Huge tidal waves smash into PNG

To view the original article Click Here

Title – Huge tidal waves smash into PNG
Source – www.bbc.co.uk
Date – 10th December 2008

When you travel you form natural bonds with people you meet and the countries you visit. You don’t even have to visit for very long to have these experiences. The consequence is that even years later when you read or hear stories that involve those people, it affects you in a very personal way.

This is just another reason why we recommend travel to everyone we meet; it expands the mind and expands people’s world, both literally and figuratively. In an age of 24 hour news we have become partially immune to bad news stories. By ‘immune’ I mean there is so much bad news we simply can not make an emotional connection with all of it and even if we sometimes feel guilt at ‘switching off’ when confronted with these stories. When you have visited the place involved, these stories become impossible to ignore, because they are real places and the people involved are ‘real’ people; people you have met; people you know and people you have an unbreakable bond with. A house destroyed is not just another house, it is one you saw, one you stayed in or even one which belongs to a family you saw or met.

Papua New Guinea (PNG as it is commonly referred to), is one such place for me, it’s a magical place, a country where your experiences will be unique; a country of people who are trying to join the ‘modern’ world but who are also bound to their traditional past; a people who are trying to find the right balance between the best of the old world and the best of the new world. This balance sometimes seems to be some way away.

PNG is a country in some limbo, its past history is of a fierce and violent society a society fractured by the remoteness of the country and individual villages within that country. Almost each village has its own language, over 800 in total (almost 12% of all the world’s languages). Due to the isolation of one village from the next, they can be seen almost as separate countries and in the past this was ‘workable’. There were violent confrontations between villages and raiding parties from one to the other, but that was often the only contact they had. In a modern world that doesn’t work, the towns contain people from all the different villages and the traditional differences and rivalries are not good bedfellows of this more ‘modern’ way of living.

My time in PNG was incredible, so many unforgettable experiences, so many people that I can never forget, so many stories still to share with new friends. However if I look at the trip in a very rational way, it might not be all that appealing, my experiences include; being surrounded by machete wielding locals demanding my wallet; getting lost after midnight in Port Morseby, one of the world’s most dangerous cities and at the mercy of strangers who turned out to be saints; being caught out on an active volcano when the wind turned and surrounded me with a cloud of sulphuric gasses making it very difficult to breath; arriving deep in-country in a canoe on the Sepic river with all my supplies exhausted; the list could go on…

What I remember of the trip is the village chiefs who took me in as an honoured guest; the children who greeted me at every village I arrived at; having a wash in the river only to turn round and see the entire village looking on; spending hours letting each member of a tribe try out my hammock; standing on the top of an active volcano and listening to it rumble; waking up in the morning and having to brush the layer of volcanic ash from my tent; sharing my food supplies with my local guides and watching the difference between my distain at tinned tuna (again) and their joy; this list goes on and on and on….

PNG is no place to go without planning and plenty of it. It is a challenge at every turn and really not for the faint-hearted. It is a violent society, full of the friendliest people. Seeing Wewak, New Ireland and New Britain once again hit by a tidal wave and knowing how fragile the infrastructure is and how self-sufficient the people have to be, reminds me of all the fabulous memories I have. It reminds me how lucky I was to get through the challenges I faced unscathed, how I had to use every experience from 10 years of independent travel to overcome the hurdles I faced, but mainly it makes me think about my friends there and to hope that they recover quickly from this latest onslaught of nature.

At Beyond The Blue (Safe Gap Year) our Gap Year and Independent Travel Safety and Awareness workshop (GYITSA) provides candidates with the skills they need to travel more safely and to avoid as many negative experiences as possible, so their memories and stories can be as enthusiastic and relentless as those my friends have to listen to over and over again.
Please visit our website at www.safegapyear.com or join us on Facebook. For a complete list of Blog entries visit our National Press Archive page.