12/02/2011, Hermit Islands, Papua New Guinea
Luf Island Village, Hermit Islands, Papua New Guinea
I never read Milton so don't exactly know what Paradise he thinks was Lost, but I'm sure he would be happy to know that a little corner of paradise still exists in the Hermit Islands of Papua New Guinea. It's been 6 months since we sailed away from the Hermits, but our too-short visit there remains a highlight of our voyage.
The Hermits are little blips of islands - I'm not even sure how many there are...maybe 6 or 7? - dotting the Pacific about 150 miles north of PNG's main island. There is one small village of about 200 gentle SDA (Seventh Day Adventist) souls on the largest of the group's islands, Luf. It was our last stop in PNG on the way to Palau. We thought we'd be there a couple of days, stayed 10, and would have stayed longer but for the lure of a good weather window to continue the sail north.
Like so many Pacific island clusters, the Hermits are ringed by a formidable reef with narrow passes that the prudent sailor only negotiates in good light. We were timing our arrival for morning light but with the help of a generous following current on the route from Kavieng we arrived at the pass at the end of day 3 rather than the beginning of day 4. We still had enough light to clear the deep water cut and then wound around several more miles to the anchorage off the village, which we discovered was either very deep or scarily shallow. Enoch paddled out as we circled like a dog looking for a comfortable spot to snooze and directed us to a safe place to drop the hook. (Check out that reef in the photo above!)
Later, during a stroll through the tidy little village, I asked Enoch if they had a store.
Yes, a small one, but only if a ship comes in.
When was the last ship here?
What month is it?
Late May.
Maybe... in January...?
Everyone loves to garden and a pot is anything you plant in
Community loos
Primary school
Several outboard engines were mounted on stumps in the sand, as if they'd sprouted from seedlings poked into the ground to grow new ones. Outboards generally signify a degree of wealth and Enoch explained that the villagers collect sea cucumbers to sell to the Chinese for their seemingly insatiable appetite for beche-de-mer. Harvesting had been banned for some time, however, to allow the dwindling sea cucumber populations to replenish so there had been no collecting - and therefore no income - for a while. "But it's ok," he said. "I'm happy even when I don't have any money. I have my garden and I can catch fish." The outboards, it turns out, were all in for repair, and like the little store, waiting for the ship to arrive with parts.
Waiting for parts
The villagers were immensely proud of their new church - a true labor of love slowly assembled over 14 years whenever a ship showed up with supplies. They built it without any formal plans, natural architects that they are, from timber they cut by hand from the surrounding hills. They were very grateful, however, for input from a "real" architect on a visiting sailboat who helped design the electrical/lighting system, all generator run, when the supply ship arrives with fuel....
Village Church
On Saturday, the SDA Sabbath, we attended the Children's Graduation Ceremony at the church. Everyone was gussied up in their Saturday best and every child in the village was called forward to be officially promoted to the next level of Sunday, er, Saturday school.
The graduating classes.
(Most of the kids and many of the adults are barefoot.)
The pastor, a diminutive little Leprechaun of a man (whose name was even McLean), was not a Hermit Island native but clearly carried a lot of stature in the village. We had saved a number of trade and gift items for our stop there and as we tried to figure out how best to distribute the stuff, the village elders all said, "Give it to the Pastor." But there are no secrets in these villages so after giving one old lady a pair of reading glasses the word was out and everyone needed glasses. We rooted around the boat, our bags and backpacks to extend our stock of specs and set up shop in one of the villager's houses. The old chief wasn't so much interested in readers as he was with a snazzy pair of sunglasses Jim had added to the giveaway pile. Every time we saw him after that he was sporting his new shades.
Happy customers at the optical shop
Another item on the give-away list was an electronic keyboard we'd been carrying around like a silent stowaway for 12 years. Never used. All my good intentions to practice long since blown away. It turned out Pastor McLean actually plays the piano so this was the perfect place to leave it, as long as the power hurdle could be cleared: the piano needed 110 power, their generators all produced 220. But Jim rummaged some more and produced a small transformer we didn't really need, so we left behind the piano, transformer, and a pile of sheet music for the village. The good pastor had already taught several of the village boys to play the guitar and was now signing up piano students.
Pastor McLean tries out his new church organ
Even birds have a corner of paradise in the Hermits. About a half hour's boat ride from the village is tiny pristine Bird Island, home to boobies, terns, frigates, and others I don't recall.
Katie tries to figure out who's who up there
Nesting booby and watchful friend
While we circumnavigated the island along its pristine beach, no-doubt annoying the birds along the way, Enoch and his crew built a little sun shelter for our stay (you can do anything with a bush knife!)...
... refrigerated the watermelons freshly picked from his garden...
... and fired up the grill to cook the day's catch.
Meanwhile, we visited a densely jungled nearby island where the guys did a little crabbing...
...and came up with enough lunch for everyone.
Cooking crab the easy way
The villagers were incredibly generous to us during our stay. Not only were we daily lavished with more freshly plucked fruits and vegetables than we could ever eat...
Sharing the bounty with our Aussie friend Al from sailboat Zeke
...the village ladies also delivered a fully cooked banquet to the boat (and then stayed and serenaded us with perfectly harmonized church songs).
Dinner and entertainment arrive at Asylum
And as if all that weren't enough, the village threw us a feast as a farewell thank you for the piano. Grilled fish and all manner of local delicacies, most cooked in freshly grated and squeezed coconut cream, filled the table. We chipped in a couple of chocolate cakes, always a hit in these oven-less villages.
After Jim sang for the kids...
...the kids sang for us.
And the chief was there in his cool new shades...
Namu, the wonderful mechanic; Al from Zeke; the cool chief and Jim
Even in Paradise we kept one eye on the weather to catch a good window for the eight-ish day trip to Palau. We were hoping to score a little more diesel for this second and longer leg of the journey, which would take us right through the windless doldrums, so Jim visited a small disabled fishing boat moored near us to see if he had any to spare. Sylvester, its sole occupant, had been towed in sometime in February, stuck there indefinitely while he, too, waited for a ship to arrive with parts. It wasn't clear whether anybody actually knew to send the parts he needed or whether he was just hoping they'd show up, miraculously, on a supply ship one day. We wondered if his family in some distant village had any idea where he was... He was able to spare about 4 gallons and was happy with the small amount of PNG cash we had left. And, well, was there any chance we had a 1 amp fuse? His GPS didn't work. Jim spent some time on the rattle-trap little boat, helped him diagnose and rewire the offending circuit, and left him with 2 spare fuses.
Sylvester
A couple days later Sylvester paddled over to Asylum and shyly asked if we could remove some of the old movies from his flash drive and put new ones on it.
Flash drive??
From a dugout canoe??
Technology definitely had found its way even to this remote little outpost of Paradise. A bit like water, it seems electronic gizmos will seep in wherever they can. Sharon, the headmistress at the primary school, had a portable DVD player that she asked Jim to fix. Enoch had a small MP3 player that he wanted us to load with new music. Pastor McLean had a digital camera (I'm not sure where he puts the photos he takes; don't you need a computer for that?). Most of this stuff has come from visiting yachties like us who have a spare this or that to leave behind (we also gave them a cell phone to use when someone goes to the "big city"). But all these contributions do seem a bit incongruous in a village that has no electricity except from a community generator (when the supply ship comes with fuel) or wee solar panels attached to their thatch houses...
...where the women still haul water from community wells...
...and cook with hot rocks on an open fire.
Laundry is done the old fashioned way...
... and many of their tools are, well, finely crafted from available materials...
What was so remarkable to me -- and humbling -- was that none of this was particularly remarkable to them. They live contentedly as they always have, not opposed to modern stuff with bells and whistles but also not particularly covetous of it. An occasional dip in the gadget pool seems to be enough for them.
Perhaps what we have in these lovely people in this tidy little village in the middle of nowhere is really Paradox Found.
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Comments [4]
11/08/2011, Maryland, USA
The Inmates clean up pretty good on land!
(At my niece's wedding in D.C. Those dashing blond guys
are 2 of my brothers and that chic lady behind me is my mother.)
Just in case anyone's been checking up on us here, we just wanted to let you know that we're running a wee bit behind these days. We've been in the States since August and seem to have been in a catch-up mode most of the time so the blog has been sorely neglected. But I do have one new post almost ready to go and another in the queue, waiting patiently in the back of my brain, so please stand by!
Happy Thanksgiving to all!
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05/15/2011, Kavieng, New Ireland, PNG
Katie with Paul and Jane Rutledge at Rapopo Plantation Resort
We don't usually make it a practice to hang out at resorts when we cruise--we'd much rather hang in gin-clear water in an isolated anchorage or off a small village getting to know the locals--but security considerations in Papua New Guinea have made resort hopping the prudent thing to do. There are some lovely anchorages and villages coming up on the next leg of the trip, which we'll explore on the way out of PNG, but until then, Resorts R Us.
Mind you, we're not complaining. These places are gorgeous and we've been generously welcomed by the hosts at our three resort stops and treated like paying guests. Which, to some extent, we are, as we treat ourselves to a dinner out now and then, but we've also had free use of moorings, swimming pools, washing machines, resort shuttles, freezers, and perhaps most valuable of all, access to local advice and information. At each place we've met a steady stream of intrepid expat residents and interesting resort guests as well, all of whom share a sort of edgy élan by virtue of living in or visiting PNG. And we've even managed to take in some of the local color and culture along the way.
Asylum and Ariana off Rapopo resort with the Rabaul volcanoes in the background
Rapopo Plantation Resort in Kokopo took us in the day after the robbery and we stayed 2 more weeks sorting things out--getting the grate made for the V-berth hatch and making daily fruitless calls and visits to the police. It was here that we met Paul and Jane Rutledge, Paul an Aussie prosecutor working in PNG as an advisor to the court system. He was in Kokopo on a 3 week "circuit" and, bless him, tried twice on our behalf to stir up a little action in the somnambulant police department. (He had no better luck than we did.)
Kokopo became the provincial capital after nearby Rabaul was essentially buried in the 1994 volcano eruption. It has a large tidy and organized public market (compliments of a grant from the Japanese); a grandma's attic-like WW II museum crammed with musty bits of war memorabilia; lots of surrounding WW II history and sites; the best grocery stores we've found in PNG (this is important to cruisers!); and perhaps our favorite, a mobile phone store that also sells traditional shell money for when you need to pay a bride price.
English translation of Pidjin instructions for helping stranded allied servicemen in WW II.
I like #6: "If the Japanese come hide the white man and give them false information."
I particularly like the baskets that all the men in PNG seem to carry. They come in all variety of shapes and sizes, some with fringes (my favorites) and some very tiny, some huge. Some they carry like a shoulder bag, an arm-hole woven into the design, but mostly you see them looped thru the middle finger. What I can't figure out is what's IN them. Especially the big ones??
Jim buying his man-basket at the Kimbe market. These ladies, who made the baskets, had traditional face tattoos and big loopy ears. The colorful bags they're carrying are called a "bilum" and they're as common as the baskets.
From Rapopo we sailed around the top of New Britain and then south into Kimbe Bay where we stayed for about 2 weeks at the Walindi Plantation Resort near the town of Kimbe (which we'd been warned was not safe to anchor at). Walindi, too, let use a mooring (anchoring can be tricky here; the water's either very deep or you're on a reef) and we had access to the resort facilities, including an air conditioned library with cable TV (we actually watched some news!), wifi, and an extensive collection of fish books and WW II history.
The owners are an Aussie couple who've lived in PNG more than 30 years and also run an oil palm plantation - palm oil being a major source of revenue for the country. There are miles of precision-planted palm trees on these plantations, like columns of soldiers on the march. In this area they were experimenting with planting patterns to allow cattle to graze between rows of palms. Men pick the fruit from the oil palm trees with scythes attached to very long bamboo poles. They lop off the big fruits and then lug them to a pile by the side of the road, which is then picked up by a truck that works its way up and back, gathering up the piles and hauling them to the processing plant. Women and children gather the small pieces that fall out when the fruit drops.
Oil palm trees and fruit waiting to be picked up for processing
Many of the plantation workers live in "company town" villages with housing provided by the palm oil company. They look a little rough to me, but apparently they're a good deal to the workers. Payday on the plantation proved to be such a problem, however, with the modern-day equivalent of stagecoach robberies each week, that the companies now find it cheaper to deliver the payroll by helicopter, which hovers over a little funnel on the roof of a locked building and drops the money bag down into it.
Village for plantation workers and the money drop building with the funnel on top
The resort also supports a local conservation NGO, "Mahonia Na Dari," Guardian of the Sea in the local language, that we visited. The program director asked us if we'd speak about our experience sailing around the world to a group of students they bring in every Saturday morning from area high schools to train in basic conservation and marine/reef ecology. It was an easy assignment: "Anything you want to talk about will be new and interesting to them!" so we put a few photos on a flash drive and prepared a 30 minute presentation that ended up going on for more than an hour. She said they'd probably be too shy to ask questions but I cajoled them at the end and once one of them summoned the courage to ask something, many did. I also spent several hours with the director talking about grant writing and basic program evaluation principles, something she was struggling with as their funders increasingly want to see "results." It was good to get the rusty brain cylinders pumping again and she seemed very grateful for the advice.
Walindi is considered a world-class dive destination and we took advantage of it while we were there. Perhaps even more interesting than the diving were some of the people we met, who come from all over the world to dive there, doing 3 and 4 dives a day. The weather didn't always cooperate but it was great diving and a first class operation. We're either not enthusiastic enough or getting old because 2 dives a day pretty much does us in. In another example of resort generosity they took in our freezer contents when our freezer started to warm up and put us in touch with their refrigeration guy who ultimately declared our compressor dead. With no replacement available anywhere in PNG, we had to order one shipped in from Australia, bound for our next destination, the town of Kavieng on the island of New Ireland.
It was a windless 34 hour motor boat ride from Walindi to Kavieng, where we dropped the hook off our third generous resort, which immediately opened their freezer to our stuff. Nusa Island Retreat is a laid back surfer/diver destination with traditional style bungalows and a bunch of native birds that come and go as they please, including a cheeky little red cardinal lorikeet named Johnny who hangs out in the bar and demands to drink from your wine glass.
Nusa Island Retreat
Here we met the local director of another conservation NGO and were promptly invited to a mangrove-planting ceremony, with featured guest and promoter of going green, Miss PNG.
With John Aini, director of NGO "Island Awareness," and Miss PNG at the mangrove planting ceremony on Earth Day
In our regular visits to the Post Office to determine the whereabouts of our express-shipped compressor we got to know earnest young Peter, who shyly asked if could come visit the boat and was amazed that it was "just like a house!"
Peter at the cash drawer in the Kavieng PO. I was struck by the contrast of this old fashioned wood drawer, with big holes for the coins, under the counter with a modern Acer computer sitting on it.
New Ireland has the longest stretch of paved road in the country at 108 miles (amazingly, you can't drive anywhere from the capital, Port Moresby; it has about 75 miles of paved roads that don't go anywhere) and we did manage a day-trip to see some of the coastal villages. New Ireland is home to the Malagan culture, with distinctive carvings and masks used for traditional ceremonies. In the past, these items would have been destroyed after being used for a ceremony, having been imbued with too much spiritual power to safely be kept around. Usually they were buried or burned, but as interested collectors and tourists started showing up, the villagers realized they could get rid of the pieces (which was the goal) and make a little money in the process, so now many are for sale. An anthropologist whose name escapes me calls it the "sacrificial economy." The Malagan masks are very cool. I wish we could have seen them in ceremony. As it was, we just saw a small collection in a village, all securely locked in a little hut, but brought out for us to examine (and buy).
The compressor finally made it onto a plane to Kavieng and a local refrigeration guy helped Jim install it. It works. And now all too quickly it's time to press on again. Our too-short tourist visas have expired.
PNG has been a mixed bag for us: the country is painfully frustrating but equally intriguing and I wish we'd had more time to explore the intriguing parts, especially all the "sing sing" cultural festivals coming up in July - Sept. But just getting the smallest thing accomplished here requires enormous persistence and patience. We lost 2 weeks chasing the police in Kokopo and then another 2 weeks bird-dogging the Kavieng Post Office. We'd been told yes, no, no, yes that we could get extensions on our visas here in Kavieng (vs. having to send the passports to the black hole of Port Moresby). A local finally pulled some strings and got us 2 extra weeks. Jim ran around for 2 days trying to find someone in the Customs office to get the paperwork to buy duty free fuel. Local businesses were also looking for them to clear containers with supplies. Apparently it was too hot to come to work that day. When it was time for us to check out, Jim finally found the lady asleep at the office in town; never mind that she told him she'd be (sleeping?) at the one at the wharf. Nobody comes when they say they will; nothing is ready when they say it will be. It's a testament to something -- true grit? stubborn determination? cultivated imperturbability? -- that the expats who operate businesses here retain any degree of sanity. (Or maybe they don't. Seems an awful lot of alcohol is consumed...) It's not clear whether life here is just so good, all the hair-pulling hassles notwithstanding, or if life in the homeland is just so unpleasant that all the hair-pulling hassles here pale in comparison. I think the place gets into your blood, though, and the beautiful, intriguing, frontier-like (if a wee bit colonial) parts outweigh the frustrating parts and, well, maybe we all suffer from a bit of insanity now and then, doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result. Maybe these intrepid expats figure that one of these times things will be easy. They all seem glad to be here and all the frustrations aside, we're glad we came. Even wish we could stay longer...
(And if you want to linger a bit longer, too, there are a few additional photos in the gallery.)
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