Yet another highlands adventure

Thanks, or no thanks to an Australian-funded project on sweet potato postharvest management and marketing, it seems that I will be frequenting the PNG highlands in the next couple of years.

Four-wheel driving and extortion at its best! Based on experience, hardly a trip goes without a few heart stopping highlights and sidelights here and there. And for this trip it was four-wheel driving on very rugged and muddy roads, skidding through a river of mud and almost ending up on the bottom of a cliff stuck in a coffee grove. It was a good thing that another car was driving closely behind us and helped us out of what could have been a very "muddy" situation. It was also quite interesting that some “well meaning” folks put up road blocks demanding K10 (roughly 3 USD) from every passing motorist as a way of compensating them for their efforts in trying to “fix” the road. And yet there was hardly a sign that the road has been fixed as we almost sunk into a knee-deep mud puddle.

Feeling like a celebrity. Do you know how it feels to be a celebrity? Well I do. Not that I am a one but visiting far flung communities in PNG where ‘white men and meri’ rarely make an appearance, its very common to attract a throng of admirers such as these. As our vehicles approached, the kids started coming from all directions like an army of ants attracted by the scent of food. One girl lost her balance as she ran towards us and scratched her knees badly. Of course, the sight of a camera even added up to their excitement.

This little girl appeared from out of the blue and immediately grabbed and put her arms around me. A mother also put a bilum (a local carry-all bag) around my head in a manner similar to what most local women do. A little girl of about two even came up to me just to shake my hand while some were just content on touching my skin and my hair.

Yu tok-tok tumas. I am not a very patient person and I have a very short attention span so that I find it a real pain to sit still and listen to speeches and lectures. And in PNG, speeches can go for as long as 30 minutes up to an hour with almost everyone (especially the men) having an opinion about almost everything. When interviewing or talking to a local for example, one fellow is bound to join in and mess everything up by repeating everything that the other fellow is saying, like a tape recorder but more. Yu tok-tok tumas.