23 November 2008
After
leaving Mono we set sail for Kokopo on New Britain in Papua New Guinea. I use
the term "sail" loosely - we motored for at least half of the trip, as there was
no wind at all. The rest of it was extremely pleasant, sailing along on a broad
reach in 7 knots of wind, even managed a BBQ while under way, a pleasant change
from being hunkered down in rain and gales. It took 3 days and we arrived in
Kokopo at first light this morning, and are anchored by a yacht we know, Ospray,
off a resort (04'20"S 152'18"E), waiting for Monday so we can clear Customs and
get some COFFEE! (We ran out 3 days ago and things are a wee bit tense)
Becalmed off Bougainville
Daemon
with volcanoes in the background
Kokopo is near Rabaul, which used to be one of the best towns in PNG, however the area is very volcanic, and in 1994 the local volcanoes erupted and covered it in ash, so most stuff has moved to Kokopo, about 10 miles down the coast. Ken on Ospray took his boat down to Rabaul last week to clear in, and came back with it covered in ash, so we'll probably just check it out by bus. The volcanoes are across the harbour from us, and there is a constant rumbling and booming, with clouds of ash being shot into the air. Visibility is very poor because of the constant ash haze - it was very eerie coming in during the night, with all the smoke and volcano flashes, not to mention the ever-present lightening storms. As well as the storms we are struggling to deal with the heat & humidity - we are only a couple of hundred miles from the equator, so life is pretty sticky at present.
3 December 2008
Thank you all for your concern, and yes, we are aware that
a certain amount of cannibalism is still in existence in PNG, but that is mainly
in the Highlands, and we are out in the northern islands, and everyone here
seems pretty friendly. The horror stories of robbery, rape & murder are mainly
from Port Moresby, Lae & to a lesser extent, Madang, the people here are very
proud of being honest. As one guy told Bruce, "One man tries to steal your
wallet, the man behind him punch him in the face!" Despite this, Bruce did end
up on the wrong side of the law, and nearly spent a night in gaol with three of
the other skippers. This came about when we cleared in at Kokopo last Monday. As
we do in every country, we notified Customs of our arrival and waited on board
for the usual boarding party to come and clear us. Normally Customs advises
Immigration & Quarantine and they all arrive at once. So, five booted officials
arrive on the boat, check our booze, stamp our passports and inspect our fresh
fruit & veges, and then tell us we can go ashore. A mass exodus to town
occurred, and we managed to secure some coffee before heading back to the boats
where the resort owner greeted us to say Quarantine we looking for us and were
severely pissed off. When they came out, they wanted to cart the skippers off to
the lockup for breaching quarantine law by going ashore without being cleared.
It turns out Customs & Quarantine aren't speaking, and the people looking at our
veges were just Customs being nosy. When we explained, Quarantine calmed down
and all was sorted amicably. Would have been a sight - four scrawny white guys
in the Rabaul lock-up!
Ash buildup in front of the Rabaul Hotel
Mount Tavavur and Rabaul Town
We had a nice week (apart from a hideous night with a surprise on-shore blow, which broke 2 boats from their moorings in our bay and gave the rest of us a sleepless night) in Kokopo anchored off the Rapopo Resort. We did a bus trip up to Rabaul to see the town, and it is a moonscape. One part of the town in buried in ash and the other end, near the port, is being kept open by bulldozers clearing the constant ashfall from the roads. Rabaul was a main Japanese base during WW2, and there are a lot of relics still here. We visited the main submarine base and also the barge tunnels carved in the hills where the transport barges were craned on to rails then hauled into tunnels and hidden. Some amazing construction work...
Locals on Rabaul Transport, Rabaul Markets Salome and the parrot, Mioko
Salome and Agnes teach Fran and me to kastom dance. Note the big-stick crowd control guy...
We are currently anchored at Mioko Island in
the Duke of York group about 10 miles off the coast of Rabaul (04'13.8"S,
152'27.3"E), which is very beautiful and well-sheltered, but every second canoe
wants to charge an anchoring fee, which is a bit tiresome. There has been a 150
foot superyacht complete with helicopter and about 4 motorboats in the lagoon
for the last month, and the locals think everyone with a yacht has that much
money. If only. We had a great day in at the school graduation/prizegiving
today, although the speeches by one of the local reverends did go on and on and
on for some time. No-one else was listening either - everyone was just wandering
around under the trees, setting up betel nut stores, selling likliks (rudimentary
ice lollies) and having a good catch up, so we just chatted as well. After the
ceremony was over (9.30am - 2.30pm!) we had lunch with all the bigwigs (saveloy
chow mein, a new fusion dish) and then went back out to find a custom dancing
session in full swing, which was pretty amazing! Well, the inevitable happened
and I ended up dancing, dragged into the fray by Salome, a very forward lass,
sporting a bright red parrot on her head and a matching betel smile. How could I
refuse? I dragged Fran from Melric in as well (the Melricans were the only other
white folk there) and we were a huge hit, nearly caused a riot, and the
big-stick guy had to beat the crowd back, literally. We were duly anointed with
a cloud of talc over our heads, which is a sign of approval, when, as exhorted
by one of our other teachers, Agnes, we shook our booties. The crowd roared....
Unlike us, these guys knew what they were doing! Mioko
Early morning pikinini in canoe, just before Bruce takes aim with the flare gun.
The only danger we can see here is to the local pikininis, who don't understand
the danger of approaching yachts to trade shells and limes before the yachties
have had coffee. They get up at 4.30am, so think 6.00am is a perfectly sensible
time to bang on the hull and call out to you. We try to keep a low profile, but
as I told Bruce, a grown man crawling around on the floor of the boat avoiding a
bunch of kids is pretty pathetic. He has now taken to giving the first lot
balloons and lollipops on the condition they keep the others away. As Bruce
says, poor buggers, their lifestyle is so different they have no idea why you
come out at 6.30am and fire the flare gun though the bottom of their canoe.
There is currently a small riot going on outside as to who gets first go at lime
trading. Vitamin C overdose is incipient.
19 December 2008
Well, we are at Kavieng on New Ireland, our
last port in PNG, anchored off a resort on Nusa Lik island, just off the town
(02'35.1"S, 150'46.0"E). Yes there is a pattern emerging here, but the resorts
have security who keep an eye on things, are usually very helpful in sorting out
stuff for yachties and usually have the best anchorages, so going in for dinner
at least once and having a couple of beers a couple of times a week is a small
price to pay. It's a sacrifice, I know.
When I last wrote we were at the Duke of York islands, which were nice, but
thanks to the New Britain & New Ireland Tourist Boards' encouragement to the
locals to charge yachties fees to get village funds, we began to feel like ATMs.
Each place would want $20-$50 to anchor, walk through a village and that's
another $5 each, visit a "tourist spot" (cave, waterfall etc) another $5-$10,
snorkel, yup, that's $10 and so it went. Then they had the nerve to come out to
get us to charge batteries, fix things etc. I was sorely tempted to send it back
with an invoice.
Bisi Mart supermarket, Kavieng
Before we left we went to the local
semifinals of the touch league tournament, which was a real hoot! There were a
couple of hundred spectators, all supporting their villages enthusiastically.
The field is a rock hard bit of grass over a limestone/coral base, hence the
"touch" game rather than full on league, that and the tendency for inter-village
warfare to break out at the least provocation, as we were to discover. There was
also a meter deep depression near one goal line, which took up a quarter of the
field, but this was evened out by the goalposts at the other end leaning
backwards and inwards. Each team came with a plethora of officials: manager,
coach, coach's mother, physio, magician, water boys, sand boys who would run to
the beach to get sand for the kicks, manager in charge of social events, manager
in charge of keeping pikininis off the field (carries large stick and uses it
enthusiastically), manager in charge of keeping pigs, chickens and dogs off the
field (too drunk to carry out role, so players just vaulted wandering
livestock), 6 pack of beer raffle manager, etc etc etc. Some players even had
boots, but all had flash sponsored jerseys and hairstyles to put Beckham to
shame!
Pitch invasion! Ref, you need a seeing eye dog! Oh, you've got one...
The game progressed slowly (everyone on PNG
time), with much time for arguing until the ref walked off and wouldn't come
back until they had sorted themselves - around 15 minutes. Every time there was
a score, there would be a massive pitch invasion, and the players would
disappear in a crowd of dancing, cartwheeling supporters and it would take about
10 minutes to restore order again. At one stage a player spear tackled another
(this is touch football!) and all hell broke loose, a giant on-field brawl
between the two villages, weapons not excluded. After about 10 minutes it got
sorted and no-one seemed to be too injured so play continued - you got the
feeling that if that foul hadn't happened, someone would have had to invent one,
and that a good scrap was a convention in inter-village games.
The spectators were entertaining as well - there was a woman who would rival my
Mum for sideline barracking, and that is saying something! One of the guys we
are travelling with got talking to some of the locals and met a raskol from
Manus in the Admiralty Group who had just been released after 14 years for armed
bank robbery and murder. You do meet some interesting people travelling! He
insisted he was reformed and was helping sort young raskols out, but was over
here to buy some of the magic lime powder that the island is renowned for -
sprinkle it on and it will make you invisible, and by extension, anyone you
touch will become invisible too. I'm beginning to see how he got caught....
Weather reports being something of a joke up here, we all (convoy has reached 5
with the addition of US boat Long Tall Sally with Penny & Greg aboard) picked a
day and headed off for the overnight trip to a bay on the north-west coast of
New Ireland. What a night! It was lovely until about midnight, and, as so often
happens it all turned to custard on my watch (2200 - 0100 hrs) and we ran into a
huge area of squalls, torrential rain and thunderstorms, which was pretty scary.
This, along with sudden bursts of high winds and large swells continued all
night and the next day. We were highly relieved to get into Bakhatere Harbour,
get the anchor down and collapse. The next day things were much improved, so we
sailed around through the Albatross Channel between New Ireland and New Hanover
to Kavieng, where we discovered there was a full-blown relief effort in force,
as a storm surge had come through the night we were at sea and taken out some
villages along the coast. Kavieng didn't cop it too badly, only a small amount
of damage and rubbish all up the beaches, but we were suddenly glad we had been
at sea not at anchor in the harbour! Air Force planes and Navy Patrol boats are
still coming in and out taking aid to the villages.
Bruce
& Winston construct the Xmas tree
We are all getting ready for Xmas here, as I write this, Bruce is making the
cake (due to lack of purchasable ingredients, I spent yesterday making the
candied peel) and we plan to decorate the tree this afternoon. Well, the palm
fronds our mate Winston bought us out this morning, in lieu of a tree. (Aside: I
know Kavieng copped the brunt of bombing in WW2 & they have every right to bear
a grudge, but it is slightly disconcerting that our 2 best mates among the
locals here are called Winston and Adolf!) We have ordered our mud crab and
lobster and are planning a big yachtie pot luck Xmas - should be good fun!
Bruce versus the crab! Note the long reach.
We had a practice with the mud crab yesterday. A vegetarian Czech couple on one
of the yachts bought one at the market to release it on the island, but a) there
were no mangroves and b) there were plenty of hungry locals eying it up, so they
bought it over to ask what to do with it. Curry it! we said, and their faces
dropped. Eventually they agreed to leave it with us if we killed it kindly.
Well, that was our intention, put it in the fridge until it chilled down and
lost consciousness, but they'd cut its claw ties when they went to let it go and
it was seriously pissed off! It decided the bucket was its home and no-one was
coming near it, every time you got close it would rear up on its hind legs and
have a go with its claws. Eventually Bruce covered it in fresh water, hoping
that would drown it, but it was made of sterner stuff than that and an all-out
Itchy & Scratchy-style fight ensued (he prefers St George & the dragon or
Beowulf/Grendel, but sorry, no...), which ended with Bruce managing to dump this
berserk creature into a big pot of boiling water and slam the lid down. A rather
Sopranos-like finale, but it was the crab or us, and the crab was certainly not
considering clemency for us! In the end, revenge was sweet, or at least Thai
curry flavoured...
1 January 2009
We are currently anchored in a bay on Tsoi Boto, in the East Island Group of New
Hanover in PNG (02'.27"S, 150'27"E) having a quiet day. We got bored witless in
Kavieng waiting for our mail and other stuff, and after nearly murdering a
couple of shop assistants when we tried to buy an ice cream (you couldn't imagine
how such a simple exercise could be turned into a textbook case of customer
frustration), we decided to break free from the cruising pack and go out on our
own. Although it is enjoyable to meet up with the others, travelling in a pack
means you don't get to meet and interact with the local people as much as you do
when you are by yourself.
The official Xmas photo:
Back: Greg (Long Tall Sally), Winston (Tokimata), Bruce, Penny (Long Tall Sally)
Centre: Adam (Tiki Tu), Dave (Melric 2), Lars (Luna), Blanca (Argo), Jill
Front: Ken (Ospray), Fran (Melric 2), Pepe (Argo), Rowdy the parrot (Tiki Tu)
We had a great Xmas Day, spent on Long
Tall Sally, eating and drinking and talking crap. We talked to our families by
cellphone and I got in some geriatric kitty time, feeding their 23 year old cat,
Jade, crab (remarkably strong and insistent for his age, at least where crab was
concerned!) so was a happy girl. Also got in parrot-time with Rowdy, a parrot
belonging to the local charter yacht couple. We had another mud crab debacle,
this time one escaped from his bonds and bucket on deck during the night (making
us nervous about his whereabouts for the next couple of days) and the other from
his bonds, and then from the pot when Bruce tried to cook him. These things are
quite sizeable - one feeds two people, they have bodies the size of a dinner
plate, and the claws the size of my hand, so you really, really don't want them
loose in the galley! After much prodding with tongs he was encouraged back into
his bucket (crab, not Bruce) and then quickly dumped into the pot where he was
transformed from crab to Xmas dinner! We celebrated again on 27 December, as it
was our 30th anniversary, so the standard of meals lately has been superb!
Rowdy gets lucky!
We set out from Kavieng the day before yesterday and motored a whole 10 miles to
a very scenic (palm trees, clear turquoise waters, nesting turtles etc etc)
island called Nusalomon, which was owned by Ranson and his family. His young
son, Barfort, took us on a tour of the island and we got to see a lot of the
Japanese bunkers and bombed guns from WW2 and to smell the pig that Barfort had
speared a few days ago and which had escaped to die in the bush. Barfort is " a
small boy, 9, or maybe 10", no-one can remember and he is distinctly feral. We stayed and talked
with them for a while and then as we were going back to the boat, Ranson's
mother gave us a lovely gift of some gorgeous cowrie shells. They came out later
and we had a good evening storying-on on the boat with them.
From there we headed up inside the barrier islands that shelter New Hanover from
the sea, and these were the ones that took a battering during the recent storm
surges. We haven't been ashore much yet, so can't tell how badly things are, but
when we anchored here yesterday, Bruce thought the village was derelict until
the ubiquitous pikinini canoe fleet headed our way. We have divested ourselves
of the remnants of our trading clothes and our "deserving case" t shirts, so I
am trying to convince Bruce I can use the space to buy more carvings to inject
some cash into the villages. I won't repeat his comments. He is scathing about
my canoe paddle collection, the philistine!
Last night was New Year's Eve and as I had had a couple of semi-sleepless nights
from the heat, I was so knackered I was asleep by 8.45. Current joke is I saw in
New Year on Chatham Islands time. I tried to explain to one of the locals
yesterday that we would celebrate on NZ time, so New Year would start at 9.00pm
local time. The concept of different time zones around the world was utterly
incomprehensible to him and he sort of got the expression I get when trying to
grasp the rudiments of quantum theory. Probably completely messed with his mind.
Just talked to the others in Kavieng by SSB, and they sound very sorry for
themselves, so I'm glad we were here!
12 January 2009
We had an insanely great day at the place we stopped to sit out the wind on Tsoi Boto in one of our futile attempts to reach the top of New Hanover ( the second attempt was foiled by running out of diesel). Just as we were about to leave in the morning, a guy in a canoe came out and invited us to come ashore and see his village. Well, hell, we thought, why not? So in we went.
Tsoi Boto Beach
The family was lovely, the parents are/were teachers at the local school and all
their kids and grandkids were home for the holidays. John, the guy who came out,
has just returned to live there after being a bank worker in Port Moresby, the
others are all teachers, bank workers etc and their English is great so
communication is easy. We went for a walk down the seaward side of the island
which is just indescribably beautiful. It was the side that got hit by the
swells - it took out their gardens, so they have to go over to New Hanover to
get veg, but as John said, the plus side was that the kids could get fish in the
gardens!
Basketry for beginners
We came back to their family compound where I was upskilled in the womanly arts
of PNG - I can now cook in a mumu (stone oven), weave coconut baskets to hold
produce and chew betel nut. Fortunately the camera batteries had gone flat for
that last one! Betel nut is up there with drinking Vanuatu kava as a
to-be-avoided experience! We then went to
watch the local soccer teams play, which was a much more sedate experience than
the league on Mioko. Mind you, standing out on a rock hard pitch, in full kit
(except wearing socks not shoes in most cases) under the blazing hot sun in
temperatures in the high 30s doesn't really make for a blistering pace.
Mumu preparation
The next day we had a quiet morning swimming and snorkelling as John and his family went to church but we got to chat with a fisherman who wanted to show us his pufferfish. In the afternoon we went in to spend more time with the family and to drop off a chocolate cake I'd made for the family and to take another walk with John. We invited the family to come out and see the boat - the kids had been obviously dying to - and later in the evening a boatload of them arrived and solemnly looked around the place, obviously cautioned to be on their best behaviour. After checking the place out and with the usual questions about the toilet and where did we shower, they departed, waving from the boat and shouting "Goodbye Uncle Bruce, goodbye Auntie Jill!" Really sweet!
Fisherman with puffer fish
After the next aborted attempt to make New Hanover we headed back into Kavieng, only to strike an evil weather event as we hit the harbour, which naturally, is full of reefs. The rain hosed down and the wind blew - you couldn't see a thing! We slowly picked our way across to the anchorage and got safely anchored and collapsed. We had been worried about Bruce as he had a fever, and a few of the yachties here had come down with malaria, but after a couple of false starts we managed to work our test kit and he was clear, so that was a relief! We had tried taking doxycycline as a preventative, but got hideous sunburned red patches from the sun-sensitivity it bought on. It still took him a while to recover, but he is fine now.
We bought a cool carving yesterday - it is a large Malagan funeral mask, very scary, painted, with high coconut fibre hair, and it has snakes coming out of its mouth and ears and birds for eyebrows. We call it Gavin and it now lives under our saloon seat. It is really fragile, so we have to work out a way to get it back to NZ intact.
We are currently getting ready to head off
to Palau in a couple of day's time, so much reprovisioning/stowing/gear checking
is underway. We refuelled on Friday afternoon, which was the usual Melanesian
SNAFU. Three of us ordered 1200 litres of fuel to be delivered by tanker to the
fishing wharf at 3.30pm. After several phone calls, a ute with 600 litres in
barrels arrives and starts offloading them. Of course there was only one
hand-cranked portable pump for the 3 boats, with a very short hose. Negotiations
were done, and another ute arrived with another 600 litres and a longer hose.
Still only one pump, though. It was almost dark by the time we had finished, but
at least that is one more thing crossed off the list! It is over 1000 miles to
Palau, and as we go over the equator (very exciting - our first time by boat -
we're equatorial virgins!) it will probably involve a lot of motoring. We
haven't done such a long passage for a while, so that will be an interesting
experience!