PNG: The Last Hurrah.

I only have 3 classes today, so I've decided to sit down and try and purge the last of the blog-able material from my pictures and notebooks. Here goes:


After about a week or so, we bade a fond farewell to Pema and its school, and went back down the Waria to Siagara, where we would spend one night before moving out. Of course, the Saigarans(?) were not content to merely host us and feed us amazing delicious food (both of which they did), but they also put on a dance for us. Just after dark, a bonfire fueled by huge, dried palm branches was ignited in the open space near the guesthouse, and the adults and children of the village did some dances for us. They started with a traditional dance to celebrate the crows that come to watch the planting of gardens, then the village children did a dance about the song-pidgeons that live near the river.

It was quite dark, so it was difficult to take any decent pictures. These were my best attempts:





After watching the dances, we went back to the guesthouse for a night of singing and playing games. The next morning, one of the villagers had brought some herbs to show us. It turned out to be none other than Cinchona, the tree responsible for the production of quinine. The tree is exotic to the island of New Guinea, but is now widespread and is used by the Zia the same way that everyone else uses it- to make malaria medicine. Here's a pic of the plant itself:



We were invited to try chewing a leaf: the taste was spectacularly bitter and very difficult to wash out afterwords. Presumably British soldiers shared this sentiment, which is why they mixed their quinine tonic water with gin.

After sampling the quinine, we left Saigara, much to our surprise, on a truck. Apparently the village had worked with others create and maintain a road between Saigara and the coast, that none of us had been aware of. We bumped along for a few hours before we stopped briefly at another school that NICO had worked on in the village of Toyare (toe-YAH-rei). Toyare was built right by the sea-side, and the winds coming in from the ocean helped to dissipate some of the brutal heat we had felt inland. Sand and palm trees were everywhere- it was a beautiful little village:



Here's Tsuneo-san playing with bubbles with the kids. He advertised himself as a sanguma, or sorcerer, and did some truly impressive magic tricks for the villagers. At any given time he had some sort of trick or novelty that he was ready to produce at a moments notice. Included was a ready supply of bubble mix, which wasn't really magical, but was in short enough supply in the jungle that the bubbles were a great source of amusement for the children:



Here's the lot of us sitting in the shade with our coconuts, after the welcoming ceremony:



I was sad to have not been able to stay in Toyare for more than a few hours, because it was really a gorgeous little town (the people were also very nice, but that was the same everywhere in the Waria Valley). However, we were scheduled to return to Bau and take a break from traveling for a bit, so we took off around lunchtime and made our way back to Bau.

The afternoon and evening in Bau were spent general recuperating from the rest of the trip, and trying to get our soggy, disgusting clothes to dry in the hot sun and sea breeze; clothesline space was at a premium:



We pulled all our clothes down off the line in the evening, as a threatening bank of clouds moved in (borne on a wind that blessedly kept the mosquitoes and sand-flies at bay), and by nightfall the baby sister of a hurricane was blasting away at the beachfront. It annihilated the sandcastle I'd built that afternoon, and brought in a fresh wave of grey, formless clouds. This, and a heavy, wet, windless heat were what greeted us the following morning. This was our last full day in the jungle, and the plan was to go on tour of two area schools, followed by a trip to Bau Island, just for fun.

The first school we visited took us through a by now familiar routine- all the children came out and smiled shy smiles at us, the schoolmaster gave a speech of gratitude for our support, and we were festooned with shell and seed necklaces. I didn't get any pictures of the school itself, but getting to the school took us a good distance along the coast through the center of Bau, which was interesting unto itself.

This picture could have been taken almost anywhere in Bau- thatched huts surrounded by gardens of select jungle plants were de rigeur:



One plant that I couldn't quite wrap my mind around were these traveler's palms- which look to me like someone took a leafy banana plant and either clove it down the sides, or perhaps squished it between their massive thumb and index finger. They were popular plants, growing in most of the gardens that we saw.



This tree house under construction was unusual (there weren't any other tree houses in all of Waria, as far as I could see), but was too cool to be ignored.



This is just a view down one of the tree-lined avenues of Bau:



This is a closer look at one of the outrigger canoes that were so ubiquitous on the river. This particular one was parked by the coast, as they work pretty well in the ocean, too.



After walking through Bau and visiting the first school, we waited at the mouth of the Bau lagoon (where we were almost eaten alive by sand flies) for the motor boats to take us down the coast to the final school we would visit.

This final school was in a very small village (whose name escapes me, sadly), and had prepared a massive welcome for us (I was later told that we may have been the first direct contact with foreigners that most of the village had). We were led up to a blue tarp draped between two buildings, and told to wait for a bit. Then, the dancers hidden on the other side of the tarp simultaneously screamed and started hammering their drums for all they were worth- which scared the living daylights out of everyone in the group (the villagers who were in on it thought it was hilarious- which it really was).

After allowing our pulses to recover, there was a welcoming procession, followed by a self-introduction to the villagers, followed by receiving gifts from the children
of our respective clans. This was the initial procession:



Here I am, covered in paint and presents:



They also fed us lunch, which included these small bananas. The size and shape were novel, as was the flavor- very sweet with a stronger than usual acid tang.



This was our first encounter with people actually using the ritual masks for which PNG is so famed- I have no idea of their significance, but they were worn during one of the dances. This was the picture that turned out alright, but each individual mask was a little different, and all were a little bit grotesque. Very cool.



Immediately before we departed, we were invited to have a look inside one of the classrooms of the school. The children were still both excited and befuddled by our arrival, and peered around curiously while someone explained the ins and outs of the school to us:



This village was an amazing experience, but honestly by the end of the whole affair I was exhausted and ready to head to Bau Island for some relaxing on the beach.

The first thing you notice upon landing on Bau Island is that the beach has no sand- it is composed entirely of the remains of corral and seashells (perhaps after a few hundred millennia there will be something here like what we now see at Dover):



This is a generic view of the beach and the adjoining reef. The surf actually broke about 100 yards away on the edge of the corral, with the waves coming in to the beach at little more than a couple inches high.



One terrifying thing about this beach (and one of the reasons I spent most of my time collecting shells on land rather than snorkeling), is that this reef contains two rather lethally venomous species: the stonefish and the cone shell snail, which can kill you either with excruciating nerve destruction, or suffocation, respectively (take your pick). Interestingly, my shell collecting guide (he knew all the good places to look) claimed to have been stung a couple times by stonefish, but that the local village healer had managed to effectively chemically patch him up. This is no mean feat, assuming that the healer didn't have access to the antivenin (which they likely did not), and that even after the antivenin the venom usually causes permanent nerve damage (not apparent in my guide). I have no idea what plant or combination thereof the healer used, but Western doctors still have a couple tricks to learn, apparently.

Another thing about these beaches was that they were crawling with masses of hermit crabs. Pick up almost any shell that looked to be in decent repair, and you would likely find it to be inhabited, as was the case with this fellow:



Another fun biological discovery by the docks were a goodly number of brittle stars. The look like spoiled seaweed, but actually have a pleasantly rough texture, and moved in some really cool ways:




We spent one last night in Bau, and then bayed farewell to the jungle once and for all (very sadly). Everyone got into larger, more powerful banana boats for the trip home. Here we are parked at an island for a short break during the 6 hour boat ride (and all that in the tropical Sun).



The same island where we stopped was also a popular play location for the local boys- they had collected an number of giant clam shells, one of which is pictured here:



I think that this shell was a pretty standard size (about 2 feet across)- but in one village I saw a shell that you could bathe a small child in. It probably would have taken three men to lift it (or one or two village men). After the boat ride we spent an uneventful night in Lae, during which the only thing I really did beside a little shopping was try PNG's local beer- South Pacific, which tasted about like any weak but not overly disagreeable lager I've had anywhere else.

The last thing we did in PNG was visit the capital of Port Moresby, which as I've mentioned holds the dubious title of World's Most Dangerous City. We never really left the bus, except to go shopping in well-guarded areas, so it didn't seem so bad from my perspective. The city definitely had a number of readily apparent problems, similar to what we saw in Lae: large population of hopeless-looking and unemployed young people, run down buildings and public works, and a general feeling of malaise pervaded everything. I tried to take a picture to capture some of it, but I think it's an immersive experience, that it would take at least a more skilled photographer than I to capture. Suffice to say, I would go back to the jungle again if I could, but I won't go to Port Moresby again unless I need to.

One thing worthy of note in the capital was the Papua New Guinea Houses of Parliament, which featured an impressive facade:



The other thing worthy of note was the native artifacts store we visited. We had also visited one in Lae, where the owner was convivial and told us all the stories behind the artifacts. She also seemed to be well-liked by her staff. The fellow in Port Moresby, by comparison, had a much more colonial air about him that I found rather disagreeable, although his shop undoubtedly had better selection- as seen in the masks below (each about 5 feet tall):



And that, as they say, is that. The width and breadth of experiencing PNG, even for just two weeks, isn't really something that can be captured in a couple blog posts. Suffice to say, the profundity of the experience was in no way proportional to the amount of time spent, although I would have liked to have spent more, and this trip is probably one of the best things I've every done, period. Short of writing a book about it, you'll just have to take my word that it was staggering, and if anyone wants I'll be happy to share more of my pictures with you (the ones in the blog are but the tip of the iceberg, even if it is the tip that turned out the best). I also took several videos that I can't embed for bandwidth reasons, but will be happy to share as well. That does it for the PNG blogging- from here on out it's all going to be Japan again. Next will be bits about my recent traveling and hiking during Golden Week.