Day 2
Takeoff from Sydney
April 20, 2019 in Australia ⋅ ⛅ 24 °C
We arrived in an overnight flight in Port Moresby at 5am. We fucking made it to Papua New Guinea. At the beginning we tried to get an earlier flight to Lae, but obviously the locals weren’t able to make this rebooking happen, although we got close. Check-in had just closed when we got there for the 7am flight.
Instead we used the additional time to go to Poolside, a crazy brunch place next to the airport with a great view over the sea and runway and a super awesome breakfast with the best passion fruit and ananas we have had so far. We arrived there just before sunrise and had a nice table directly with a view to the runway. Tim had a swim which was a wise decision as this was the last proper shower we had for a while thereafter. Finishing up, we took the 9:50am flight to Lae and landed at 11am. In Lae, Etto, who had arrived the day before, and Defol, our “guide” that we had gotten to know via sending a message to a random person on Facebook, picked us up with a 4x4. Some porters were joining us so there were like 10-12 people in the car.
So how this trip has gotten into place was the following: we had gotten to know this crazy German teacher in the desert in Iran who apparently visited PNG in the 90s and had told us awesome stories about it. Doing our research, we found the Black Cat Track that is close to Lae and we wanted to hike. It’s an old hike from WWII where Aussie and Japanese soldiers had a big battle. It crosses rivers with heavy rapids and all along the way there are war relics like plane wrecks or weapons. Unfortunately, in that hike recently some people were killed by local rivaling communities and some people had gotten their head chopped off. We still wanted to hike it and thus started texting random people on Instagram and Facebook because no official sources would offer this trip. Defol ran this Facebook Page “Morobe Province Tourism”. He back in the days did more prominent tours in Port Moresby and he invited us to come and bring us to the mountains. We were actually his first ever group visiting the region. Planning happened via E-Mail and we had randomly transferred a huge amount of money to some guy from Facebook. Usually response only happened once every few days because the people setting up the trips usually lived in villages and only had access to the internet once back in the city. So we were happy when we realized that there was somebody waiting for us and this was not all a complete scam.
We went to Lae where we had a snack, bought some food in the supermarket for the track, left our bags in Etto’s hotel, had a last proper toilet and then drove into the wilderness for roughly 5 hours. We went offroad pretty quickly and the nature was beautiful.
On the way we made a few stops to chew betelnut. Betelnut is this snack they put in their mouth to then chew it and bite on mustard that they dip in lime. They do it so long until it turns red and then spit it out. It has a similar effect like cocaine on them and that’s the reason why they all have black and dirty teeth and a red disgusting mouth.
Arriving in the first village in the middle of nowhere called Boana Station, there was supposed to come the chairman of the national tourism bureau in order to officially welcome us. However this guy doesn’t take cars and just walks through the country and there is no service anywhere around, so obviously these guys didn’t coordinate to actually make that happen. Originally also some kind of newspaper reporters wanted to report about that but they were neither able to coordinate that as well. Still we made a stop in Boana Station which was surprisingly organized and well set up. It was also the last time we had phone service for the next few days.
We continued and arrived at 7pm in the dark in the middle of nowhere. We got out of the car and walked a bit further to reach the village where Defol showed us the “room”. It was a little hut with nothing in there so we slept on the floor. In the evening the whole village came to welcome us as they had never seen a whiteman. They wanted to make a fire below our house (which was out of wood?!), so we made a fire and then had a chat with these guys for a few hours before we went to bed.
They told us how their community is set up with the community leaders, the elderly and church leaders and they were chewing betelnut the whole time. So Papua New Guinea is a country with many distinct tribes that have fought against each other for centuries, only somewhat recently they are trying to create a Papuan identity. The Sing Sings (described later) were for example introduced to make the tribes dance together with each of their local traditions instead of fighting against each other. There are over 300 languages spoken and they can’t talk to each other. Also, only somewhat recently they created a Pidgin language that was understood by more widespread Papuans. It has similarities to English. Having so many local tribes means also that there are very different cultural traditions. They were all crazy in different ways. In the highlands there are still quite some cannibal tribes. The tribe around Lae was known for once a year burying out their dead people, dressing them with their old clothes and hanging out with them for a day (!). That’s also why PNG was pretty long not colonized by Europeans because the first missionaries that entered the island were all eaten and the tribes created a reputation of being batshit crazy.
So the village women prepared a chicken for dinner but we only ate potatoes with ketchup and drank water with purification pills. You can’t drink any water here so we needed to bring these pills that purifies the water. Lio and Tim obviously didn’t know anything about that but luckily Etto knew and had taken enough. Otherwise we had been in deep shit by now (like, literally). Food wise all of these tribes here live self sustaining, they don’t buy anything in supermarkets. So it’s a lot of vegetables and for special occasions also meat from animals that they hold. But definitely fewer than in Western society. The supermarkets were actually really expensive: we bought a few pasta and rice cans with very basic supplements and got rid of 100 EUR.
Afterwards we went to bed already impressed with what had happened that day.Read more
