Monday, October 19, 2015

New Guinea: The ugly, the good and the wonderful (Retrospective from July and August, 2014)

Ottawa, October 19, 2015

The Ugly:  Papua New Guinea

On July 21st, 2014, I flew from Honiara after eleven expensive but interesting days in the Solomon Islands. My destination was Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea.  PNG would be my 117th country, and I was looking forward to it, although it was clear from reading my Lonely Planet that it was also going to be an expensive experience.  The LP also talked about what a dangerous, menacing city Port Moresby is, so I had already bought a connecting ticket to head on to Madang, on the north coast, later the same day.

When I got off the airplane in Port Moresby   , I headed to join the visa-on-arrival queue.  I was one of only two people in the line, while the adjacent queue, for foreigners already possessing a residence permit, consisted of two planeloads of Aussies headed to work in mines and a giant natural gas development in the interior.  They were a menacing-looking group, hard-faced men with bulging biceps, tattoos and shaven heads; I wouldn’t have wanted to run into any of them on a dark night outside a pub.  PNG is full of expats, mostly Aussies, running the extractive resource sector; PNG was an Aussie protectorate for decades before independence in 1975 and Australia still dominates its former colony economically, as well as giving $500 million a year in foreign aid in return for PNG housing boat people who try to reach Australia in a notorious internment facility on Manus island.  A number of top civil servants in PNG have been Australians over the years, although lately relations have cooled noticeably.

As I sat waiting for my flight to Madang, I listened in on a conversation between two Aussie miners and a newly-arrived rookie colleague.  They were headed up to the highlands, to Mt. Hagen, and the veterans were telling blood-curdling stories about how dangerous conditions are for Western expats there.  “If you want to go to the shop to buy cigarettes or groceries, you tell your supervisor and he’ll arrange a vehicle with security guards to take you.  You don’t walk to the shops alone unless you want to end up dead!”  Ordinarily I tend to discount such stories in most countries as exaggerating the dangers, but PNG really is one of the most violent countries on earth, with a staggering murder rate, a tradition of blood feuds and vengeance killings and a culture of raskols (rascals, Pidgin for “gangsters”) who seem to operate with the sort of impunity and gratuitous violence that rival the notorious street gangs of Central America.  I had just listened to a BBC radio documentary about violence in PNG a few weeks earlier, and even PNG cabinet ministers admitted that over the past two decades the levels of violence have gone through the roof.

I caught my flight to Madang, over the steep mountainous interior that has prevented the country from linking together its various provinces with roads.  With few exceptions, long distance travel in PNG is by air as the various provinces are rarely connected by land.  When I landed, passengers rapidly dispersed into various Toyota Land Cruisers, usually with metal screens protecting the windows, and I was left alone.  The airport staff (all six of them; it’s a pretty small airport) became concerned and asked me where I was staying and who was picking me up.  I hadn’t reserved a room, and I had thought I would either catch a bus or a taxi into the city, but there were none to be seen anywhere.  The airport staff were keen to lock up and get home while it was still light, and they directed me to a phone to call the Madang Lodge to come and collect me.  It took them a while to arrive, and the staff were getting noticeably edgy about their personal safety, so they asked someone to give me a lift.  He was a minister in a local church who had come to pick up another church member who hadn’t shown up.  We drove partway into town in his tank-like Land Cruiser before the Madang Lodge minibus showed up and I got transferred.  I don’t think I have ever been in an airport where the locals were so concerned about my personal security, and the LP lists Madang as being the most laid-back, safest city in the entire country.
The waves pounding against the seawall at Madang Resort
The Madang Lodge was listed as the only budget accommodation in Madang, and it did have some rooms for as little as 130 kina (PGK; PGK 130 was about US$ 55 at the time).  Hardly a thunderous bargain, but a lot better than the 400 or 500 kina that some other places were charging as their cheapest rates.  The hotel was located on the seaside, and huge waves were pummeling the headland near the restaurant, making it impossible to sit outside on that side of the hotel.  It was already getting dark, so I took advantage of the gym facilities and the pool to get some much-needed exercise, had some overpriced and under-tasty food in the restaurant and went to bed, where I was kept awake by the short space allocated to the bed, and by a herculean coughing fit by the man in the room next door starting at 4 am.

I had chosen Madang as my first destination as I had heard that PNG’s diving is some of the best in the world.  I was a bit concerned by the pounding seas, but the diving takes place inside the barrier reef that encloses the harbour and some offshore islands.  I was dropped off by the Madang Lodge minivan and wandered into the very fancy (and very expensive) Madang Resort grounds.  I found the dive shop, paid up my PGK 400 (about US$ 160) for two dives, got my equipment and met my fellow divers, mostly a group of professors from a university in Lae, a city just down the coast from Madang.  The diving was pretty underwhelming, with a very lax and casual divemaster, some pretty inexperienced and unconfident fellow divers, not particularly great visibility and coral that was in pretty poor shape.  The dives were short, too, as we dove in one group and a couple of people ran out of air quite quickly, bringing the rest of us up early with lots of air left over.  There wasn’t much to see in terms of fish, either, with no turtles or sharks or rays to brighten the experience.  The divemaster stood on the coral, picked stuff up and generally didn’t set much of an example for his divers.  For the price I was paying, I thought it was incredibly poor value.

I hadn’t booked onward travel, as I had left open the possibility of subsequent days of diving, but the first day of diving was enough to dissuade me from that.  I had an SP Export beer at the resort while contemplating the utter amazement of the local Papuan woman who ran the counter at the dive shop.  “What are you DOING here in PNG?” she asked when I said that I wasn’t working here.  She found it inconceivable that any sane person would come to her country just to visit.  It was true that I hadn’t seen another tourist yet; the numerous white faces I had seen around town or in the hotels were all working here for foreign aid, NGOs, universities or mining outfits. 

I added to my image of the Crazy White Tourist by walking into town to use an ATM (my supply of kina just kept evaporating), talked to Air Niugini about flights to Wewak, my next destination, then tried to find the ferry lines that supposedly ran along the north shore of PNG, Star Shipping and Lutheran Shipping.  As it turned out, the latter was bankrupt and didn’t operate anymore, while Star Shipping’s next ferry wasn’t for another 3 weeks.  This decided the issue:  I bought a flight to Wewak for the 24th (there were no flights before then) and made a tentative booking from Wewak to Vanimo for the 25th, in case my tentative plan to go up the Sepik River came to naught.  Pleased with my logistical successes, I walked to the stand for PMVs (public motor vehicles, the most common public transport in PNG) that would take me back to the Madang Lodge.  It was located just outside a Chinese-run supermarket (as in the Solomon Islands, almost all shops in PNG are owned by Chinese businessmen), and as I stood there, the shutters started coming down on the shop and two local employees started sweeping the sidewalk outside in a pretty lacklustre fashion.  The Chinese owner walked out and started hitting them with a stick; he wasn’t hitting them very hard, but it still evoked looks of poisonous contempt from all the locals gathered around the market.

At this point I made a serious strategic blunder.  My Teva sandals had been falling apart for weeks, with the soles coming loose from the rest of the sandals.  I saw a guy doing shoe repair and asked him if he could fix my sandals.  The strategic error was not making sure of the price beforehand.  I should know better; on my first trip to India in 1997 I had run into an identical situation in which the cobbler had demanded a huge sum afterwards.  I was busy chatting with the local men who were selling various things in the market; they were pleasantly surprised to see a white guy walking anywhere, rather than being driven around in a 4WD.  The conversation was going well; we were talking about the highlands and banditry on the buses that lead from Madang to Mount Hagen, and having a bit of a laugh, when the shoe repair guy finished.  He handed back the sandals, neatly stitched, and asked me for 100 kina (about US$ 40).  For 20 minutes of work, this was an outrageous amount, and I felt like an idiot.  I tried to bargain, but he wasn’t having any of it, and suddenly the atmosphere in the market changed; everyone was looking at me as the rich guy who wasn’t going to pay a poor local worker a fair price for his services.  I decided that with the afternoon waning and people starting to vacate the downtown area, it wasn’t a good time to get into an ill-tempered argument with a bunch of pretty burly guys in a country known for casual violence.  I paid the money, cursed my rookie error and got onto a PMV back to the hotel.

I had another day to spend in my little cell, which passed with lots of reading, juggling, Sudoku and an hour of internet on a horrible connection that cost PGK 20 (over US$ 8), the most expensive internet I had paid for in a long time.  I was starting to feel that PNG really wasn’t worth the tremendous expense.  A bit of working out in the gym, a beer in the hotel restaurant and that was it for the day.

I was glad to see the back of Madang the next day.  At the airport I asked whether I could get American Airlines frequent flyer points, since Air Niugini is partners with Qantas, and American Airlines partners Qantas.  The clerks got a bit confused, thought that I was a Qantas premium member and escorted me out of the crowded waiting room to a premium lounge where I contentedly sat reading my Kindle, sipping tea and juice and munching on sandwiches.  The flight to Wewak didn’t take very long, and soon enough I was walking out of the Wewak airport.  This time nobody warned me of my impending demise, and anyway the hotels I was interested in were directly across the road from the terminal.  The Airport Lodge was full, and the upmarket Talio was insanely expensive, with PGK 520 (US$ 220) for a room made out of a shipping container.  The third hotel I tried, the Surfsite, was truly hideous, with a new building being built directly over the low-rise motel.  PGK 130, the same price as I had paid in Madang, got me a peeling, mouldy concrete box with a decaying ceiling and a broken door.  I asked why the door didn’t lock and was told that they had had to open a door when a customer left town with his key.  Aside from wondering why they didn’t have a duplicate key, I also wondered when this had happened.  “Last year,” I was told.  Not the most dynamic of motel staff, then….
Wewak Beach--the highlight of my PNG experience
I left my hovel behind and caught a PMV the several kilometres into downtown Wewak in search of possible tours up the Sepik, an ATM to replace my constantly hemorrhaging supply of kina, and a decent lunch.  Downtown was a dusty, depressing area, with a 45-minute queue at each of the two functioning ATMs in town and a third bank whose ATM was closed---for the next week.  I stood in line with an Aussie ex-diplomat working for Oxfam who told me stories of how hard it was to work in PNG, and how much money was necessarily wasted on astronomically expensive hotel rooms, flights and meals, along with security guards and new Land Cruisers.  I asked about Sepik tours and was given prices that were so high that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  The cheapest offer I got was 3000 kina (over US$ 1000) for a 3-day trip up the river to various longhouses, but only if I could find three other people to share the trip; if not, it would be 5000 kina.  I decided that, interesting as lowland Papuan culture must be, it wasn’t worth that kind of money.  I went by the Air Niugini office to pay for my reservation to Vanimo for the next day, and then wandered in a vain search for a restaurant or bar that was open.  Everything was closed, so I found a shop selling postcards and bought three.  I went to buy stamps, and even there I found a PNG sting in the tail, as each postcard cost PGK 8.70, or over US$3.50, one of the most expensive postcard tariffs in the world.  I caught another PMV back to my hovel, went for a run along the beach, did some decent body-surfing and ate at Talio (the 520-kina-a-night place) and retired early to my room, with luggage and furniture piled against the door, as there was a dubious-looking crowd drinking beer outside the hotel.


Peanut vendor in Vanimo
July 25th, only four days after my arrival in PNG, I woke up early, went for a long run along the beach, had breakfast at the Talio while writing postcards, went into town to mail the cards at the post office, then walked across the road to the airport.  In the waiting room I ran into the first backpackers I had seen in PNG, a Slovenian couple who had planned to be in the country for 3 weeks but who were bolting for the border after only 10 days.  They had spent most of their time up in the highlands, and talking to them I was glad that I hadn’t gone with my first plan to go there.  It had been miserably expensive, hard to get around and far more menacing in terms of street security than the coast.  I also heard a horrifying story about the husband’s former boss coming to Port Moresby for work, getting harassed in a bar by a belligerent local guy and waking up the next morning to find his harasser’s severed head impaled on a stake outside his guesthouse with a sign attached saying “This fellow will not bother you again”. 

Vanimo is the end of the line for the north coast of PNG, with the Indonesian border only 50 or so kilometres away and a road extending right to the border post.  As soon as I arrived at Vanimo airport, I walked out into downtown (the airport is right in the centre of town) and asked around for local transport.  The Slovenian couple had to go try to get an Indonesian visa, making me glad that I was on a year-long multiple-entry Indonesian visa so that I didn’t have to spend another expensive day in PNG.  I wasn’t sure if the border was open in the afternoon (it was about 1 pm), and was assured that it was open until sundown.  We waited for a good long while, gathering passengers to cram into the PMV, and rolled off around 2 pm.  I was premature in thinking that this would be the last 20 kina that I would spend in the country, though.  We got to the PNG border gate and I got stamped out of the country, but the official told me that the Indonesians had closed their border gate early.  Apparently tension was high on the Indonesian side since a gun battle a few weeks before between the Indonesians and guerrillas from the OPM, the pro-independence movement that contests Indonesia’s hold on the western half of New Guinea and whose fighters shelter on the PNG side of the border. 

I thought that I would have to go back to Vanimo, but the driver and the PNG border official both told me that I could take a boat around the border and get an entry stamp in Jayapura.  We drove to a nearby cove where a few boats and a few Papuan travellers were sitting in the shade.  A bit of conversation revealed that for 100 kina (a bit more than US$ 40) I could get a lift to Jayapura.  With seven passengers in the boat, the captain was doing pretty well for an hour and a half’s voyage!  As in the Solomon Islands, there are no poor boat owners in PNG.  The voyage was pretty straightforward, as the big waves that had pounded Madang were nowhere to be seen.  The biggest hazard came as a byproduct of the fact that a big Malaysian logging company has a timber concession in the hills inland from Vanimo and is energetically stripping out the forests as quickly as they can.  The water offshore is littered with floating and almost-submerged logs, and it was a tricky half hour of steering, with one of the passengers in the bow spotting for logs.  I was very, very relieved to step out of the boat in Jayapura late in the afternoon.
So long PNG!  On the boat to Jayapura

There were still two expensive surprises in store for me courtesy of PNG.  The harbour where we put ashore was about five kilometres from the centre of Jayapura, but was where the immigration officer was to be found to stamp my passport.  The office was already closed when I arrived, so I was told to come back the next day.  Then it was time to find transport into town.  One of the Papuans who was hanging around at the dock offered to get me a cab, as there were none to be seen anywhere.  When it pulled up, he and several friends piled into the cab and I was immediately suspicious of a scam.  We stopped off at a little moneychanger for me to change my leftover kina into rupiah, and then headed to the hotel.  I checked in, wondering how much the taxi guy would ask for, and was not surprised when he asked for 400,000 rupiah (about US$40).  While that might be not outrageous in PNG, in Indonesia that is truly ridiculous for a ten-minute ride.  I knew that a one-hour ride to Jayapura airport was only 250,000 rupiah, so I offered the driver 100,000 rupiah.  There was immediately a great chorus of protest, but I had the advantage of being already in the hotel.  I headed to my room and unpacked, leaving them fuming in the lobby, and about ten minutes later the front desk called to say that they were still there and very unhappy.  I strolled back downstairs and put on some theatre, offering them Rp 100,000 or nothing (still far too much, but a bit of face-saving for the taxi driver), and after vehement refusals, I crumpled up the money and threw it at them and went back to my room.  An hour later they were gone and I was free in the streets of Jayapura.  It was a relief to be back to the far more reasonable prices and vibrant street life of Indonesia; I walked out after dark and bought food from a street stall, something that would have been absolutely unthinkable on the other side of the border.

The next morning I caught a rickshaw back to the port where I had arrived (it cost only 25,000 rupiah this time) and discovered that while PNG citizens can be stamped into Indonesia there, Westerners cannot.  I had to backtrack all the way to the Indonesian border post to get that all-important entry stamp.  There was (of course) no public transport to the border, and I was being asked for 750,000 rupiah by Jayapura taxi drivers to do the roundtrip.  I decided that it could be done more cheaply, so I caught public transport (three of the bemos that are such a staple of Indonesian travel) as far east as I could, then negotiated with an ojek (motorcycle taxi) driver to take me to the border.  Everything went smoothly at the border, I was back in Jayapura by mid-afternoon and it only cost Rp 250,000, still an annoying sum, but at least I was finally free of the hand of PNG.

Writing this and re-reading my diary, I remember how intensely I disliked my travel experience in PNG.  I don’t often hate everything about my experience in a country, and I’ve been to countries like Bangladesh, Djibouti, Somaliland, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus that have reputations of not being a barrel of laughs for visitors.  I can honestly say that nothing that happened to me during those five long, hideously expensive days in the country was really positive.  I shudder to think how much money I spent to have so little fun.  It’s not just me, the cheapskate backpacker, who doesn’t have much fun in PNG.  The expats to whom I talk all have the same stories of crazy prices, personal danger, dysfunctional government, corruption, violence and difficult relations with their Papuan counterparts.  I think that if you were really, really rich and didn’t care how much money you were spending, you might be able to experience PNG in a way that would be positive and memorable.  The country should be an eco-tourism mecca, with mountains, beaches, diving and more cultural diversity than almost any other country, but until it becomes significantly cheaper, significantly safer and a lot more organized, there will continue to be only a handful of (misguided) backpackers visiting the country, and tourism will continue to be the province of well-heeled miners and oil workers along with rich Aussies willing to drop US$ 3000 to walk the Kokoda Track (site of famous fighting in World War Two involving Australian soldiers).  Having been there once, I am in absolutely no hurry ever to go back, even to work.


The Good:  Hiking in the Baliem Valley

Once I had gotten my all-important surat jalan (travel permit) for West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea) for a Rp 100,000 “administrative fee”, I had exhausted the entertainment possibilities of Jayapura and it was time to move on via a short flight to Wamena, the administrative centre of the Baliem Valley up in the central highlands.  I arrived and promptly spent two very frustrating days trying to find a guide willing to take me on a trek into the highlands east of Wamena.  It was a futile quest, as the guides I could track down were either sick/dying, out of town or no longer doing guiding.  It was supposedly high season for tourism in the Baliem Valley, and yet I could hardly see any tourists around, aside from one big German group.  I looked into visiting a high-altitude lake (Habbema) but was put off by the crazy price tag associated with it (US$200 for a one-way motorcycle taxi ride from Jayapura).  Eventually I decided that trying to find a guide was useless and that, as in Nepal, it would be easier to trek completely on my own.  I went to a supermarket, bought some supplies, left all non-essential gear behind at my hotel and caught a bemo to the end of the road at Sugokno, where I shouldered my pack, consulted the Lonely Planet and set off into the mountains that rise on either side of the Yatna River.

Hernius' family in Seima
The Baliem Valley is the best-known of the valleys in the central mountains of New Guinea, an area of high peaks which soar to a maximum height of 4884 metres above sea level (higher than any peak in the Rockies or Alps) and which are cut off from the coast by impenetrable swamps and dense bush.  It was only in the 1920s that colonial officials, who all lived on the coast, even became aware that there was a densely-populated society farming in the mountains, largely using Stone Age technology.  Anthropologists were immediately drawn to study the languages and cultures of the people of the highlands, and the Baliem Valley was the site of a major Harvard expedition in 1961-62 that Peter Matthiessen wrote about in Under The Valley Wall.  The anthropologists documented the life of the Dani people, describing a culture of incessant small-scale warfare, raiding, kidnapping and ever-shifting alliances.  The Indonesian government has supposedly stamped out the warfare, but the people of the highlands are still a distinct group, farming their terraces yam fields, raising their pigs and still dressing (some of the older men, anyway) in nothing but a penis gourd.  I passed a few men in traditional Dani attire, but most of them, along with all the women, were in Western dress, although almost everyone was wearing a traditional string bag slung over their head to carry things.
Smoke percolating through the thatch of a roof, Seima
I was headed towards the village of Kurima, where I knew there was a small village lodge, but since I had only set out at 3:40, I realized that I probably didn’t have enough daylight to make it that far.  I fell into conversation (in my terrible Indonesian) with a guy named Hernius who was walking my way.  He suggested that I come home to his place rather than racing the dark, and I was glad to accept.  In the village of Seima, located at 1650 metres of elevation, Hernius had a traditional circular adobe hut with a thatch roof, but next door he had built a four-room wooden cottage equipped with solar panels.  I ate dinner with Hernius and his wife and children:  rice and greens, a roasted corn cob and a yam (the staple food of the highlands).  Historians believe that the New Guinea highlands was one of the few places on earth where agriculture arose without outside influence, and that people have been farming these steep mountainsides for millennia.  After dinner I sat around drinking tea with Hernius, his wife, two young sons, his older brother, his nephew and his mother.  
Hernius and two of his children, Seima
I wished that I spoke better Indonesian, as I was only able to communicate in very primitive sentences.  I fell asleep in my own room in the cottage, content with finally being out of Wamena and into the mountains.  This is the sort of random encounter with people that I love in travelling; as a result of a casual meeting on the path, I became part of Hernius’ family for the night.

The next morning I arose to a cold and misty village, drenched by heavy overnight rain.  Breakfast was another yam and tea.  I paid Hernius Rp 200,000 for bed, dinner and breakfast (probably above the odds, but so much cheaper than PNG that I wasn’t going to argue the point) and he walked with me down through the village centre where he turned over the money to the village headman, some sort of relative of his.  I couldn’t tell whether he was repaying an old debt, or whether tourism income had to be handed over to the village authorities.  I said goodbye and dropped steeply down to a bridge over the Yatna River (at about 1550 m) to Kurima.  On the other side I encountered pavement and ojeks, suggesting that the road I had left the day before continued in some form from Sugokno to Kurima, a new development since the Lonely Planet had been updated.  On the way out of Kurima, I passed a group of three Italian trekkers, their Sulawesi-born guide and five or six porters carrying supplies.  They had spent the night in Kurima (where I had planned to sleep the night before) and I chatted with Lucia, Gianfranco and Fabio a bit over the next few hours as we hiked.

High up above the village of Wamarek on day two
The trail climbed fairly steeply up to 1880 m.  I had walked ahead of the Italians, but managed to take a wrong turn.  Luckily the guide saw me and shouted across to me to set me right.  The correct trail was a very steep descent, made very slippery by the night’s rain and the worn-out state of my hiking boot soles.  Eventually I reached another bridge over the river, now known as the Baliem, at about 1200 m.  I crossed the river and was rewarded with a 500-metre climb steeply uphill to get to Wesagalep village, perched picturesquely on a steep-sided village between two waterfalls.  Not having done much hiking that year, especially not with a pack, I arrived with my legs running on empty, drenched in sweat and covered in mud.
Wesagalep village

I was housed in the village hall, in a slightly ramshackle room used for storage.  It was dry, but I was glad that I was carrying a ThermaRest as the bed was the wooden floor.  The village kids, excited at a departure from routine, were pestiferous, constantly peeking in the windows, howling with laughter and really annoying when I wandered out to try to do some birdwatching.  I felt dehydrated; I had drunk at least 4 litres of water en route, but in the heat and humidity, it wasn’t enough.  I asked for tea and got a couple of litres to rehydrate.  I was fed a huge amount of rice and greens and a yam which I didn’t manage to eat as I got full of rice.  The old man who was in charge of me sat and watched me as I ate and drank, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and playing Papuan pop music on his smartphone.  I sat in my room as it got dark, reading and trying to figure out what birds I had seen during the day.  I was reading Jared Diamond’s book The World Until Yesterday about traditional societies around the world, and a big part of it was (naturally, for any book by Jared Diamond) set in New Guinea, which seemed appropriate given my surroundings.  I fell asleep to the sound of rhythmic (and highly amplified) chanting somewhere in the village, which was either a traditional ceremony or (more likely) an evangelical church meeting.

Day three scenery: finally some sun!
I was up the next morning by 5:30, and after stretching and drinking cold leftover tea, I left Rp 100,000 (US$ 10) for the old man (who was nowhere to be found) and headed off in lovely morning light, the first time in three days that I was walking under clear skies.  It was a steep climb out of town, and after 45 minutes the old man came scampering uphill, anxious to be paid.  I told him where I had left the money, and he raced back to collect it.  I think he wanted more money, but he didn’t want it enough to chase me down a second time, and Rp 100,000 was all the accommodation and food was really worth.  After 300 metres of climbing, the path levelled off and I came out on a steep field that dropped a long way downhill.  I had loved the peace and quiet of walking in the early morning, surrounded by birdsong and butterflies and lots of primary forest, but the downside was that there was nobody to ask directions.  
Extensive views to the high peaks to the south
I followed the path downhill through neatly tended garden plots until the path suddenly began to peter out.  I was suspicious that I had taken a wrong turn, and was reluctant to go too much further downhill before I was sure where I was.  I sat and breakfasted on crackers and leftover yam and waited to see if anyone might wander by.  Sure enough, a farmer from Wesagalep village showed up after a while, recognized me from the village and gestured that I should come back uphill.  With a mixture of my bad Indonesian and lots of sign language, I realized that I had gone wrong quite a long way back and that I needed to be up on the top of the ridge above the field.  He reached into his string bag and gave me a cooked yam for the road.  I accepted it gratefully, grunted back uphill, halfway back to Wesagalep, found the right path (a barely discernible break in dense vegetation; no wonder I had missed it) and finally joined an obviously main path in the right direction.  Finally, at an elevation of 2140 m, I popped out on top of the ridge, in sight of where I had had breakfast, having lost an hour with my inept navigation.  I was glad that I had set out so early. 

A wonderful stone axe, but there's no way I was going to buy it!
From then on route-finding was much simpler.  I was walking a lot on open ridges with expansive views and a nice cooling breeze.  I took one more short wrong turn past a hut where an old man tried to sell me an old polished stone ceremonial axe that must have weighed 15 kilograms; I can’t imagine anything I would less want to carry around for days in my backpack.  By noon I had dropped off the ridge down a pretty muddy track to an idyllic bathing spot where I ate lunch, had a good rinse and soak, and then cleaned the mud out of my socks before settling in for more Jared Diamond.  From that point on, the trail got drier and easier.  I popped over a ridge, went down a surprisingly dry descent and tried to find Wusalem.  As it turned out, the name applied to a huge area, and every time I came to a village, I would ask “Wusalem?” and be told yes, but then realize that there was no place to stay there, so I must need another village.  Eventually I got to the last place named Wusalem and was told that it was much too far to make it to Syokosimo.  I thought this couldn’t be true, and took a chance on going there anyway.  It wasn’t that far, but it was supernaturally muddy, and I got there in plenty of time (by 4:30) but completely covered in mud.  I felt like an extra from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I found a proper guesthouse run by a pleasant old lady who cooked me good food and gave me endless supplies of boiled water to make tea and instant noodles to rehydrate.  Conditions were positively sybaritic, with a soft sleeping mat on top of carpets, a proper mosquito net and even a real WC.  I managed to wash my body and my truly revolting clothes and then ate enormous quantities of food and slept more soundly than I had for several nights.  I was down in a valley, and although the altitude (1530 m) wasn't much lower than the previous nights, it was much less chilly at night and in the early morning.
Young women of Syokosimo village
The next day, August the 1st, I harboured faint hopes that I might make it back to Wamena that day, but those were scuppered by my tardiness in getting away in the morning.  I only left at 8 am, much later than I had been doing recently, and I was starting to feel a bit lazy after three days of pretty full-on hiking.  I climbed up to almost 1900m through a beautiful, bird-filled forest that gave me lots of excuses to stop and birdwatch or to take pictures of flowers.  
Typical highland hut
I picked up an irritating would-be guide who took a long time to shake off, and then a group of irritating small children at the next village.  It took tellings-off by two groups of adults to make the kids finally stop plaguing me.

The walking for the rest of the day deteriorated sharply, with the path petering out into a narrow, overgrown, muddy track through abandoned farm fields.  I realized afterwards that I could have (and should have) taken a track down to the river to a bridge not mentioned in the LP, cutting out this section of the trail.  I kept slipping and falling in the mud, cursing and swearing at the horrible track conditions.  Finally I slithered down a final descent to Yuarina, slipping on ice-like black mud on newly plowed fields.  I somehow managed to miss the bridge entirely at the bottom, and only after wandering upstream for five minutes did I look back downstream to see the bridge, completely made of wood and lianas, and head back to cross the river.  I stopped just out of town beside the river to eat lunch, watch birds and recover mentally from the horror of the descent.

The bridge at Yuarima: all natural fibres
The rest of the day was comparatively easy, through cultivated fields and fallow patches with essentially no real forest.  The views were tremendous, looking south towards the highest mountains of the range.  There was quite a bit of foot traffic, locals coming back from Wamena via the fastest route.  I was feeling pretty tired by the time I got to Hitegi, so I slowed down and ambled the last stretch into Ugem village, stopping for a quick rinse off in a stream just outside town to try to remove the mud.  
The descent to the road from Ugem
I had a look at my boots as I was cleaning them and realized that their soles were worn down to almost nothing; no wonder I couldn’t stay on my feet on the muddy slopes!  In Ugem, I found a tidy village full of big tin-roofed buildings and a gargantuan church.  The village looked more prosperous and tidier than most places I’d seen on the hike, probably because their proximity to the road means that more money flows into the community.  I stayed in a newly built village guesthouse, very well-equipped but plagued by annoying kids with a very low boredom threshold.


The next morning I strolled out of town quite early in the morning and was down in Kurima (the village I had passed through three days previously) in an hour and a half, accompanied by the oldest son of the family that run the guesthouse.  I was pleased by his ability to show me the right track to Kurima, but less happy about him taking potshots at birds with his slingshot.  In Kurima an ojek driver offered to drive me right to my hotel for Rp 100,000 and I figured this was a good deal.  The ride to Sugokno was adventurous, with me clinging to the luggage carrier for dear life as we crossed streams and ravines, and I had to get off and walk from time to time, but 40 minutes after leaving Kurima, and only 2 hours after walking out of my lodging in Ugem, I was climbing into the shower in my room at the Rannu Jaya II Hotel in Jayapura and trying to wash mud out of my hair and my skin.  My trekking clothes were such a muddy catastrophe that I brought them to a commercial laundry service.  The rest of the day was spent eating and trying (unsuccessfully) to arrange flights for the next morning, which were all booked solid.  I knew, however, that there was an active same-day resale business in plane tickets outside the airport, so I decided that the next morning I would try my luck.


The Wonderful (Part One):  Birds of Paradise in the Arfak Mountains

I had been reading my Lonely Planet attentively and knew that Indonesian New Guinea had a number of wonderful natural attractions, and it was a matter of choosing between a number of good options.  I eventually decided that I would go birdwatching in the Arfak Mountains, just outside the town of Manokwari, and then go diving and snorkelling in the Raja Ampat archipelago off the western tip of the island.  I had been reading Alfred Russel Wallace’s book The Malay Archipelago recently, and the culmination of his years of collecting birds, animals, insects and plants in Southeast Asia were his expeditions to New Guinea in search of birds of paradise.  I am not a committed birdwatcher, but I find that birds are easier to spot than big wildlife, and make a great thing to do while hiking or cycle touring.  I had seen enough great nature documentaries to know that birds of paradise are some of the most amazing birds in the world, so the chance of seeing them up close and personal was too good to pass up.

It was a bit of an adventure trying to get from Wamena to Manokwari in one day.  I got to Wamena airport early in the morning hoping for a last-minute standby ticket.  By 6:20 am the airport was heaving with people waiting for one of the several early morning flights.  The airlines themselves resell returned tickets at more or less face value, so within minutes I had a ticket in hand.  Flights were delayed, and the first three departing flights were all cargo flights, so the crowd was getting pretty restless, but by 8:30 I was on my short hop back to Jayapura.  Amazingly, the flight, which had been sold out the previous afternoon when I tried to buy a ticket, was half empty.  The views over the forested mountains and impenetrable lowland swamps were amazing in the early-morning light.  I was in Sentani airport (the airport for Jayapura, located an hour outside the city) by 9:30, just in time to buy an onward ticket to Manokwari for 11:30.  I was there by 12:30, having spent the flight talking to my seatmate, an Indonesian woman working for a bank who was being transferred to Manokwari for the next three years.

Less heavily loaded than usual:  Manokwari motorcycle
Manokwari is a fairly tidy, peaceful little town surrounded by jungle-clad hills.  I found a great place to stay, Losmen Kagum, run by a pleasant family, and spent the afternoon buying a few groceries, finding the best internet I had seen in almost a month, and walking in the hills up to a Japanese war memorial (a bizarrely unimpressive structure that resembled a half-build public urinal).  I ran into a Hungarian couple back at the hotel who were travelling at a leisurely pace through Indonesia, extending their visa every month, well into their seventh month in the country. 

The next morning found me gobbling down a breakfast left for me on a tray the night before and heading off by 6:15 on an ojek to the Wosi bus terminal.  
Don't put all your eggs on one motorcycle:  Manokwari
It was a case of hurry-up-and-wait, as it took 3 long hours of waiting to assemble the 10 passengers required to fill a 4WD pickup truck for the 2-hour drive to Syobri village.  The drive was an hour of peaceful cruising along asphalt roads, followed by an hour of hair-raising muddy trail-bashing.  I was relieved to get out of the truck and find my way up to Zeth Wonggor’s birdwatching lodge. 

Zeth is a legend in this area, having shown birds of paradise to countless film crews including David Attenborough’s team.  His lodge is basic but functional, and very friendly.  The place was deserted when I arrived, but soon enough a full crew of birdwatchers appeared from their morning in the forest, ravenous for lunch.  
 Feline owlet-nightjar, Syobri
They were a group of 10 people travelling together under the auspices of Wild Borneo, whose founder and boss was the trip leader.  Many of them were professional biologists of one description or another, united by an enthusiasm for pitcher plants, although they were interested in anything that was alive.  I joined two French birders that afternoon in one of Zeth’s hides, constructed near one of the leks where male magnificent birds of paradise dance and display for females in the hopes of convincing them to mate.  Sort of like a nightclub on Saturday nights, then.  It was not a productive afternoon, as we huddled uncomfortably for 2 hours inside this tiny structure of wooden posts and tarpaulins, listening intently and peering out, for exactly one second of face time with the bird, who showed up, looked around and flew off after calling from nearby trees for half an hour beforehand.  I went back to the lodge dispirited, only to hear that two other groups had had far more luck with the magnificent bird of paradise and with the western parotia at two of Zeth’s other hides.
Magnificent bird of paradise (note the tail "wires")

That evening I cooked up some food and then sat around eating and socializing with the Wild Borneo team, who were full of great stories of their trip, and of previous Southeast Asian expeditions together.  At 8 pm, I joined them as they trooped out with powerful headlamps in search of nocturnal animals.  We had a lot of fun, as we spotted three cuscuses (shy, pretty nocturnal mammals a bit like small brown raccoons), 2 sugar gliders (smaller gliding mammals) a nectar-eating opossum and a very beautiful small frog.  We also had a spectacular mishap as Chien, the Wild Borneo owner, fell out of a tree where he was trying to capture a cuscus.  There was a great crashing of branches and tumbling of humans, but nobody was hurt and the cuscus escaped to safety.

Magnificent bird of paradise
The next morning I went back to the same hide by myself and was rewarded by wonderful and repeated views of the magnificent, as the male danced, fluffed himself up, leaned from one side to another, spread one wing and then the other and generally showed off.  His long, curving tail feathers looked absurd, an example (like the peacock’s tail) of sexual selection of a functionally useless feature.   That afternoon I hiked up with a couple of birders from Wild Borneo to a different hide, high above the village in spectacular primary forest, in search of the western parotia.  Unfortunately, this was an almost exact replay of the previous afternoon, with lots of calls, lots of sitting around huddled in great bodily discomfort, and only three 2-second appearances by the male, who didn’t display and disappeared immediately.  At least the walk there was very pretty, with huge liana-draped trees and dramatic tumbling streams. 

Despite only seeing one of the two species of birds of paradise that were possible there, I really enjoyed getting out into the mountainous rainforest and seeing Zeth and his team working hard for the preservation of the birds and the forest.  He had started his working life as a hunter, but had been recruited by a BBC film crew to show them birds and was amazed that Westerners would pay him far more to show them live birds than to bring them dead birds.  It changed his life, and now he searches for new leks, moves his hides around as birds change their preferred spots and works with other villagers to preserve large tracts of primary forest.
Cuscus

I moved efficiently the next morning, hiking out early towards the main road before being picked up by a driver with a very offbeat sense of humour transporting people and a mountain of vegetables to Manokwari.  I paid the same as on the outward leg, Rp 100,000, which, given the beating the vehicles take over the jeep tracks, is probably a fair price.  I picked up the luggage I had left behind at the Losmen, bought an afternoon flight to Sorong and was walking out of the airport in Sorong by 4 pm.  I took an expensive room at the JE Meridien (not far from the Marriat Hotel) and went to bed watching Roger Federer play tennis halfway around the world.


The Wonderful (Part Two):  Diving Raja Ampat

The next day, August 8th, I was a blur of activity, buying my Raja Ampat National Park diving badge, buying a ticket to Jakarta for August 20th, trying to find a place to stay out in the Raja Ampat archipelago, texting them to see if I could get picked up that day, and trying to reserve a place at a posher dive lodge for my last few days.  I caught a lift to the ferry port, bought a ticket to Waisai and cruised rapidly over the sea for a couple of hours, leaving the main island of New Guinea behind.  Raja Ampat (literally “Four Kings”) is a remoted and lightly populated area of small offshore limestone islands that has become famous for its great diving.  Years ago, when I first heard of Raja Ampat, the only real options were incredibly expensive liveaboard dive boats.  Now there are a dozen or so dive lodges scattered around the various islands, most with inexpensive homestays located nearby to provide a range of accommodation prices.  I knew that I wanted to finish my trip at BioDiversity Dive Lodge, but I couldn’t really afford to stay there for the entire 10 days.  I found a much cheaper homestay, Yenkoranu, on Pulau Kri, that offered diving and which only cost Rp 250,000 a day (US$ 25) for my own room and three meals a day (diving was extra).  I settled in for six days of serious relaxation.
Yenkoranu Homestay, Pulau Kri, Raja Ampat

Although Yenkoranu certainly could have been better run (their diving logistics were occasionally a bit slipshod in terms of when they were going out), the location was perfect, on a sandy beach surrounded by dense jungle, with a long wooden pier providing access to the water on the outside of the lagoon and a breezy shaded deck out over the water that was perfect for watching the spectacular sunsets.  
The pier at Yenkoranu
The group of Western travellers that had gathered there was an eclectic mix, with quite a few old Indonesia hands who had either lived in Indonesia or who had visited the country many times.  Raja Ampat is not as well known as places like Bali, Lombok, Java and Sumatra, and so first-time visitors to Indonesia rarely end up there.  There were interesting discussions and lots of great stories told over breakfast or dinner in the communal dining room.  The food was simple but delicious, and the rooms were equally simple but completely functional.  Walking along the beach at low tide made for perfect beachcombing, particularly at the far end of the island, when low tide exposed huge areas of white sand.  It was a picture-perfect tropical paradise.

The diving season in Raja Ampat is really from October to April, so I was in the lowest of low seasons, with all the liveaboard dive boats having moved for the season to the new diving hotspot of Komodo for a few months.  The sea was perhaps a bit rougher than it would be in the high season, but I found the diving really good once you got under the water.  There are lots of sharks, including the strange-looking bottom-crawling wobbegong, frogfish, barracuda and snappers.  I spotted a lovely pygmy seahorse (I had seen them before at Bunaken Island, but this was by far the clearest view I had ever had) and saw lots of colourful nudibranchs.  The coral was in excellent condition, and currents weren’t too strong.  The only disappointment was not seeing any manta rays; we went out to Manta Sandy, but there were none to be seen, so we aborted the dive and went elsewhere (if there are no mantas there, there is essentially nothing to see on the featureless sandy bottom).  I didn’t dive non-stop; I picked and chose among the sites, and was very pleased with what I saw.  My fellow divers were pretty experienced and made great companions, and the dive guides were knowledgeable and great at spotting stuff.

When I wasn’t in my wetsuit, I took the chance to relax a lot.  I did yoga on the deck over the water, juggled on the beach, went birdwatching in the forest, swam lengths off the pier (wearing a mask and snorkel so I could watch the sharks and fish and turtles and coral below me) and read a lot, finishing off a number of books on my Kindle, including Thomas Piketty’s tome Capital in the 21st Century.  The most impressive sights to remember were seeing another cuscus up close one night, and watching a shark feeding frenzy off the end of the pier as the kitchen staff gutted that night’s supper and tossed the remains into the water.  All the sharks I have ever seen while diving have been either patrolling or sleeping; I had never seen sharks hunting and attacking fish successfully until then.  I have to say that I sheltered behind the pilings of the pier to watch the action, not wanting to become collateral damage.

Sittin' on the dock of the bay, BioDiversity Lodge
By the time I caught a boat across to BioDiversity, on the other side of the channel on larger Pulau Gam, I was feeling pretty relaxed.  BioDiversity, a fairly new upscale resort run by a Spanish couple, made me even more relaxed.  There are only six cottages, lovingly maintained and very tastefully furnished, with very little around them.  The beach and pier are pretty, and the food is excellent.  There weren’t many other divers there, and it was a truly lovely way to finish my summer of travel.  The diving was excellent, although we visited a number of the sites that I had dived much more cheaply with Yenkoranu.  Blue Magic was my favourite site, full of big silvery fish and sharks, although I loved the Frewin Wall as well, a long vertical granite wall underwater.  The last afternoon I went out with 5 Singaporean fellow guests to look for the red bird of paradise.  This was easily the best bird of paradise encounter that I had all summer, with 5 or 6 males dancing and displaying for at least 2 females, with successful mating at the end.  We had great views of the action, although it was essentially hopeless to try to take photos given the low light and high contrast. 
BioDiversity Pier

And then, suddenly, it was time to head back to Leysin for another year of teaching, my fifth and final one.  It was hard to tear myself away from the beaches, the diving, the jungles, the food and the tropical ambience of Indonesia.  It was my fifth trip to this sprawling, diverse country, and will likely not be my last given the existence of Terri’s place on Bali.  I really enjoyed the Indonesian side of New Guinea, infinitely more than my Papua New Guinea experience.  I had always wanted to trek in the Baliem Valley, and diving Raja Ampat had been on my radar for a decade or more.  I am already lazily sketching out a bicycle itinerary running east from Bali to Timor, exploring the islands of Nusa Tenggara, and I could certainly see going back to Raja Ampat someday to do more diving.
Chilled out at the end of a great summer of diving

As I took my long flight back to Jakarta and on to Amsterdam and Geneva, I was already contemplating my next trips.  Travel is like a drug; once you’ve done some, you want to do more, and it consumes your thoughts, your time and your money.  It’s probably a lot healthier than most drugs, though, so I see no reason to curtail my addiction anytime soon.
Yenkoranu sunset


Sunday, October 18, 2015

By The Numbers--Brought Up To Date

Here's an updated list of the countries I've visited over the course of my life, arranged by the date of my first visit to the country.  I don't count my home country, Canada.   Of course, exactly what constitutes a country is a bit slippery.  My well-travelled friend Natalya Marquand holds that the only objective list is the 193 permanent members of the UN.  Others hold that these countries, plus the non-UN-member Vatican City, make up the 194 canonical countries of the world.  I think the reality is a bit slippier.  When I visited Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia, despite the fact that these countries aren’t universally recognized, I had to get a visa to visit them and cross at a border post manned by people in uniform who stamped my passport.  Somaliland not only has its own consulates and border guards, it even has its own currency.  And, to take an extreme example, anyone who claims that Taiwan isn’t effectively an independent country isn’t really recognizing what’s been de facto the case since 1949.

So my list of independent countries is a bit bigger than 194.  It’s about 204 countries; the number may fluctuate a bit, and it doesn’t include three countries (Western Sahara, Palestine and Tibet) with pretty legitimate cases but without their own border guards. One of the many lists of countries on Wikipedia lists 206 entries that either are recognized by at least one other state as being independent, or effectively control a permanently populated territory, but they include Western Sahara and Palestine which are at the moment illusory pipe dreams, to the distress of the people who inhabit them.  If I'm not counting Canada, that would make 193 or 203 possible destinations.

Anyway, without further preamble, here’s my list of the countries I have visited, arranged according to the date I first visited them.  The non-UN/Vatican members of the list are coloured red; there are eight of them, so if you’re counting by the UN+Vatican list, it’s 111 (out of 193).  I would make it 119 out of 203.  Whichever way you count it, I’m now well over half-way to my goal of visiting them all, and my to-visit list is now down into double digits.   

1969
1. US

1977
2.  France
3.  Switzerland
4.  Liechtenstein
5.  Germany
6.  Netherlands

1981
7.  Tanzania

1982
8.  Norway
9.  Italy

1988
10.  UK
11. Vatican
12.  Greece
13.  Hungary
14.  Austria
15.  Czech Republic (Prague, then part of the now-defunct Czechoslovakia)

1990
16.  Belgium
17.  Monaco
18.  Poland

1991
19.  Australia
20.  New Zealand
21.   Fiji
22.  Cook Islands

1994
23.  Egypt
24.  Turkey

1995
25.  Spain
26.  Kenya
27.  Uganda
28.  Democratic Republic of Congo
29.  Japan
30.  Singapore
31.  Indonesia

1996
32.  Philippines
33.  Malaysia
34.  Thailand
35.  Cambodia
36.  Nepal

1997
37.  India
38.  Sri Lanka
39.  Pakistan
40.  Luxembourg
41.  San Marino
42.  Andorra

1998
43.  China
44.  Portugal
45.  Morocco
46.  Tunisia
47.  Jordan

1999
48.  Israel
49.  Syria
50.  Lebanon
51.  Chile
52.  Argentina
53.  Peru

2000
54.  Bolivia
55.  South Korea

2001
56.  Mexico
57.  Brunei
58.  Laos
59.  Taiwan

2004
60.  Kazakhstan
61.  Kyrgyzstan
62.  Tajikistan
63.  Uzbekistan
64.  Turkmenistan
65.  Iran
66.  Bahrain

2006
67.  Vietnam
68.  Burma

2007
69.  Mongolia
70.  Palau
71.  Bangladesh

2008
72.  Bhutan
73.  Cyprus
74.  Northern Cyprus

2009
75.  Kuwait
76.  Azerbaijan
77.  Georgia
78.  Armenia
79.  Nagorno-Karabakh
80.  Iraq
81.  Bulgaria
82.  Serbia
83.  Kosovo
84.  Macedonia
85.  Albania
86.  Montenegro
87.  Bosnia-Hercegovina
88.  Croatia
89.  Libya
90.  Malta

2010
91.  Ethiopia
92.  Somaliland
93.  Djibouti

2011
94.  Denmark
95.  Abkhazia
96.  Russia
97.  Ukraine
98.  Trans-Dniestria
99.  Moldova
100. Romania
101.  Slovakia
102.  Belarus
103.  Lithuania
104.  Latvia
105.  Estonia
106.  United Arab Emirates
107.  Oman
108.  Qatar

2012
109.  Slovenia
110.  Togo
111.  Benin

2013 


112.  Maldives
113,  Iceland
114.  Ireland

2014
115. East Timor
116. Solomon Islands
117. Papua New Guinea

2015
118. Finland
119. Sweden

The projected next few new countries, early in 2016, should be Uruguay, Brazil and Paraguay, and then there are lots and lots of African countries to visit on what should be a long round-the-continent trip.  There are still huge areas of the globe that I haven't visited and I am really curious to see what they are like.  Africa and the Central America/Caribbean area are the biggest remaining blank spots on my persional map.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

A Brief Sojourn in the Solomon Islands (Retrospective from July, 2014)

Ottawa, October 17, 2015

After over a year of sloth, it's time to bring my blog up to date with some of the travels that I have gotten up to over the last year.  This is from July of last year (2014) when I went to the Solomon Islands.  More updates coming later!

After saying goodbye to Terri and spending an evening in the mass-tourism mecca of Seminyak, late in the evening of July 9th, 2014 I boarded a flight from Denpasar airport to Brisbane, Australia.  I arrived in the morning, just in time to see the final shots of the shootout between the Netherlands and Argentina on the big screen in the arrivals hall.  Australia has a neat system for visas that more countries should copy.  Everyone except Aussies and Kiwis needs a visa before arriving, but it can be arranged online without the nonsense of sending your passport to an embassy.  Your name goes on an online list and when you arrive, the immigration officer looks you up online. Very easy and efficient.

Anyway, I was in Australia for only a few hours, as I got on another Virgin Australia flight to Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands.  I had decided to visit Papua New Guinea on this trip, and since the Lonely Planet guide for PNG also covers the Solomons, I had decided to add the Solomons to my journey, the 116th country on my life list.  I got to Honiara mid-afternoon and wandered through the dilapidated old airport looking (successfully) for a place to change money and (unsuccessfully) for a bus into town.  I had booked a room in the Red Mansion hotel and eventually found a cab of great age to take me there.  It was the cheapest room I could find, and it was still 700 Solomon dollars (US$ 85) for a very indifferent room seveal kilometres from downtown Honiara.  I had crossed the line dividing Southeast Asia and its reasonable prices from the Pacific and its ridiculous prices.  The city looked poor, dusty and still recovering from the days of the civil war (1998-2003).  I dropped off my luggage at the hotel, wandered down the hill to the main road and caught a bus downtown for a reasonable S$ 3 (about US$ 0.40) to see if I could figure out the interisland ferry schedule.  I was too late; offices were already closed.  I found a small Chinese take-out joint, ate some greasy fish and chips and then caught a bus back to the hotel, mindful of the dire warnings I had heard about nocturnal security problems in Honiara.

The next day I got up early, ate a truly unimpressive hotel breakfast, checked out, left my luggage and went back into town.  I found a travel agent who knew nothing much about interisland ferry schedules, found a slow, overpriced internet joint, then bought a Solomon Islands Telecom SIM card. After a quick phone call to the ferry company (who were only marginally more helpul than the travel agent), I set off in search of a cheaper place to stay.  On a hill just behind the three-block downtown core, I found the Rock Haven Inn where a windowless basement cell was only S$385 (US$ 50).  I caught a bus back to the Red Mansion, picked up my luggage and caught a cab back to the hotel.  The early afternoon was devoted to organization:  buying a ferry ticket for the 12th to Munda, booking a hotel in Munda, talking to Dive Munda and Dive Gizo on the phone, having a beer at the Yacht Club and arranging diving for the next day on the outskirts of Honiara.

With logistics taken care of, it was time for some sightseeing.  I headed out of town on a minibus to go to the trailhead for a hike recommended in the Lonely Planet, to the Mataniko waterfalls.  The bus led out of the crowded dusty centre to the dirt-poor shantytowns on the outskirts of town.  I set off up the trail, forded a river and was promptly chatted up by a local guy who demanded S$200 (US$ 30) for "traditional fees" and guide services.  Since this sort of thing drives me nuts, I decided to give up the waterfall in favour of the US War Memorial.  I walked up into the hills, trying to figure out the shortest route, and finally found myself at the memorial.  The US has put up a very informative memorial to the bloody Guadalcanal campaign (Honiara is on the island of Guadalcanal) in 1942-43. 
US Guadalcanal Campaign war memorial in Honiara 
Local kids at the War Memorial, Honiara
Guadalcanal marked a major turning point in World War Two in the Pacific.  The Battle of Midway in June 1942 was the first naval battle that didn't go Japan's way, while Guadalcanal marked the first land battle lost by the previously invincible Japanese army.  The memorial is an oasis of order and cleanliness amidst the garbage-strewn streets of Honiara, but I almost didn't get in as the groundskeeper was nowhere to be found.  Eventually he showed up from across the street and I spent a good hour reading the history and admiring the views over the surrounding hills.  A few days after I visited, the memorial was badly vandalized by persons unknown.  Some overpriced Chinese food at the Sea King restaurant and it was time for an early night in bed.  On my way home at dusk, walking four blocks back to my hotel, the staff at the restaurant looked horrified that I was going to walk and not take a taxi.  Nothing happened to me, but there was definitely an air of menace as the sun went down.  I spent the night roasting in my concrete box and sleeping poorly.

July 11th was devoted to diving.  I headed over to Dive Tulagi, the only dive shop in town, and a group of 6 Western client and a couple of Solomon Island dive guides headed out of town in the back of a truck.  We headed to a dive site called Bonegi, where Japanese shipwrecks from 1942 are just offshore.  The diving was indifferent:  visibility was terrible, with a lot of silt, supposedly from massive floods a couple of months earlier, obscuring the top 5 metres of the water column.  My dive guide was fairly terrible, with little control over his buoyancy, not much of an eye for interesting creatures and an alarming tendency to stand on live coral.  I still managed to see some interesting bushy soft corals, lots of crabs and a very pretty shrimp in bubble coral.  The wreck was impressive, but more or less impossible to get inside.  I hoped for better diving in Munda and Gizo.  My fellow divers included a couple of Australians working for RAMSI, the military intervention force sent to restore order in 2003.  They were interesting to talk to, amusingly cynical about the country and its venal politicians and the non-existent economy.  Another guy was an Anglican minister, in the Solomons for a church training course, (Religion is a big, big deal in the Solomons.)

That afternoon I had a late fish and chips lunch at the Kokonut Kafe and reflected on what I'd seen so far in the Solomons.  It was a paradoxical country, very expensive but dirt poor.  The roads were full of ancient wrecks of cars, and yet nobody was on bicycles or on the cheap motorcycles that are the staple of transport in Southeast Asia.  All the shops were run by Chinese businessmen who often sat on an elevated chair keeping an eagle eye on their local employees.  The only thing that seemed to get local people excited was chewing betel.  There were ubiquitous NGOs that seemed to make up much of the local economy.  
Pidgin:  "You me together clean up; stop dengue!"
There was little of the commercial bustle that I was so used to in Indonesia.  The people are very dark-skinned Melanesians, rather like Australian Aborigines in appearance, but with a lot of red or blond hair in evidence.  The most striking part of the country so far were the wonderful Pidgin English signs, like "Iu spitim, iu klinim" (you spit, you clean) for "No betel chewing".  

The next morning I headed down to the ferry dock by 7:45, looking forward to a relaxing day on the ferry that would take me 24 hours west to Munda.  Instead it was one of the most miserable 24 hours I have ever spent on any public transport anywhere.  
The huge crowd trying to board the MV Chanella to Munda
The regular ferry was out of action for maintenance and had been replaced by a cargo freighter over which a tarpaulin had been stretched.  It was hopelessly overcrowded, like a refugee boat on the Mediterranean, and I was barely able to find a tiny space to wedge myself between the piles of bags and possessions covering every square centimetre of the deck.  It was dangerously overcrowded, hot and sweaty and smoky, with waves splashing up over the sides and torrential downpours eventually finding gaps in the tarps.  The journey acquired the feeling of a nightmare as I drifted off to sleep only to wake up from someone stepping on my feet or raindrops landing on my face. At least it cost me S$ 500 (US$ 70)!  I decided that from now on I would fly.

I was infinitely relieved to get off the boat at Noro, 20 kilometres past Munda, at 9 o'clock in the morning.  The boat can't dock at Munda because the old pier in town burned down over a decade ago and nobody can agree on who should pay for a new one.  I waited for a couple of hours for a bus, as company buses shuttling fish cannery workers around passed by one after another.  Finally a bus showed up and dropped me off in what passes for downtown Munda, outside the Qua Roviana guesthouse.  I got a room, showered off the grime from a night spent sweating in my clothes and went out to arrange diving across the street at Dive Munda.  I bought a plane ticket at the airport (I decided to give Gizo a miss and to fly back from Munda to Honiara the day before my flight out of the country), had a great lunch at the Grass Haus Cafe (run by a local guy who has returned from working abroad), went for a long run, did some yoga and went out to dinner at the Agnes Motel where I chatted with a handful of long-term Aussie expats about the Solomon Islands.  They had a depressing litany of complaints, from the government's willingness to sell its tropical timber and its offshore fishing rights to foreigners (Malaysians and Taiwanese and Chinese) for a trifling sum, to the hopelessness of the banks and the post office.  The shops in Munda (entirely run by Chinese again, as in Honiara) sell almost exclusively imported food, and from the wrong places:  expensive Australian rice rather than cheaper Thai rice).  I went to bed tired and dispirited.

Shallow lagoon outside Munda
Nine hours of solid sleep later and I awoke refreshed and much more positive.  I spent the next two days diving with Dive Munda, a very professional (and expensive!  US$180 a day for two dives a day!  Pacific island prices, rather than Indonesian prices) outfit run by a British couple.  Compared to Honiara, the diving was amazing.  The reef is in good shape, and the number of large fish is high.  On the first day, I went out with a Canadian couple, Mathieu and Audrey, into pretty big swells outside the lagoon that encloses Munda.  We saw 8 sharks on the first dive and 2 on the second dive, several turtles, Spanish mackerel, rainbow runners and barracuda.  On the second day, it was only me and the dive guide Solomon, and we had an even better day, with more than a dozen sharks of three species (whitetip, blacktip and grey reef), along with eagle rays, a spotted ray and even a mobula ray (a smaller version of the manta).  Apparently the area right around Munda has been declared a marine sanctuary and, despite poaching by some local fishermen, fish numbers and reef health are both really high.  The local authorities have banned shark finning after Dive Munda explained the local benefits of tourism and diving.  It was really world class diving, and just about worth the eye-watering prices.

After the second day of diving, I got picked up by Eddie the boatman and brought across an open strait to Rendova Island and a tiny homestay, Titiru Eco-Lodge, where I would spend the next four nights before returning to Honiara for my flight to PNG.  I was immediately charmed when the 6 staff members welcomed me on the dock by singing a four-verse welcome song, putting a floral lei around my neck and giving me a fresh green coconut to drink.
My hut at Titiru
Talking to people in Munda the night before (a group of Rotary Club volunteers who had come over from Brisbane to do volunteer work on the local school and the hospital), I had learned that the total number of tourist visas granted every year to the Solomons is about 8000, and at least half of those are for volunteers and missionaries.  There are no more than 3000 real tourists a year, or about 8 arrivals a day.  Somehow this tiny trickle of tourists supports some 80 "eco-lodges" spread all over the dozens of main islands in this extensive, sparsely-populated country, and I was the only guest at this one.  There were 4 cottages spread around a wonderfully-landscaped garden, full of colourful flowers and birds.  All sorts of possible activities were written up on a chalkboard:  caves, mangrove walks, village visits, mountain climbing, snorkelling, bat-watching.  I had a guide assigned to show me around everything, and two cooks to keep me fed.


Sadly, the weather was pretty disappointing over the next four days, with Biblical downpours most days, and I never got to climb the local volcano.  
Wild waterlogged soccer game on Titiru
I did make it into the caves, and walked around the local village watching the school students play football since their teachers had all had to go to Munda to go to the bank, leaving them at a loose end.  Snorkelling was challenging, as it was almost impossible to get from the limestone shore over the reef into the water.  I enjoyed swimming in the freshwater lagoon, although we later saw a big crocodile basking on the opposite shore and I decided swimming probably wasn't worth the risk.  The mangroves were full of massive soldier crabs and interesting birds, including red-throated parrots. Mostly, though, I read (finally finishing Proust's In Search of Lost Time, after almost two years of off-and-on reading), juggled, played guitar and drew, waiting for the rain to end.  

Titiru Lagoon
 I spent a lot of time talking to my guide, Haigo, and the owner of the lodge, Kilo.  From them I got a bit of a picture of the texture of life in the outer islands.  The area around Munda is a hotspot for logging by a Malaysian multinational, and Haigo and Kilo had both worked for logging firms, often the only source of paid employment to be found.  By some estimates, there are only about 3 years' worth of timber left to  be felled in the entire country.  The country's prime minister is in contempt of high court rulings to halt logging by his relatives in his constituency.  The main agricultural crop in the boondocks, copra (roasted coconut flesh) sells for a mere S$2.80 a kilogram (US$0.40 a kg).  The country has a population of about 600,000 people and they speak an amazing 60 different languages.  There are missionaries and members of the Wycliffe Society on every island trying to translate the Bible into all these languages.  Local villagers get paid S$4 an hour for casual labour (US$ 0.55 an hour), very low given the high prices in shops.

My very well-paid boatman Eddie
After 4 enjoyable, lazy days, it was time to leave my island.  I paid S$2000 (about US$300) for my 4 days of lodging and food; expensive, but par for the course in the Solomons.  What really annoyed me was that my boat trip to and from Titiru (2 45-minute rides on a 30-hp open dinghy) cost almost as much:  S$800 each way.  There are no poor boat owners in the Solomons!  I got to Munda, caught a flight to Honiara and spent my last night at the Agnes Guesthouse, trying to sleep through the deafening loudspeakers of a Christian revival meeting across the street, and (at 3 am) the loudest dogfight I have ever heard.  

As I flew out to Port Moresby on July 21st, I  reflected on my experience in the Solomons.  It was remarkably expensive for not very good quality food and accommodation.  The diving in Munda was great but (again) really expensive.  The country itself is a bit sad:  poor, politically dysfunctional, with no economic growth and serious social problems (rape, murder, unemployment, casual violence), with venal leaders addicted to selling out the country's resources cheaply to foreigners in exchange for a cut of the action.  I don't see this changing for the better anytime soon.  So I'm glad I visited, but I won't be rushing back again any time soon.  Little did I know that PNG was going to make me miss the Solomons!