After the run down from Sorong, our arrival at Misool was at Harfat, which we visited back in November last year on our way north to Wayag. We were uncertain of the exact location in the chain of islands that runs out from Misool, and we let the conditions dictate the area we would revisit.
The block of rock around Harfat is so interesting that it was a suitable place to have second look at. Misool is a large island, and the chain we visited runs out to the east from Misool for about 20NMs (about 40 kilometres). This chain of islands is composed of karst rock; millions of years of coral deposits that have been dissolved and compressed and then lifted above sea level, in this case, by the pressure of the Australian continental plate slowly crashing into Asia at the rate of about 2cm each year. The islands at the western end of the chain are large solid blocks of rock, and the further east you go in the chain, the smaller and more eroded the islands become. The area around Harfat is in a Goldilock Zone, where the rocks have been dissolved into canyons and caves, but are still largely intact with only channels that have been eroded from the softer rock in the fault lines.
Having travelled the area more since our first climb of the peak, it was worth doing again now that we are familar with the labyrinth of channels that we have been exploring by dinghy. Some of the other activities we enjoyed around Harfat was to follow a cave through the hills to where it emerged in a lake, and a trek up an Indonesian style logging track through the jungle.
Leave a Reply