However, a week after the fact I realized that I need to get it out before it all becomes covered in layers of Japanese cognitive goo (and that stuff gets everywhere).
That being said-
Papua New Guinea
First off, I had always wanted to visit New Guinea ever since taping and repeatedly watching a documentary about its animals, plants, and peoples run by none other than David Attenborough. Sitting on our basement couch in Denver, the Jungles inhabited by tribal peoples, fantastic plants, and impressively poisonous animals all just seemed terribly exotic. However, as go so many notions about travel, so went my plans to travel to New Guinea. I developed other interests and taped other documentaries, and, at the age of 10, actually got to go to far-away Florida to touch a real palm tree (my botanical cup ranneth-over). Skipping ahead 13 years, I was abruptly offered a chance to go to Papua New Guinea- not just the normal Papua New Guinea stuff (whatever that might mean), but actually into the jungle where tourists can't even go! All I had to do was participate in the Niigata Charity Organization's charity musical, and cough up $2,000(ish- give or take for the exchange), and I, too, could go to New Guinea. In spite of the massive investment of time and money, I jumped at the chance, and it's one of the best things I've ever done.
Before I talk about the actual particulars of the trip, however, here's a bit on New Guinea, or rather Papua New Guinea, or rather Niu Guini.
It was probably also from that documentary that I acquired the habit of referring to Papua New Guinea simply as "New Guinea." I think that this is because I'm used to thinking of the whole island in David Attenborough's ecological terms, and not used to thinking about the political situation there. However, politics they have, and every time I've referred to the trip as going to just "New Guinea" I have been immediately and violently corrected. Rather than viciously correcting the same people about politico-semantic distinctions in their own diction (you mean you returned to the United States, right, because America has many meanings), I decided to keep the peace and just try and say "PNG" instead (which is also an acronym commonly used in Papua New Guinea). Hence, hereafter, Papua New Guinea (or just Niu Guini in Tok Pisin- more on that in a bit) shall simply be known as "PNG."
One of the first things for anyone to learn about PNG is that it is home to %12 percent of the World's languages. Languages usually aren't talked about in terms of raw percentages, probably because most of the time it's not worth the trouble. Even the most eclectic of countries don't have more than a couple tens of languages (China boasts 10, if you count each iteration of Chinese as separate language, and 11 if you count Tibetan). PNG, by contrast, has no fewer than 832 mutually unintelligible tongues that are yet living and being spoken in various corners of the jungle. This staggering number has both made the place a sort of Mecca PhD Linguistics students, and has necessitated the adoption of a lingua franca as the various tribes integrated into a coherent administrative collective.
The language that came forth was Tok Pisin, or "Talk Pidgin," and as the name would suggest it is a pidgin language. I'll let those of you interested in the structure of the language linguistically just read the Wiki articles for yourselves, but I would like to post some examples of Tok Pisin here just to give you an idea of the sound (these are better read aloud, courtesy of Wikitravel):
Hello.
Gude. (goo-DAY)
I'm [very] sorry.
Mi sori [tumas]. (mee SOH-ree [too-MAHS])
I don't understand.
Mi no harim tok bilong yu. (mee noh HAH-reem tawk bee-LONG yoo)
...and so on, until you have a language. The rest of the phrases are available here. I also got a picture of Matthew 5 in a Tok Pisin Bible (a copy of which is officially going on my want list, if anyone's feeling charitable), which will be in a later post.
The climate in PNG (and probably Indonesian New Guinea, for that matter) is hot, muggy, and wet; the equator being only a stone's throw to the North. The land itself is frequently hilly and broken, and is overwhelming covered by dense jungles. There are two seasons; a dry and a wet, although I couldn't tell you in which one I visited (they have very different standards for "dry" down there).
In terms of development, PNG has a lot of work to be done. The tribal peoples live similarly to how they have in the past, but are beginning to import more and more technologies from the "developed world," a trend which, like so many places where it's playing out today, has been both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, most tribes have gotten along fine for literally thousands of years without modern niceties, but the benefits from medical and transportation technologies are simply too large to be ignored. Unfortunately, creeping modernization has also caused massive, unsustainable management of the country's plentiful natural resources.
The final bit of acquainting that needs to take place here is with our travel itinerary, which I will refer to frequently without re-posting maps or explanations every time. The first leg of the trip was obviously by air from Tokyo to Port Moresby. The second leg was from Port Moresby to Lae by air:
From Lae travel was primarily by boat- we went down the coast to a sea-side village cum town called Bau:
From Bau it gets more complicated- we went by boat up the Waria River to the village of Saigara, where we stayed a night. Then we traveled further up-river to Pema, the site of the new school building and the place where we spent the majority of our time. After departing Pema, we boated back down to Saigara, then went by truck to another coastal village called Toyare where the Niigata Charity Organization (hereafter NICO) had built another school. From Toyare, we boated back to Bau, and from Bau we went back the same way we had come.
I am hoping that between those maps and the plethora of pictures I took (not evident in this post), I hope that a complete-ish illustration of my PNG trip will emerge. This ends the introductory post- I will be adding many many photos of many many things, people, and places in future posts as time allows me to, so keep an eye out. With any luck, I'll even be able to get another post in today, but I'm not sure how that will work out with my schedule.
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