Suddenly, the whole ritual of the Easter Bunny, chocolate, and a painted egg hunt didn't make much sense with respect to the resurrection of Christ when I tried to explain it to Sally's uncle, Sally, on the porch of his jungle village bush house. Us Westerners sure can be weird. Sally, the uncle, definitely knows about Jesus, most likely better than I do, and eggs and bunny rabbits to boot but I found myself fairly completely unable to make any sort of connection. Can someone please help me out here? Anyhow, it was a happy Easter. We visited a beautiful jungle village where Sally, my friend, has relatives. I spent a couple days there earlier in the week and got a taste of the simple life. Lunch is usually a pile of plantains, still in their skins, barbecued wherever one might happen to be. Anyone got a match? A dip in the lazy river afterward seemed to be a requirement. If I was thirsty there were plenty of coconuts at hand to drink from and everyone carried a handy coconut opener aka bush knife aka two and a half foot saber for just the occasion. Thankfully I am fond of coconut juice. The family I stayed with had an amazing garden with rice, sweet potato, bananas, plantains, yams, kasava, taro, coconuts, and lots of cocoa. Everything was for their own sustenance but the cocoa which they sold in town for good money. I got to help harvest some rice which was surprisingly fun. I guess the novelty of seeing rice coming from the ground and not a bag was enough to get this city boy excited. Afterwards I had the privilege of getting high on buai (beetle nut). I had tried it a few times before with no effect but for whatever reason I this one time I was feeling wicked. Check that one off the list. Locals chew buai more than they drink water. Its pretty fun because you get to chew a big fresh seed thing then dip some stem bit in crushed coral powder and add it to the mix which turns bright red. Just chew and spit, don't swallow. If you have good ingredients and get the mix just right the high should be something like tobacco. There are some fantastically frightening grins waking around all red lipped with black stained teeth from all the buai chewing.
I also fulfilled my snorkeling fantasy. I had been psyching myself up for this moment since I was a kid pretending to be a seal by swimming about at the bottom of our pool in Fresno. I can remember how it felt so lovely to zip around weightless under water. I have been snorkeling many times before and found that not much is more interesting to look at than tropical marine life. My father was an exceptional swimmer and when he went snorkeling he would ditch the snorkel and dive deeper than I could comprehend to look for shells. I wanted to do the same, to dive deep deep deep and be one of the fish, to look around as if I lived there too, like a scuba diver without the bulky gear and noisy breathing. I had a good go at it in Zanzibar but the coral I found wasn't quite the spectacular scene I was looking for. Anyhow, I found what I was looking for. We took a small taxi dingy out to a small island preserve to have a swim, a picnic, and spend the day. I had heard the coral in PNG is some of the best in the world and since most of it is scheduled to die soon (something about climate change) I was eager to get a look. It was the spectacular scene I dreamed about with sprawling plates and people sized barrels of coral. Squigglies were everywhere with the most delicious bright colors on the funniest of shapes all swaying and swimming about in the weightless underwater world that is the ocean. I got to take my time and deep breaths, one after the other. It is a fun game to play, skin diving. Just as you are running out of breath you spot something you just have to come back with more oxygen to have a look at.
While its sea gardens and village life is quite fantastic, Papua New Guinea also has an ugly side, the towns. There are only three or four places worth calling a town in the whole of the country and they have all turned into centers of crime and pestilence. Its not that Fresno or even SF doesn't have similar criminals, we all lock our doors and plenty of neighborhoods have barred windows, but here in PNG they define the towns. People from the bush, mostly men, migrate to the towns looking for work and when there is none they turn to crime - robbing houses, holding up cars and buses, dirty deeds for hire. A fantastic tension develops between the the jobless locals and the wealthy expats cruising about in new trucks running construction and mining companies and the like. A major industry in Papua New Guinea is security. Fences and armed guards are found everywhere. My friends fairly rural dwelling, just outside of the mountain town of Goroka, recently acquired full time security guards after some sketchy incidents. A house Sally and I were house sitting was broken into while we were enjoying the beaches in another town. The security guard was tied up. Two of the thieves were caught and are in jail awaiting trial. Apparently the robbery was a drunken operation and not a very tight one at that.
In the midst of it all I managed to get some engineering done. Sally has a fledgling dried fruit export business, bananas and pineapples, and I got to help her design a drying chamber for the new coffee husk burning hot air blower she got from Brazil. We spent a week and a half building the furnace with a prototype drying chamber getting sidetracked every which way with electrical issues. Can you believe that after a masters degree in mechanical engineering I didn't know the difference between three phase and single phase electric motors? But now I do. I'll never be fooled again. So that was fun being useful and learning a bit.
Now it is time to come home. The flights are booked, an insane four day blitz of seven flights to get from point A to point B, Port Moresby, Cairns, Guam, Tokyo, Honolulu, Seattle, San Francisco. Credit card sky miles aren't all they are worked up to be. I have got a day in Guam and a day in Honolulu to kill so maybe I can get some more snorkeling in.
Next blog will be written from Fresno, the exciting finale. It will be time to make up all sorts of far fetched conclusions about my adventure so I can derive some meaning from it. So stay tuned!
Its been great PNG. I'll be back some day, hopefully before all the coral is gone.
No comments:
Post a Comment