Kristin Reporting!
Papua New Guinea is one of the two stops on our trip that my Travel Clinic Doctor recommended that I take malaria medication to visit. As such, we started taking malaria medicine two days ago, and we will have to take one pill a day for the next seven days also. That’s nine days of taking pills for one day of possible exposure to malaria! Ridiculous, huh? But, better to be safe than sorry!
To prepare for going outside, we doused ourselves liberally with bug spray. We accidentally overdid it– this being our first time using the spray– and made it difficult to breathe in our cabin for a few minutes!
Our tour didn't leave until 12:45PM, so we slept in this morning. We planned to check out the donuts in the Commodore Club (served from 10AM to 12PM) but when we went by, we didn't see anything. (We checked back a few days later and saw the donuts, and just kept on walking... they were very unappetizing!)
We went outside to take in the view off the back of the ship and saw a very undeveloped town. You could walk right off the ship onto a street lined with local people selling colorful cloths, jewelry, and other wares. It didn't look promising in terms of seeing anything really interesting. Rabaul, Papua New Guinea looked to be the poorest and most undeveloped place in the world we've ever visited (so far!).
In the end, our slow start this morning meant that we didn't have time to go exploring before we needed to meet up for our afternoon tour. I took advantage of the little time we had to take Erich on deck to get some photos with the picturesque tropical scenery.
We checked-in to our tour and we were loaded onto tour vans. Each van held about 8 people. The weather was miserably hot, and terribly humid. We sat for some time in the van, just waiting, and melting. (There was little-to-no breeze.) This was particularly unpleasant for some of the older people in the van with us. Sweat was rolling down our arms, backs and faces while we sat there, waiting. It was hot enough that I think it would be a potential medical concern for sensitive people. I also wore long sleeves and long pants to protect myself from mosquito exposure.
[Davin Interjection: Fortunately, I was able to sit in the front seat of the van. There is a serious problem whenever I ride in a van that I literally will not fit in the seats. Even sitting with my back all the way against the seat, my leg bone will be too long to fit between my seat and the seat in front! Being tall isn’t always a plus, as I mentioned before!]
Once we finally got moving, we drove through Rabaul and took in its lack of development. The van ride took quite some time to reach the first destination. Our tour guide, a local woman, explained that the road we were driving on was a dirt road because the volcanic eruption of 1994(!) caused the existing road to be buried. After the eruption, the landscape looked like a desert of ash. Now, some twenty years later, the landscape is lush, tropical, and so thick you cannot see anything through it. In some cases, nature can bounce back fast!
[Davin Interjection: Unfortunately, the road hasn’t bounced back nearly as fast, since it’s still gone after more than 20 years! I think that tells you a bit about the economy of this place!]
The first stop was at a "museum" about the Japanese occupation of the island during WW2. I use the term "museum" extremely loosely. The many guides (1 per van) did not provide any explanation, and it turned out to be a property containing dilapidated Japanese war vehicles, and some massive artillery shells and bombs that had turned out to be duds. Some vehicles were twisted metal wrecks. All of them were rusting and falling apart. Taken individually, some of them could be considered works of art– they looked pretty cool and would certainly make awesome yard decorations!
[Davin Interjection: The war museum was really not at all what I was expecting. Seeing some of the equipment was cool, and I didn’t mind seeing it, but most of it really was just broken down scrap. The description of the tour kind of oversold this place. To make matters worse, this tour was quite expensive, at over $100 each, despite it being such an undeveloped country. I guess the country was undeveloped to the point that actually finding someone who could scrape together some vans and guides was difficult, thus requiring a high price?]
During this 15 minutes "museum" stop, we went straight to the "office" to ask about buying a postcard. There was a sign saying they sold postcards, but inside the office we discovered they had only about 6 left, and they looked quite old. Most of them were of some tribal artwork which we had not seen. One postcard showed a dilapidated Japanese vehicle from WW2. It was the only one of its kind, and when we flipped it over we saw that the postcard was printed in 1991! It's as old as Scott! The back is covered in yellow age spots. I offered the guy $1.00 for this postcard, but he gave it to us for free! That was really nice of him, and I think he felt bad at the idea of selling us a 20 year old postcard! Lol! (It turned out that there would be no other opportunity to buy a postcard on our visit to Papua New Guinea, so getting this postcard really saved our postcard door project!)
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| The Ultimate Swiss Army Knife! |
Also, in the middle of this war artifact museum, for no stated reason, there was one traditional wooden house that we could go inside and admire the tribal artifacts that were contained within. It was also sprinkling on and off at this time, so we just got wet because we did not bring rain jackets. The heat was miserable enough without putting a rain jacket over the top. Plus the addition of a little rain water was hardly noticeable in our already sweat soaked clothing.
The second stop of the tour was to a cemetery dedicated to all of the Allied forces who lost their lives on or around Rabaul. There were mostly Australian and Indian soldiers buried at the cemetery, and many memorial markers stated "an unknown soldier" of one of those two countries. There were two really amazingly huge trees outside the cemetery, and the trees had other plants growing on their trunks and branches! That was pretty amazing to see– botanically speaking.
[Davin Interjection: I saw one cool thing on the drive out to the war memorial. It started to rain and a woman and a boy, presumably her son, just picked some large leaves to use as umbrellas! Crazily enough, the leaves on some of the plants in the jungle were large enough that they actually could serve as a decent umbrella! ]
We were both feeling pretty underwhelmed about the tour at this point. There was one stop left– the Japanese Tunnels. This was by far the best stop of the tour, but was not especially great either– just historically interesting. The Japanese dug massive tunnel compounds into the hills of Rabaul and used them as military bases. The vans dropped us at a tunnel entrance and we entered the dirt tunnels. There was nothing inside them to make them more interesting (for example, desks or cots to show how it would have looked during the war.)
It was literally just dirt tunnels that a short man could stand up straight in. Davin had to bend over the vast majority of the time. The guides really failed to guide us. Mostly we wandered at random and avoided going down tunnels that had absolutely no light in them. There were only a handful of tunnels with light in them, so we didn't really get a good feeling for how massive this tunnel complex may really have been. We saw many pitch black tunnel entrances, but the area we visited was very small. So, who knows?
As the bus returned us to the ship, we got a close up view of the wares being sold on the street out in front of the port. All jewelry, colorful cloth, etc. So, we knew there was nothing of interest out there for us– no postcards. As such, when we got back to the ship, we decided we had gotten enough of a taste of Rabaul, Papua New Guinea. The ship was also leaving really early today-- at 4:30pm so we would have only had 30 minutes to an hour to explore anyway.
We spent the evening in the usual fashion after a day in port-- relaxing and recovering from the draining heat of the day. I also took photographs of the island from Deck 9 of the ship. One thing that must be acknowledged about Papua New Guinea is that it is a truly beautiful tropical island. However, standing outside to admire its beauty is extremely uncomfortable. It is better admired while sitting inside the air-conditioned buffet restaurant and sipping an afternoon cup of tea!
We now have four sea days ahead of us before we finally reach land again!
[Davin Interjection: I thought just driving around the island and seeing how things are was interesting. The roads were all in pretty bad condition, with some parts totally washed out, and others filled with pot holes. The van had to drive on the wrong side of the street as often as not, because of the street condition!
There weren’t that many people on the roads either, with the exception of one part of one of the main towns, where the street was a little bit busy. It’s interesting how the modern world of cars has invaded even places like this which are out in the middle of nowhere. I suppose that maybe this is the last frontier?
The people of Rabaul all seemed very friendly and happy to see us. I just wonder how they’re going to move beyond where they are now? There are plenty of countries out there with cheap labor, where factories and infrastructure are already in place. It’s going to take a lot of cruise ships visiting Rabaul to push this place fully into the 20th century.
Out in the forest, we saw some people who were living more of a traditional life, with subsistence farms, and, at this point, I sort of question whether they might not be better off than those trying to live in the semi-modern cities?
But, then again, everyone seemed happy, so maybe I’m not measuring by the right standard? After all, we have many unhappy people in the United States, and our country routinely ranks lower than Mexico in terms of happiness, and we’re arguably the most developed country in the world. There’s clearly a lot more to life than technological and economic development.]
Next Stop: Puerta Princess, Philippines (March 6, 2016)
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