Thursday 28 July 2016

28th-29th July 2016 - Kavieng - New Ireland - PNG

Thursday 28th July 2016

Today it was a Kavieng day.  We walked into town and around – yes! – the hardware stores.  They sold, to my astonishment, Australian wheeliebins!  Mind you they don’t use wheeliebins here…the rubbish is mainly strewn along the streets.  It is a very pretty town, a bit like Nhulumbuy (Northern Territory) with pleasant houses suitable for the tropics, and beautiful big trees lining the streets.  And an understorey of rubbish, mainly coke cans.


Pete made friends with a young bloke called Jonah, from Nusa Island just across the way, looking very beautiful. 


And with an older man called Bruce, who led us, in a dignified manner, to the Air Nui Gini office.  We would never ever have found it.  It was all bright pink and concrete but there was not a single sign to be seen on the outside…


I was very grateful to Bruce.  It was cool and peaceful in the office and there was a delightfully efficient travel agent called Powden.  I left my details with her and followed Pete to find the Customs office, which we had been told was opposite the church in the main street.  It wasn’t; we went in and it was the Treasury.  The man in the office had no idea where Customs was so we wandered round…


I found a Department of Labour and Industrial Relations which amused me somewhat.  (I worked for eleven years for the Industrial Commission, in Tasmania.)  And there in a shy little doorway just beyond the DLIR, was a little sign saying, Customs.  Jackpot!

It took Powden a long time to organise my tickets; it was all very complicated.  But she did it, smiling all the way through, and I am very grateful.  There is no way in the world I would have been able to do it on the dodgy internet operating on my modem, which lasts for three minutes at a time and then cuts out.  I am so looking forward to my thirteen days of Tasmanian Life!!


When we dragged our dinghy off the beach into the water a whole tribe of small boys yelled PUSHIM!  PUSHIM!!  (I do love Pidgin…)  And push they did, shrieking with joy.



This morning early I looked out the window and there – oh astonishment! – was a yacht, a beautiful Amel Super Maramu 2000, with an Italian flag.  Astonishing because really there are very few yachts in this part of the world…

Friday 29th July

The team from SV Refola came over for drinks in the late afternoon.  Very nice people – Liliana, Alessandro, Luciano.  I do like Italians…Luciano and I will be flying together as far as Brisbane on Monday.  I only have to go to Melbourne and then Hobart after that but it will take him 35 hours to get to Verona…we have to leave Refola and 2XS at 3.45 to get a taxi to the airport… This seems a bit excessive to me; the plane doesn’t leave until 6.10am but better safe than sorry.  I never want to miss another plane!!


This morning we had a visit from an official boat from the Port Authority.  Noah Tamekus and Geoffrey Darius had come to tell us we owe 200 kina for anchorage fees. 

Pete chatted to them nicely and I made them iced tea and gave them photos of themselves, which made them very happy.  They are going to help us get fuel – quite a completed process, involving the filling out of forms.  Very glad they are going to guide us through the maze of red tape!


They also gave us a lot of information about the region.  They both said that New Ireland, and Kavieng in particular, are the very safest place in PNG.  Nusa Island, a few hundred metres from where we are anchored, used to be a plantation, owned by Germans.  When there was a gold rush (not sure of the dates of any of this…) the Germans all moved off Nusa and decamped to the gold fields on the mainland, and the government bought back the land to return it to the original villagers.  All seemingly a painless process.

Apparently Kavieng gets quite a few visitors from the outside world, not just 2XS and Refola!  Eery year a team comes from National Geographic.  Bill gates has been here, aos Russell Crowe.  And – the Bulldogs rugby team!  Kavieng most passionately follows the blues and the maroons and the whole town shuts down for the State of Origin matches.  I had noticed flags for sale in the shops but hadn’t registered the significance.


There are a few tourist attractions not far from Kavieng, so Geoffrey told us.  Apparently there is as place where you can wade around up to your knees in the shallows and fondle large eels…Another village has the tradition of calling sharks; they have done this for centuries.  There are fire eaters in one village, men who walk on hot stones in another.  All of this goes on regardless of whether there are tourists or not, which I think is great.  I never really enjoy seeing people tricked out in costumes and performing traditional ceremonies just for the tourist dollar.  Much nicer to have traditional customs continuing just because the people revel in them.

Wednesday 27 July 2016

25th - 27th July 2016 - Manus Island to Nauna Island to New Ireland (Keviang)

Monday 25th July 2016

02 degrees 00.455S
147 degrees 16.592E
Lorengau
Manus Island
5.2m

Manus Island is big.  It took us ages to sail along the northern coast to get to Lorengau – the nearest shop, by the way, for the people of the Ninigo Islands.  A very very long way on 2XS and even longer on a little wooden sailing canoe…

We didn’t have much time in Lorengau, just enough to go to get a SIMcard and some load for my modem and Pete’s phone.  And to have a beer at the hotel on the waterfront, where we spoke to the very dignified manager, Albert Posungol.  We asked him about the detention centre.  There are about 1,000 detainees, all wearily awaiting “processing.”   But the good thing is that they seem to be very welcome on the island.  They stroll around and go shopping and swimming on the beaches, and many of them have jobs. In fact, two of them are working at the hotel, one as a chef, one as a kitchen hand.   But I am sure they will be very happy indeed when they finally have a place they can call home.

02 degrees 12.340S
148 degrees 11.742E
Nauna Island
10.5m


Nauna Island Boys
The next day we had one more stop, and an unlikely anchorage off Nauna Island.  It was late afternoon when we finally, cautiously, dropped anchor.  There were whoops and yells from the clifftops – a whole tribe of boys, running through the jungle, climbing trees to wave at us!  We had innocently thought this was a deserted island…but no!  Within a few minutes we had two canoeloads of boys and men on board, happy to tell us about their cheery little island with a population of 500.


Three without trousers
The little boys, so David told us, cheerily, had “forgotten to wear their trousers.”  Never mind…I took them up to the front of the boat and taught them Heads and shoulders knees and toes, which they loved, and then read them The Waterhole.  STORRREE! they said, their eyes glittering.


One who remembered trousers
As it grew almost too dark to see they hopped off they boat and paddled away, reluctantly.  We had a very long day and night ahead of us so we went to bed very early.


STORREE!!!
At 2am Pete got up to look at the stars on deck and he tripped over two silent young men, in the cockpit… (I am SO glad it wasn’t me up there, checking out the stars, possibly stark naked…)  “Hmmm, what’s going on, fellers?” he asked?  “Hello Peter, it is Jack.  And Steven.  We are looking after the boat for you.  We got here at 10 o’clock.”  They had been sitting there silently and happily all that time.  Pete didn’t think they were doing much harm so he left them to it and reported back a bit later that they were both fast asleep, curled up on the outdoor carpet.

In the morning, early, I made them a cup of tea and we sent them on their way in their little canoe.  We looked around and realised they could have taken: headtorches, ropes, binoculars, snorkels masks flippers, our boatshoes, an umbrella – all big ticket items on the islands.  Such lovely gentle harmless boys (16 years old.)  But I hope they don’t; do this too often; I imagine that some people would be so nervous and terrified they would be shot, or at least tasered!

Wednesday 27th July

02 degrees 34.815S
150 degrees 47.372E
Kavieng Harbour
New Ireland
6.2m

Another overnighter with no autopilot and with the Raymarine screen turning itself on and off.  This is so very much NOT fun at 4am, when humans are at their lowest ebb!   But the sea was calm, the wind slight, so it was just tedious rather than dangerous.

And we got to Kavieng, a nice little town with several supermarkets bursting with tinned spam in many manifestations. 



We thought we would go to Immigration and Customs, and the supermarkets.  The latter were open, thank goodness, but everything else was shut because guess what – it was a public holiday!  Yes again we have arrived exactly on time to find everything shut up like a clam.  And nobody can ever again tell me Australia has too many public holidays!  NOT compared to the rest of the world, we don’t!

I managed to get some load for my modem and it works like a treat for about three minutes and then shuts down for many hours.  Very annoying…This makes it particular hard to book airline tickets, which usually requires several hours of concentrated attention in cyberspace!

In one of the supermarkets I saw a small toddlerboy with a low-slung trolley basket.  He was slamming packets of biscuits into it, most industriously.  Nobody stopped him!  When it was fully loaded he pushed the trolley importantly down the aisle and around the shop, with a few dreamy women looking at him fondly.




We stopped briefly in the one and only pub before walking back to the beach where we had left the dinghy.  I was very tickled with the sign above the door. 




In the bar there were about ten men, any one of whom might have been Joe Schulze – they weren’t enforcing the dress code!  (No shoes, many hats, many raggedy clothes…)