. But then again, we're not quite sure what we're seeing really was the top of the wall, either.

Contrary to the finely cut stones of Lelu, these structures are made of rounded boulders, probably carted up the hill from the nearby stream beds.

The walk through the jungle was amazing, with giant 'Ka' trees speeding their roots around the trunk, and giant vines curling up and around anything large enough to support their weight.