Daily Archives: August 18, 2012

Joseph and Mary vs. PNG

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Or: how we eventually found a hotel in Wewak (and no, neither of us is pregnant).

It has never taken me two days to find a hotel before. We turned up in Wewak with our trusty Lonely Planet in hand, hoping to find not only a hotel at short notice, but also a tour guide to take us up the Sepik river (of which more later). It was a relatively tall order, but one of the best known Sepik guides actually runs his own hotel, so we walked confidently past all the hotel taxis at the airport and strolled the short distance to the Surfside Hotel. Which was a series of portakabins sheltering under a three story building site (OK…), and which had nobody at reception (less OK…). So we waited, and waited, and tried the hotel next door (ugh), and waited, and it got dark. And you really don’t want to be caught out after dark. And here begins an epic story to rival that of the holy parents themselves. Laying it all out longhand would turn into a long list of and-then-we-did-this. So, a few selected and compressed highlights:

  • Our initial rescue by a pair of scruffy good Samaritans with a Land Cruiser (one of whom turned out to work at Deloitte PNG, of all places) and driven to the best hotel in the country “where the white people stay”(!). The Inn Wewak Boutique Hotel is actually reasonable value at US$200+ per night but was deemed a little too expensive so we resolved to try again the next morning
  • Discovering that the hotel we had targeted as a cheaper alternative was – how shall I put this? – a brothel full of drunks. Complete with complementary condoms in the rooms. Nice! And great value at US$175 a night
  • Not being let past security at our next choice of hotel – we clearly looked undesirable (perhaps they thought I was a drunk, and Lucy was, erm, also a drunk)
  • Eventually finding Francis – our saviour and the owner of the Eden Blooms Transit Inn. Deaf as a post, deeply eccentric (i.e. he had a fully equipped kitchen, missing only an oven or stove of any kind) but good to us. There was no hot water, and you had to be careful not to fall through the floor in places, but it was cheap at the price ($US60 a night). We didn’t have the heart to tell him that in the UK a transit house was a place where ex-convicts were rehabilitated, and that this was perhaps impacting the tourist trade just a little…
  • Shocking the staff at the posh hotel so much by our exploits that when we returned a few days later – stumbling out of the jungle, hungry and unshaven with armfuls of native carvings and desperately in need of a shower that didn’t come out of the river – they automatically gave us a 20% pity discount. But that is another story.
Our eventual hotel. The sign says "One person (given a mattress on the floor) – 60 Kina". Class!

Our eventual hotel. The sign says “One person (given a mattress on the floor) – 60 Kina”. Class!

Our eventual hotel. The sign says “One person (given a mattress on the floor) – 60 Kina”. Class!

Bats and Coconuts – Welcome to Papua New Guinea

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This song is actually called 'Papua New Guinea', although I have absolutely no idea why. It sounds exactly like nothing you hear in PNG

 

When we set off from NYC back at the end of May, one of our observations was that there was no hard start to our trip. We drifted away from the very familiar surroundings of the East Coast into gradually more unusual places. Regular subscribers (all 27 of you! Hurray!) may remember this post from back then describing how it felt. Had we started in PNG, all of that pseudo-intellectual musing would have been moot. PNG is different – very different. We are actually writing these posts in the Solomon Islands, having left PNG (we always stagger our posts a little behind time to allow a buffer for inevitable internet blackouts) and we have now had at least some time and distance to digest the trip. What will follow is a mix of the usual frivolous nonsense and at least a couple of relatively thoughtful notes on our impressions of the country. PNG certainly makes you think. We had an amazing time there, and would recommend it whole-heartedly to some of our friends.

Anyway, back to the good stuff:

We arrived in Port Moresby on a flight from Cairns and (following good advice from people we trust) immediately left town without setting foot outside the airport. The best hotel in Port Moresby is actually situated just beside the airport, and is designed to allow travelers to pay a hefty premium have absolutely nothing to do with the capital city of PNG (we will post on our return journey another time). We had selected the sleepy seaside town of Madang as our first stop, based on which flights had the shortest connection in Port Moresby, and arrived later that afternoon wide eyed.

Bats, sir. Thaasands of them. Where you might normally expect gulls in a town by the sea, Madang has bloody great fruit bats. They roost hundreds at a time in bloody great trees when they aren’t flocking around in dark, ominous-looking, bloody great clouds. (Interesting Galapagos-type factoid: there seemed to be no bat poop under the roosting trees, perhaps because they roost upside down?). Apparently they taste pretty good, but we didn’t find anywhere which served them. Instead we ate at one of the best-rated restaurants in PNG (no joke) – a walled-off part of corrugated iron shed called “Eden”, which couldn’t have looked less pre-possessing if it tried but which served a mighty fine rendang.

We are trying hard to avoid “been-there-done-that-itis” where our blog is simply a teenage diary-style list of things we have done. It is going to be hard for PNG, given the amazing s*** we got up to. Let’s just say, after a day of walking around town, sipping beer and eating coconut flesh, we decided that Madang wasn’t sufficiently intrepid. Next stop the Sepik River!