Boana

In the morning we had our breakfast before we said goodbye to Anton and took a car back to Lae. This time we only had a pick up and we had to sit on the loading area of the pick up with roughly 10 people. The others sitting, we were standing while holding tight to the front of the car and putting disco tunes. That was quite a fun ride. Also we made a stop at a river that was apparently the most rapid one within PNG although we don’t know if this info is verified. After a few hours drive we eventually got back to Lae, in between of course stacking up our Betelnut inventory.
On the way to Lae we stopped by the airport. During the hike Lio had found that our tickets for the next flight were issued for a wrong day. Turned out that we had booked for a completely different day, probably due to UI issues on the website of the airline which looked like a complete scam and didn’t really work properly. After some negotiation with the people at the airport however they reissued a ticket for us for some verbally negotiated price.
We dropped all the porters in Lae in different areas of the city and then went to visit Defol’s boss in the tourism bureau. There obviously wasn’t much to do in the tourism bureau but meeting some people and doing the remaining payment. When we handed over the money Defol started doing pictures of this. He posted that on Facebook with “bringing in the foreign currencies'', that was hilarious. So we took another selfie together holding roughly 2k€ in cash.
We couldn’t yet continue with the rest of the trip for some - until today - unknown reason (something with the boat we think). So while Defol was taking care of whatever it was, we went with his boss to the yacht club next door and he invited us for some burgers. This definitely was the only regular food we found during our two weeks in Papua. The yacht club was a little club of Aussie expats working in the military base. On that day there was the ANZAC day so military parades happened especially in the morning. As said, there was a big war during WWII in that region. Aussies fought against Japanese and since then there is this military base and military cemetery where they had the ceremony.
After a few hours we were finally off for a 3h ride on a little banana boat heading to Buingim Village. We were a total of roughly 10 people on the boat.
To explain what you need to do in order to reach this village: take 3 flights to reach PNG, from where you take a flight to Lae, from where you have to hike, from where you have to drive 100km with a boat because roads do not exist any more. You do need to commit to reach this place. And we were the first ones to ever do so.
We obviously put music on the boat but closely before we arrived in the village Defol asked us to put it off. We were a bit surprised because we had literally zero expectations of what would be coming now, Defol had not communicated anything to us. We thought we were going to another random village saying hi and sleeping. We had already questioned why we were still going: driving on a boat for 3h just to overnight for a few hours to then return to the airport again didn’t make much sense any more. Luckily, we couldn’t be more wrong.
Arriving in the village, the whole village of >1.000 people was waiting for us, dressed in local costumes, singing local songs, dancing local dances. It was unreal, like Christopher Columbus must have felt when he first arrived in South America. The tribal elder officially welcomed us while the whole village was singing to an orchestra of people using shells as flutes (!). After getting out of the boat and the official welcoming, the whole crowd led us singing through the village to the “village square” where they put three chairs for us in the middle with a wide circle around where the village people would stand. Next to the chairs with shells they created big letters saying “feel at home”.
This whole procedure took 1 hour, until we sat on the chairs and the whole village in a radius of 50m around us. It was unreal and we could have imagined that this was now the part where they would put us over a fire and eat us, like in some stupid movie. There are still quite some cannibal tribes in PNG after all and the way this trip was being set up was not exactly official (we had just written some guy on Facebook). Instead, they started a show for us with each part of the local village performing their traditional tribal dances and songs, 15 tribes of each 5 minutes. It’s called Sing Sing. The whole village was singing to these dances. We were completely overwhelmed. Defol meanwhile took pictures and videos for us.
After the last group finished, the village people came closer and Defol held a speech again that he would like to support the village and try to bring tourists. We were again the test case, the first ever people to experience this. We held a speech afterwards that Defol translated. How was the village chosen in the first place? Apparently it’s the village where Defol’s mother is from and where his sister is living.
After another hour of being nice with the people, taking pictures with them, talking to them, buying some shell bracelets, we went to a buffet with awesome fresh fruits. We continued with the boat to a little lagoon where we could “shower” and/or chill in the ocean. The lagoon directly ended at the beach, it was a great spot for sunset. We went to the beachside in the village again where they had prepared a crazy dinner with vegetables, rice, a little meat and many fruits. Meanwhile we were talking to the tribes elderly about what to make sure to take care of if they want to bring tourists (like avoiding mass tourism to preserve their unique culture and staying eco friendly). Also they told us that their local water pipe was not working any more so half of the population of the village currently didn’t get fresh water. What was also funny is that their local language was very close to German. The weekdays for example are the same as in German (Montag, Dienstag, Mittwoch, …).
After speaking for hours, they brought us first to another washing place (basically a little pipe that ended above a little creek) and then to the sleeping place. Now, this was another weird story: we arrived at a little hut that was basically only a roof with banana leaves and no walls, like a Palapa. In the middle they had put more leaves to make it a bit softer and we started unpacking and putting our sleeping bags. Lying down in our sleeping bags we realized that the remaining 20-30 people were not going to leave now but waited next to us until we fell asleep, literally 2-3 metres away from us and watching us fall asleep. This was the second situation where we thought now we might get eaten. They kept discussing tourism in their area and we actually made it to fall asleep and did not get eaten after all.Læs mere