PNG Update: Ready to go back to the valley
Added to website: 27 July 2007
PNG Update
Ready to go back to the valley.
Sitting upstairs in The Old Lae Yacht Club. Writing by the light of the Turtle Project offices. We’ve taken over the little empty office to put our stuff in as the turtle season is not until October and the project is suspended until then. We have been waiting for a boat for days and it is getting a bit frustrating. There was a huge storm the other night and so only essential journeys were made by sea. We are now waiting for a boat from Bris Kanda who are sending a business advisor to our village to help with some ventures. The corner boys have a little store where they sell bits and bobs for people. They have salt and noodles and betel nut and evil cigarettes. They also have coconuts for those that can’t be bothered to collect their own. The store is just a table on the corner with a collection of boys from the boy’s house manning it at all times with a nearly-tuned radio. We will let the adviser talk to them and the guys at the cocoa fermentery where they buy cocoa beans and roast them over a wood fire to sell when they can find a boat to send it on.
I am looking forward to going back to the village where there are no cars or pickpockets or electricity. The food is straight from the gardens or picked in the forest. We grub around all day doing stuff then return to endless greetings and laughing kids. Our house is made from wood and sago and creaks and moves as you walk around. We usually catch a rat or two in the night, but they are pretty cute, so we let them go after a while in the mornings. I like to go and collect fire wood, which involves gnawing away at long-fallen trees with an axe and wrapping them in string from the bush. You carry as much as you can as it’s quite a long way back.
I find the bats very appealing and look forward to catching new ones. There was an amazing one in the net at Jure that looked like a gremlin. I miss washing in the stream and spend many a contemplative moment looking up at the birds in the trees, pouring cool water over myself and feeling the tadpoles nibbling my toes. We collect water from a spring higher up. In the evenings we speak a bit of rubbish or some serious stuff, or Pisin to people like Zinny who said he is going to make me a canoe when I get back. I’ll try and help him as well as helping the excellent Mr Tim to build a new bit on his house if I can fit it in.
I better put my mossie net up soon. We are sleeping on the floor of the old club, which is like an abandoned warehouse with various boys and girls and village councillors sleeping in different corners. There are security guards at all hours and the odd mouse and cockroach. The guys that work here are all a good laugh and work setting up community-based managed fishing areas when their funding comes through. We had bread and stuff tonight for dinner and spoke to a guy from across the bay, who remembers when Lae was a more pleasant place. Last night we splashed out on an amazing barbie at the New Lae Yacht club, as we don’t get much meat in the valley. Turned out to be giving away free glasses of beer as well, which was good news, as we have no beers in the valley.
If we go tomorrow we will load the banana boat with all our kit, and stuff we have bought, and leave all the city grime and nonsense behind. On the way in last time I smelt an unusual aroma, the fumes from a car. I realised this was something I had not tasted for over a month.
The boat will chop on along the coast of trees and islands and little houses in the distance with the odd canoe bobbing about as another banana boat passes by. We will stop at one of the islands to find a tree and change the fuel and eat some things. After almost too much time and a droning in the ears the water becomes smoother and we cruise up the river to shouts and waves from the banks. It will go dark soon and we’ve just got time to unload the boat with millions of helpers who appear from nowhere. Then we are home sitting under the house with a gang of grinning faces in time for tea and the evening chorus of frogs and other noisy beasties.
Andy Farmer
