Back to the Land of the Expected

Reaching Port Moresby from New Ireland was already a major gear change. To accentuate it still further we negotiated with a hotel bus driver to take us to Airways Hotel (who no longer provide a shuttle service to anyone but their own guests) and we passed our transit hours happily gorging at their buffet breakfast and souvenir shop.

I was sad to say goodbye to my Madang friends as they left for their flight. I have met some amazing people during my time here. I headed over to international and that limbo land of half leaving the country. The airport lounge came as a shock to the system. There were just so many white people! And they looked so unhealthy. Pale and overweight and a bit loud.

Despite a few hiccups with a rejected take-off, a closed check-in and some visa problems, I eventually made it back to Townsville to be met by some friends who drove me home in an open top car. Smooth roads and a car you didn’t have to lock all the doors and windows of! I saw more naked flesh on display in the ten minutes along the city beach than I had seen in the last ten weeks. It seemed wrong.

We stopped to pick up Indian take away en route (ah, the luxury!) and as we waited for it, we had a drink at the next door bar. A decent red by the glass! I was very excited. I was nervous about leaving the car with my suitcase sitting in the open back seat even to sit 2 metres away but was rightly laughed at by my mates and reminded that I no longer had to worry about security so much. My dog was very happy to see me, my house is in great nick and my own bed felt like I was sleeping in cotton wool clouds. Most exciting of all… this morning I walked to the shop. On my own! Walking! On a street! It is a great thing, and I will try to hang onto this new appreciation of how precious personal freedom is, and that it is not something to be taken lightly or for granted.

So now I am back in the land where things work. I like it, but I appreciate the other freedoms of Papua New Guinea and I expect I will return there to the Land of the Unexpected when I can.
Thanks for following my blog; I hope you enjoyed my journey as I have.

PS. I decided that I would leave a part of my 'sole/soul' behind in PNG by joining in the national sport on the street outside Sarah's house ....it was great fun getting my runners up there!!!

Island retreat and breakfast with hornbills

From East New Britain we travelled on to New Ireland a day later than planned due to a flight cancellation (which we found out on reaching the airport… no SMS alerts here!) After a short drive through Kavieng town we were taken by boat to our island retreat. No floor in the restaurant, just sand. No locks on the doors, no full names, no worries. Hornbills, cockatoos and the first well fed dogs I’d seen in PNG just wondering around mixing happily with the humans. Hammocks strung around through the trees, and traditional wooden thatched huts. Beautiful.

Chilli mud crabs, proper latte, and the most extensive cocktail list in the Pacific were icing on the already very tasty cake.

It hurt to get up at 4.30 to leave and come back to reality, but the compensation was the boat ride across to the airport, with our way lit only by the moon and the stars as we sped past silent groves of coconut palms.

I will return there one day inshallah, and next time for longer than a day.

Dukduks, dolphins and dancing

I was very sad to say goodbye to Madang. It is a great place and I have enjoyed my time here immensely. If you have to leave though, then not a bad way to do it is to pop into Rabaul on the island of East New Britain, and then Nusa Lik island in New Ireland on the way home. They are off to the north of the PNG mainland, heading towards the Solomons and they are quite incredible. There is very little tourism yet they offer amazing landscapes, culture and wildlife.

Fo ur of us (fourpela white meris from Madang) headed off to ENB via Port Moresby. Having lunch at the Gateway Hotel near POM airport en route was very exciting for us and we revelled in the simple pleasures of a decent Caesar salad, a laksa and some reasonable coffee, and as soon as we hit Kokopo in East New Britain we knew we were going to like it. It definitely felt safer than Madang, and actually had a functioning provincial government which delivered roads without potholes, an absence of betelnut spit stains on the ground, some decently maintained buildings, and a market that was organised into different sections with signposts – amazing after the shemozzle of Madang!



We stayed in Kokopo, a pretty recently developed town which grew rapidly when nearby Rabaul was devastated in the mid 90s by the dual explosions of Tavurvur and Vulcan volcanoes on opposite sides of the bay. Vulcan erupted for ‘only’ a month, and that side of town is coming back to life, but the main old town was and continues to be subjected to ash from Tavurvur (‘the big stink’) which steams almost constantly, and last spewed out acidic ash on the town as recently as 3 weeks ago. It is a stunning place, but eerie to see the remains of the buildings which collapsed under the weight of the ash (the Rabaul Hotel is still operating and is one of the few buildings saved thanks to the efforts of its staff who swept the ash off its roofs for days). The vault of what used to be the main bank also remains; its reinforced walls an enduring advert to somebody’s construction skills. The forests of dead trees, black dirt and smoking mountain are in stark contrast to the busy harbour where boats from around the world still dock with their goods or to launch their goldmining expeditions.


We hired a boat and sailed to the base of Tavurvur. The trip was a delight – I have never seen so many dolphins, dozens and dozens of them around our boat in every direction, then the looming presence of the volcano belching clouds of white smoke, steaming water and bubbling beach; local islanders harvesting megapode eggs in deep hand-dug sand trenches which could collapse in on them at any moment (there are frequent deaths as the holes collapse and the men are buried alive); red sea water; Japanese tunnels and abandoned artillery on the beaches of smooth black sand. And not another tourist around.




As our boat pushed off the shore where the men collect the megapode eggs, one of them climbed up high then mimed a dukduk dance, and shook his stick at us while making high-pitched shrieks and laughing. It was brilliant.


Two of our number, plus Henry our guide climbed halfway up the volcano until they had to turn back (they had reached a hot spot and it was getting quite dangerous), whereas Liz and I decided a quarter of the way up was enough for us in our bare feet. Soft ash is pretty hard to climb it turns out…


Another ENB highlight was the dukduk dancers we twice encountered on the streets by chance, the iconic grass-suited, conical-masked representations of the Dukduk God: after a few days there I started to ‘see’ them myself in the shapes of the local trees.
East New Britain and New Ireland both still use shell money in addition to paper currency and there is even a bank where you can exchange your shells for Kina. It feels a world away from Moresby’s bustle.

Getting to 'Go Pinis' Time

It is 4 am and I am awake and listening to the roosters crow. It has been much quieter living here in Kalibobo these last few weeks compared to on campus with the roaming packs of howling dogs, the occasional herds of drunken students fighting or carousing, and the flocks of flying foxes screeching.
I don’t think it was the kakaruks that woke me here... more likely the prospect of having to be up early to see somebody off on the early flight. I am just going along in the car as an extra body for added safety as the airport road can be a bit dodgy in the early mornings. I will be interested to see how the personal safety aspect strikes me when I am back in Australia next week; I have taken it for granted for so much of my life that I have great freedom to roam and be mainly safe, and yet after the initial bumps of the transition, I have settled very quickly into a general acceptance of the restrictions placed on me (or which I choose to place on myself) here to stay safe. After a few days in Port Moresby where crime levels appeared to be much higher (the awareness and concern certainly are and it seems there is a correlation between the fear and the reality), I actually came back to Madang with a sense of its relative safety which shows just how far my standards have changed since my arrival 2 months ago.
The list of ‘basics’ I had become complacent about in Australia is long and varied: well paved roads, car insurance, cheese in the shops, coriander and haloumi, decent red wine, ATMs that work, high-speed internet connections and reliable electricity and water supply, on-line transactions, phone calls that get through, just generally stuff working, the absence of malaria, freedom to walk alone, no need for security guards at home, leaving doors unlocked, healthy eating out options, and last but not least good healthcare.
My list of the positives about PNG are many : the smiles and easy friendliness of the people, the beauty of the environment, tasty organic fruit and veg sold by the people who grew it at markets where you can taste and touch and talk and smell, amazing cultural variety and the richness of the interplay between the different groups, the sense of humour and readiness to laugh of many people and the expressiveness of Tokpisin. These are all obvious. Less overt but just as seductive are the sense of flexibility everyone needs to cope with the unexpected nature of life here, not to mention the fun you can have dodging potholes in the road, the recognition that people need to work together to survive and surmount all the obstacles to daily life and a healthy disregard for the imperatives of email communication and time management in general.

The video here shows some of the students from the Western Highlands province marching at the recent Culture Day. Today is the first day that the upload has worked!

Culture Day Continued

There were too many amazing sights at the cultural day to do it justice with pics from my Blackberry, but unfortunately my camera has carked it so I hope these at least give you a flavour.

I am currently in pack-up mode, with this being my last week in the Land of the Unexpected.... after 2 months which have gone unexpectedly quickly!

Busy bee!

It has been some time since my last post… a result of either being busy or a lack of internet access when not. In the interim, I have been stung by a swarm of killer bees, moved house, had two separate visits from JCU colleagues, spent a few days in the capital, Port Moresby, and attended a cultural show so I am not short on material!


First the bee swarm! Ok, so I only copped 6 stings, and maybe they weren’t killers…. But they were nasty and made me a bit sick… A group of us hiked to Nobnob, setting out from the local village of Benik with some local friends and guides along the track through thick bush. Sam, the owner of much of the land led the way, slashing through obstacles with his big bush knife. In most cases this was exactly what was required but at one point he inadvertently sliced open the home of a bunch of bush bees who were none too happy and proceeded to make their displeasure known to those of us within reach. My language was a bit fruity for a while but I decided I had to at least pretend to be a brave wee soldier when the wee kid with us stopped crying about her stings… but it was a beautiful hike and a wonderful day out, topped off by Sam shinning up a coconut tree at the end to cut down some for us to drink, then casually catching some freshwater crabs for tea!

Last weekend saw me move out of my on-campus accommodations and into hotels while my boss was visiting and I was back as a JCU staff member, which was easy to fall back into, but a little strange to have the two worlds collide. It also showed me that I have clearly moved into ‘PNG time!’
The trip to POM was interesting - after a disturbed night of Lariam-induced insomnia, nightmares, and general bee-bite malaise, it was off at 5.30 am to the airport for the short shuttle flight which should have seen us land at Moresby and have time for a freshen up before our first meeting in town at 11 am. Nobody told Air Niugini that was our plan Our plane was there and was in working order but it had to make an unscheduled side trip to Wewak first before coming back to pick us up. Checking in was interesting as a blackout meant the only light available was from the headlights of a car strategically placed next to the check in counters where we received our handwritten boarding passes. The lack of fans and AC wasn’t too bad until the sun came up when it started getting hot. There was a lounge to wait in but coffee was out of course as there was no power. So it was about 6 hours into the day before we got our first coffee and any food other than a biscuit! After 2 months in Madang, POM was a revelation… it felt like the big city, and I felt like a country hick in my crumpled clothes and toting my billum (which I have since found out I should not have worn in POM as potential thieves can see through the weave to your contents and be tempted.

The time in POM was great, and I enjoyed the luxuries on offer there, such as coffee that didn’t come from a plunger, cheese, a hot stone massage (seriously, it was great!) and drinkable red wine by the glass, not to mention a mattress in my bed a good ten times thicker than I had become accustomed to. The level of unease about crime was considerably higher there than Madang though, and in just 4 days there I encountered one person who had just been held up, and heard of two people working for an AusAID managing contractor I visited who had been car-jacked that day. A staff member of that firm picked me up the next day and had to radio in his whereabouts to their security firm on leaving and arriving at every destination, and even my driver, Yoba could not get home to his settlement safely after around 9 pm. When I came back to Madang it felt like my ‘liklik home’ but also like a breath of fresh air as the sense of surrounding menace dropped dramatically. It must have a psychological impact on people to live with that level of tension constantly, like being in a war zone.

Divine Word University was also host to a wonderful event a few days ago, a cultural show where the students and staff showcased their costumes, songs and dance from their local areas all over PNG. The results were incredible!

I used to care but... things have changed

I stole that title from a great Bob Dylan song.... it sums up perfectly how I felt when my hair straighteners exploded yesterday. I had forgotten to bring a hairdryer with me (too used to there always being one in the nice hotels I usually stay in) but that was alright as I was actually enjoying letting it all hang out ... going a bit wild and hairy! However, I did like the presence of the straighteners, the fact that a couple of times a week I would choose to put in a bit more of an effort if I wished. Anyway, poof! All gone in a wee cloud of smoke, and the best part is I don't care!

I am however intending to hit Kalibobo, Madang's main (only?) clothes emporium. I keep complimenting women on their clothes, only to get the answer, "Kalibobo... 20 toea!" or about 8 cents. Apparently one woman from Canada recently bought a beautiful wedding dress there on the off chance she might ever need it at a snip for under $1. I have decided I am sick of living out of a suitcase after 6 weeks, especially given that my choice of suitably modest clothing was relatively slim pickings in the first place.

This week is an interesting case of worlds colliding as we have had two JCU researchers on campus (though they are currently living in Moresby so I am not sure that counts) and next week will see visits by our DVC and Dean of Research. I had forgotten these researchers were coming this week and got a pleasant surprise when I turned round at morning tea and copped an eyeful of JCU shirts, but it was very nice to catch up with some of my 'wantoks' (though I am using the phrase very loosely as they don't really speak like me!)

Well, tonight I am heading out to a Chinese restaurant. This time I believe it is a proper restaurant but I will let you know!