Hagen, where one of the mission people kindly offered to drive us to the Baptist mission guest house, where we could spend the night. The driver turned out to be an old resident of Kompiam who had gone to medical school in Australia, become a doctor, married an Australian woman, and returned to PNG, where he settled in Mt. Hagen. Local villager makes good, I guess. He still had some ties with Kompiam, though, since it turned out that he owned most of Kompiam's trade stores!
The Baptist guest house turned out to be a very nice place, which was fortunate - I needed someplace quiet where I could just relax for a bit. Like most of the places I stayed in in PNG, it was in theory a hostel, where singles were supposed to share rooms with other singles, but in practice was empty enough so that I got a private room.
Saturday, noon: I went wandering around Mt. Hagen, visiting the weekly market. Mt Hagen has an evil reputation in PNG, as one of the towns where the 'rascal' (crime) problem is the worst. There were guards in all the stores, and several times people who I met on the street warned me that 'bad men' were around, and that I should be careful. Hagen is often described as being like the 'Wild West', meaning that police presence is minimal, and the only thing that really stops criminals is the fear of vigilantes (killing 'rascals' is a very popular pastime in PNG, since it's about the only time you can kill someone and not worry about legal or tribal reprisals ...).
Anyways, the market was colorful, and I managed to escape without being attacked. Back at the hostel, I finally managed to reach the tour operator in Australia, and fill them in on what was happening. They said they would try get in touch with my trekking group [they failed], and suggested that I hang around Hagen until Tuesday, and then fly to the town of Wewak, which was the ending point of the trek. They offered to pay the airfare from Hagan to Wewak, but nothing else, which annoyed me (since I had paid for an all-expenses tour, I thought I deserved to have my expenses paid in Hagen!).
Sunday and Monday: I spent these two days at a country lodge near Mt. Hagen, generally just hanging around. On Sunday, I went to mass at the local Catholic church, where I heard an Australian priest deliver a sermon in Pidgin English, which was full of references to 'strongpela tok' (= 'strong-fellow talk' - Pidgin is a lot of fun!). I noticed that several of the local villagers who had told me they were going to church were nowhere to be seen - it turned out they had stopped somewhere for a quick game of 'spears' (= darts), and were still playing, roaring drunk, 5 hours later. Just like back home in the US! I happened to ask one villager who wasn't completely drunk what he thought of the coastal tribes (remembering that Samson, the Kompiam DM who was from the coast, had told me that the coastal tribes were much more civilized), and he replied that they were real pansies, since they used sorcery to fight their tribal wars, whereas real men (= Highlanders) fought wars the proper way, with spears, bows, and arrows.
Tuesday: I arrived at Wewak from Mt Hagen (another Twin Otter) at noon. During the flight, I sat next to a fairly grubby looking national who told me he was a gold dealer with 2 kilos of gold hidden in his boots! There were several big gold rushes on in PNG (I had by this time met several stone-age looking natives who proudly showed me their penicillin jars half-full of gold, and heard plenty of stories about newly rich 10-year olds buying fancy sports cars, crashing them on their first drive, and then promptly buying another one ...) and he apparently had just spent three weeks buying gold at one of the gold fields. The gold he bought for $10,000 at the fields could be sold for $30,000 back in the capital city of Port Moresby - provided that no one knifed him and stole the gold in the meantime! Being a gold buyer was definitely a high-risk, high reward job.
Before I left Mt. Hagen, I went to the MAF (Missionary Aviation Fellowship) desk and asked if my companions were scheduled to fly out from Yengis on the twice-weekly flight to Mt. Hagen. The woman very helpfully told me that she doubted it, seeing as the flight had been cancelled because the plane was 'buggerup' ...
Wewak was a small town on the PNG coast, near the Indonesian border. It had a jungle climate - hot and steamy, but beautiful tropical beaches. Apparently, it was also the 'in' place for travellers, as it was the only place in PNG outside of Port Moresby where I ran into other foreign tourists.
Around 6PM, Grant, the agent from the tour company who had done most of the 'organizing' for my trip, showed up with another tour group. I went over and started to tell him about the group's misadventure, only to find out that he had absolutely no interest in this. He said he was on vacation now with his girlfriend, just another customer on a tour, and he was not going to do any worrying about my group.
Wednesday: I joined the other group on a trip to the village of Tambunum, where my group was supposed to be finishing up and the other group was supposed to start a canoe trip from. It was quite a ride, in a Land Rover type vehicle over some of the worst tracks I've ever seen. In fact, every half-hour or so I would reassure myself that the track couldn't possibly get worse - but it inevitably did. There were several points when I thought we would have to turn back, but our driver (one of the best 4WD jockeys I've ever seen) somehow always got through.
Tambunum village was known as a 'crafts factory'. It was the biggest craft-producing village in the biggest craft-producing area of PNG. The locals were even building a small lodge where they would put up tourists who wanted to buy crafts directly from the craftsmen. The lodge wasn't ready, though, so we slept in a longhouse - a large open house which was on stilts. The most interesting part of the longhouse was the open ground beneath it, where all the cooking was done, crafts were made and put on display, people hung around and socialized, etc. The longhouse interior, in contrast, was just a fairly boring sleeping area.
Arriving in Tambunum, I discovered that ... (drum roll) ... there was no sign of my group. The Army trekking group had indeed arrived from Yengis, more or less on schedule, but neither they nor anyone else had heard or seen anything of my group. At this point, Grant, the tour company agent, finally started taking an interest, and said he would ask people at the village to send a canoe up and look for my group [he did ask, but the village people 'forgot' to do so].
Thursday, day: Still no sign of my group. The Army people and I piled into the Land-rover, accompanied by as many villagers who could fit in, and headed back to Wewak. Aside from the overcrowding, the trip was much less exciting than the one coming up, because this time the driver managed to get proper directions, which no one had thought to give him before we left Wewak.
Back in Wewak, I met a Norwegian anthropologist, who was hanging around Wewak trying to get an MAF plane to take him to the village he was doing research in. He had been waiting two weeks already, and probably would be waiting longer, as one foul-up or another kept him from taking one of the 'regularly scheduled' MAF flights. The two of us watched 'The Mosquito Coast' on video, and had a good laugh when someone told Harrison Ford in a shocked voice '...but that country is still in the Stone Age' (imagine being in New York and watching a movie where someone arrives in Buffalo and says 'Wow! The big city'). The 'jungle' scenes in the movie looked remarkably like what we could see out of our window ...
Thursday, night: My last night in PNG. I had finished making some final phone calls to the agency in Australia (no word of my companions), when I heard a knocking on the hostel door. Wondering who it could be at 8PM at night, I opened the door to discover some incredibly dirty and haggard looking travellers. I admit that I didn't even recognize them until one of them said 'Ehud ...' - it was them!
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Part 3 of 3: Stuart's Story
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On the sad tale of a truly 'buggeredup' trek through the PNG Highlands
Synopsis: I had signed up with an organized trek in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, but had been separated from the group on the second day of the trip. After being unable to make contact with them for an entire week, I had assumed they were lost and in serious trouble - until they turned up on at the doorstep of my hostel, haggard and dirty but at least in one piece. After they ate, shaved, and showered, I sat down besides Stuart, an Australian schoolteacher who was in the group, and got him to tell me his story. Somewhat cleaned up, it went as follows:
'As you know, we started out from Kompiam on Tuesday morning, with four tourists [me, Stuart, and a Canadian couple, Jim and Jean], the Australian leader [Ron], a local guide [Thompson], and one porter [Sam]. We made slow progress on the first day, mainly because our packs were too heavy, especially Jim's and Jean's. Jean, who only weighed 50kg or so, had a 25kg pack, and Jim, who weighed 90-100kg, had a 40-50kg pack. Most of the gear they were carrying wasn't needed for the trek, and should have been air-freighted to Wewak. Ron, our leader, should have checked their packs before we left, but, unfortunately, he had not done so.
So, the first day we did not get anywhere near where our itinerary said we were supposed to be. We set up camp in a cleared area where some huts had once stood (the huts had been destroyed in tribal fighting), and, after a bit of searching, found some water. We heard all kinds of yelling at night, which we presumed came from tribal groups making night raids on each other and buring down yet more huts. Ron assured us that tourists were never affected by tribal fighting, but I admit that I slept nervously.V The next day, Wednesday, we walked until lunchtime, where we ran into our first real village. It was obvious that it would be very hard for us to finish the trek on schedule unless Jim and Jean lightened their packs, so we tried to hire porters. Unfortunately, because of the tribal fighting, none of the villagers was willing to accompany us. After some talking, however, Thompson, the guide, said the villagers were less afraid of walking back along the trail to Kompiam, and he could hire carriers for that route. He volunteered to take some carriers, the excess luggage, and most of the food back to Kompiam, where it could be flown to Yengis on the Friday MAF flight. Since there was less fighting at Yengis, it should be possible to hire carriers there for the remainder of the trip. We discussed this, decided that we could dispense with Thompson's to-date unimpressive abilities as a guide, and thus agreed, thinking that we could still use Sam, the porter, as an interpreter to talk to the locals and get directions. At the last moment, of course, you [Ehud] said you would go back with Thompson to Kompiam.'
[Later events made me wonder about Thompson claiming he couldn't hire carriers to go forward, but could hire carriers to go back. I suspect he could indeed have hired carriers to go forward if he had wanted to, but was already looking for an opportunity to abandon us. As mentioned in part I, when we got back to Kompiam, Thompson just went home, and made no attempt to fly to Yengis. I also must admit that the main reason I volunteered to go back with Thompson was that I was already disgusted with the 'organization' of this trip, and was hoping that by flying to Yengis, I could link up with another trekking party organized by the Australian army. So, I, too, was planning to 'bail out' of this trip!]
'After you and Thompson left, the rest of us put our packs back on and headed on down the trail. |
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