A Taste of the Trail
…the Kokoda Trail, that is. To quote beloved Wikipedia (do donate…where would we be without them??!!), “The Kokoda Trail or Track is a single-file foot thoroughfare that runs 96 kilometres (60 mi) overland — 60 kilometres (37 mi) in a straight line — through the Owen Stanley Range in Papua New Guinea. The track is the most famous in Papua New Guinea and is known for being the location of the World War II battle between Japanese and Australian forces in 1942.”
Last Sunday, the POM Bushwalking group (there’s a facebook page, you know?) dipped its toe into the first chunk of the Kokoda Trail, from Owers Corner down to the Goldie River. It is very beautiful, very muddy, intensely steep in many places, and if the sun is shining then downright brutal coming back uphill. I may be playing tennis a few hours a week in the evenings here, but I still felt like my little old heart would give out on the uphill return in the hot sun. One goes through that marker directly above and then steeply downhill past what you can see in the very first pic: notice how, behind the grass, all you see is the next range of hills — well, that’s on the other side of the Goldie River, I guess…and you notice it doesn’t look all that far away, meaning one goes very steeply down, then very steeply back up. And to do the whole trail, one does this many times in the space of the above-mentioned 96km. This may give some idea why, in WWII, the front line between Allied and Japanese forces ran along the mountains here.
The orang mushroom photo is the “my heart was about to over-extend itself, so I had stop and drink and rest, so to look less like a wuss I took some photos to appear purposeful” shot.
…this is a short post. We’re intensely busy at work, but as you know, I don’t really do work on this blog. It’s about me and what I’m seeing here. So we’ll leave it at that for now and hope this small taste of the trail is interesting for y’all. Peace, out.
Moss & Mushrooms – A Rainforest Walk
smw, slt has now been back in PNG for three weeks, after our lovely lazy long holiday in Los Angeles. Much is happening on the work front which has kept me busy and often feeling rather overwhelmed. Thus the usual Sunday outing during my extended visit to Tari this past week was very welcome: we went to Ambua Lodge and walked around their ravine and rainforest during a rain that ranged from quite strong to dripping mist, over the course of our couple-hour ramble. I got into the mood of it – so long as I’d be ending muddy and wet regardless, I decided to disengage my brain from daily mundane worries and look at all the layers and varieties of life packed into each square centimeter of ground, tree and even air that I could find. Hope you enjoy these views of a wet walk through the rainforest near Tari.
This mossy hollow by the path felt like the kind of place where, in a fantasy story, you’d find the hidden entrance to another world.
…And often, as in the case of this mushroom and moss-bedecked tree, or the long red hanging berries (anyone know what those are??), I couldn’t decide which angle or close-up I found most fascinating for viewing it. So you get both…hope it doesn’t bore you.
In 9th grade biology class I was required to design a controlled experiment of my own – this was a first for me. I recall that my experiment involved, among a few other kinds of plants, New Guinea impatiens – which you see, above, in their native habitat. Who knew that … thirty-five years later?! … I’d end up on the other side of the world seeing them in their native land? Below you see what I think of as the departure lounge at Tari Airstrip, where I waited for 2.5 hours for a delayed flight on Thursday only to get cut off as darling AirNuigini decided, for reasons unknown, not to let everyone with boarding cards board. You wonder why I don’t encourage my friends to come here for tourist reasons, much as I’m obviously enjoying it as a work location for myself? Among other reasons, its air travel situation requires more patience & flexibility than most people want to need on vacation — even Americans who’ve adapted to the farce that is air travel in the US these days.
Creeks, Peaks & Streets – (Ma)lingering in LA
smw, slt has now returned to Port Moresby, from 4.5 lovely, wonderful and restful weeks in LA. With fond thanks to the family members and friends who spent time with me in LA, many of whom flew great distances to be there, I present herewith my usual too-big selection of photos. It’s late Monday, already more than 24 hours after I landed back in POM, and I know that if I don’t post these fast then it’s likely to be weeks and weeks before I get to it. I’ll have a full couple weeks of settling back in here. So I’ll keep the text short and focus on the photos. Folks who live in LA are usually happy when outsiders think of it as little more than a knot of crazy freeways overloaded with traffic, but in fact there are many wonderful things about the region, and these photos may give you glimpses of why I always find it one of the most relaxing places to spend my down time, especially when I can stick to my bike and the streets of Venice – which I did quite well until the final week on this trip. The final week took me out a bit more into town and yielded some of the – too many – photos of Disney Hall that you’ll be seeing, both above & below. Hope you enjoy. 🙂
I’ve become addicted to physical therapy: this time for tennis elbow to allow me my regular tennis outings once I got back here; last time to fix my shoulder after tearing it up on the roads of N Kivu. Above and below are shots of the birds, flowers, bikers, walkers and waters of Ballona Creek which forms part of the route to my physical therapy appointments. Yes, the bike ride to and from PT is half of the reason for my addiction. 🙂
When my mother and brother came to visit, Trisha Brown Dance Company was doing a big retrospective in collaboration with UCLA, including a fantastic site performance at the Getty Center – as you see, these 10 dancers spread around the center doing a 40-minute performance were just a magnificent blend of movement, architecture and natural environment. And above, by contrast, a street-side view of Disney Concert Hall, yet another of LA’s architectural (and acoustic!) gems.
At left, Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood has expanded since my last visit; and WeHo park has gotten a radical face-lift and a big new parking lot complete with graffiti art since my last visit. 🙂 Below, some shots of me at Disney Hall’s garden, taken by Mom, the only visual proof that I was actually in LA these last weeks…
Below, if this lays out as hoped, if you look closely you’ll see a bit of a rattlesnake’s tale sticking out of that brush. This hike in Topanga Canyon was rather exciting for my friend Steve and me, since we nearly stepped on not one but two rattlesnakes, and nearly walked into a buzzing swarm of wasps or some other flying insect that generated a certain sense of menace in our brainstems… Further down, again if this works as I hope, a junction sign on the hike; we tried to avoid heading toward Cheney for obvious reasons.
Above & below are my photographic ode to the streets, houses and beaches of Venice. It’s so much more than the drug-addled beach walk full of tacky t-shirts, which is just the face it shows tourists. 🙂
Above, my photographic ode to Walt Disney Concert Hall, an acoustic and architectural masterpiece in the heart of LA. Below…a shot to confuse you: from last August, standing in line for our boat trip at Margaret River in Northern Territory, Australia. Since there’s so little of me in this post, figured I’d remind you what I look like…
Los Angeles Miscellany
smw, slt has been back in Los Angeles for 2.5 weeks now, weeks that have flown by with the speed of a bullet train. Less than two weeks from this moment as I sit in bed at dawn uploading these pics and writing these captions, I’ll be back on the airplane winging my way across the Pacific. Since there is much that I dearly love, and much that I dearly love to make fun of, in my home state and home country, I’m bringing you some of both. Just captions to explain, nothing much else. Enjoy.
LA County Museum of Art (first shot) has expanded quite a bit since the early 2000s which was the last time I lived here in LA full time. Similarly the construction around the Ballona Wetlands by Playa del Rey, the two shots above, has continued and added plenty of cars to the roads, but left these lovely fields of wildflowers and wetlands for birds in a few pleasant pockets.
Immediately above, the main central garden at the gorgeous Getty Villa, reopened in 2005 when I’d already begun this wandering lifestyle. Since I live by the water here it’s easy for me to bike up the Getty Villa, spend a morning or afternoon in the gardens and enjoying the classical collections – something I do as often as I can! Above is one shot of the Santa Monica mountains as seen from an odd angle of the Getty Centre, which has remained blessedly similar to what it was when I left LA to start living as I now do…
Two studies in orange from the Long Beach Aquarium: above, California Poppies (our state flower!), which blanket hills and valleys in a golden-orange carpet every spring; below, orange jellyfish (known to our Australian cousins, I believe, as marine stingers – perhaps more accurate but less poetic, don’tcha think?) in a tank inside the lovely aquarium which I was delighted to visit – along with the Getty villa – with my friends Cate & Dan, and their parents Neal and Elizabeth, when they spent a few days out here with me. Thanks :-).
Above, a few more shots from the lovely mid-town LA County Museum of Art, whose regular collection still surprises me on occasion (even after a few years as a member), and which underwent substantial expansion in the last few years; below, sunset in Marina del Rey, the last place I lived full-time in the US: you can see why, huh? 🙂
And these last shots: can’t help myself when I get back to the US… I mean, seriously, the level of coddling that our litigious society forces upon all institutions. Anyone who didn’t figure out that you’re in the foul ball area deserves to be hit; anyone who doesn’t notice the giant drop off down to the rushing traffic below deserves to fall…and so on. Btw, I was always taught the four styles of Chinese cuisine were Szechuan, Hunan, Canton & Northern/Beijing…who knew that New York had become one of China’s regional cuisine hotspots! 🙂
And we end with the Getty Centre, scultpure garden and the road, under construction and very biker-unfriendly (this I know: I travel mostly by bike here in LA, when I’m not on the bus), below the Getty.
Beauty, Big and Small
so smw, slt has been back in pom for precisely six weeks now, since the end of the vacation from which those lovely last photos of coastal fnq originated. thanks to all who liked and commented on that post – i seem to be picking up some readers who didn’t know me back when: i’m delighted that my pics and ramblings appeal to you. in this post – mostly photos from a wonderful hike just today, up a mountain to a swimmable many-tiered waterfall, past a mini-copper mine (we’re talking a watery mosquito-breeding hole in the side of a hill: don’t get excited), and back through grassy fields and hillsides. you’ll notice that rainy season has returned to pom, borne on the change of wind direction: which made possible the aerial photos of downtown and suburban-sprawly port moresby, including the majestic and rather dramatic house of parliament (a short walk, actually, from where i sit as i post this…), since the planes now land and take off in the opposite direction, northbound rather than southbound. honestly: i’ve never carried my camera aboard so many flights as i do in png, nor been as glad so often that i have it with me. i will write nothing more – you may have heard some distressing things in the news about png lately; those exist, as they do for the US and any other place where humans gather; but so do very many people, places and things of beauty. i’m choosing to focus on those, at the moment. enjoy.
…i was also in tari this week on a visit; the head decoration you see up above in the fourth photo is one of our colleagues there: many huli men routinely adorn their heads or their hats with leaves and other such accessories, which when you first arrive from the streets of LA or Paris seems unusual, but it really grows on you. the other shots above and below are from tari hospital and surroundings.
Here you really see how the coral reefs grow up closer to the water and how they differ from the sandy bottom or whatever else there is. At the top is a real island with sand around it; but below that there is only one area which barely was breaching the surface. This is off the coast of Gulf Province, west of POM, on the trip up to Tari earlier this week.
Below, depending on your browser and how it reads the layout: the airstrip at Tari; furhter below, you can see the old-town part of downtown at the top, and the sprawl of the suburban areas where I’m living and working, and where the House of Parliament is, all strewn around these lovely green hills. Well, now they’re green — a few weeks ago when I landed from Cairns they were getting mighty brown…
Flora, Fauna, Waves – Northern Queensland Beaches
It’s been a very quiet week here in what smw, slt has learned is sometimes called fnq: far northern Queensland. It’s been all about runs by the water in the early hours, walks by the water in the evening hours, and being a lazy schlub with tennis on tv in between. All in all a quite restorative little respite just across the ol’ Coral Sea from POM. Herewith, and without further introduction other than the occasional caption, some of the things I’ve been seeing this week. (Yes, there were philosophical moments during all those walks, but I can’t remember any of it at the moment. Aren’t you glad?!)
this is called tidal erosion made visible – above and below
Some flora & fauna in honor of Cate, whose dad mentioned this week that she’s enjoying seeing new members of the animal kingdom when the opportunity arises. Above: fruit bats on their morning migration back to their treetop roosts in the mountains, after a night’s foraging. Below, a gaggle of parrots and all I can say is any number of parrots creates an enormous racket. I have the impression there are lots of Australian-native species of parrot and parakeet and other such. These were the easiest to photograph here because they’re quite numerous; another white parrot was equally loud but higher in the trees and less numerous. Below that, there’s what I think is a kukaburra — stress the “think.” He was hanging out in a tree on my run this AM.
… it would hardly be coastal northern Australia without warnings for salties, and the occasional story of lost pets or worse. (Here, pets; in NT: occasionally the odd person, but the NT salties can beat up the FNQ salties any day.) ‘Twas awareness of the possible salties that made me extra wary when my runs and walks took me close to the mangrove areas – I felt most brave doing so. 🙂
Coast, Highlands, Coral Sea…by Land and by Air
Those are not islands: that is coral just below the surface of the aptly-named Coral Sea, as I flew from POM to Cairns again yesterday – second time I’ve done that flight in this direction. God it’s a great view.
So if this text appears where I hope (this is never guaranteed, and can vary from browser to browser…so fingers crossed), then to the right & below is me at an office meeting; I put that there for the map! See the flag on the south coast, to the right side – that’s POM. The Coral sea is below it — all the stuff between Cairns — due south by southwest of POM, and where I sit watching the bright sun reflect on the ocean (that’d the Coral Sea ocean of course) as I write this — and all the pics in this entry were taken in and around POM, or in the air between Tari (left-most flag in the center of the island, of an appreciably different color) and POM in December, also from the air. Some of those shots are obviously rivers and river deltas of Gulf Province (to the left of POM, as you look at the map, and stretching inland a fair piece to abut Hela Provicne where Tari is located), but the one up above is, I think, the Highlands Highway as it stretches from Lae to Tari. (Lae is one of the flags on the map sorta due north of POM through a thick part of the island, and the HH starts there – not in POM. No roads to Highlands from POM, only planes.) Further up, you will note a photo of something I found truly stunning when I did the hike: a hillside of yellow grasses with short palms popping up out of the grasses, all sort of backlit by the sun which was just popping over the brim of the hill. It really was a stunning and unusual view.
Now, again if this appears as planned: above is a coastal shot in which, if you look closely, you can see the (few) towers of downtown POM in the distance – from the same hike as the gorgeous yellow-grass hillside – and to the left you see both docking bays at the Tari airstrip. That Air Niugini plane is the one from which those other airborne shorts were taken.
And yes, the drum-and-pipe band is part of the military barracks at Taurama, the start and finish point of our lovely coastal hike from which many of these shots come. After a hot hike in the blazing sun of tropical PNG, it was a classically where-am-I experience to sit and guzzle water while listening to militarily-precise drum-and-bagpipe music. Remember: the southern part of what’s now PNG was actually a direct British colony for a while, while the northern part became an Australian League-of-Nations mandate after it was taken away from Germany post-WWI.
This seems as good a place as any for me to put some general text. So here it is a new year- how did that happen? it feels like just last month I was baking croissants for Christmas breakfast with Mom and Steve! – and here’s Paul being a lazy so-and-so in a spacious apartment full of the mod cons in Cairns for a week of much needed sleep and disconnection before I return to start thinking about how to make 2013’s plans come to fruition as we’ve … well, as we’ve planned them, to the extent that’s ever possible in life let alone this particular line o’ work. I haven’t much of a general nature to say: these are a collection of photos taken either on the last bushwalk group hike that I joined in 2012, plus some aerial shots from the plane taken between Tari and POM in December, and between POM and Cairns (the entire flight path, all one hour of it, is over the Coral Sea aka Great Barrier Reef, more or less) just yesterday.
As always when I leave POM and come to Australia, I find myself going philosophical about human development, the development of nation states, cultural expectations of what makes for a good life or a good community. The driver who took me from airport to condo was a friendly and professional guy who would have been born just after WWII, and whose attitudes towards those of quite different skin pigments and cultural assumptions were likely more mainstream at that time than now, though I suspect I do live in a bubble and such attitudes are more common even among “my sort” than I know. Having lived as a pigmental minority in various parts of Africa and Asia, I realize it’s unavoidably universally human to single out those different from us for extra attention. I worry about the tacit assumption among those of my own pigmental type and general late-capitalist developmental background that our own ways of life, belief, eating, etc. are inherently superior. Seems to me we’ve made a fair hash of things on a number of fronts, while having real successes on others, so rigorous self-righteousness is hardly in order. On the other hand, I am reminded that when westerners first showed up in Japan we were found quite smelly (butter-smellers, I think?) and barbaric…heck, this dismissal of those who look, smell and act differently from us may e the most universal cultural trait defining humans. So I held my peace and took my driver’s attitudes as a lesson in humanity, rather than a depressing view of cultural realities in contemporary Australia.
For those on my email list, there’ll be another bit coming out shortly with random thoughts, hopefully not too terribly long. I’ve chosen to stay on for a second year in PNG. I find the place endlessly fascinating and confounding, and the work we’re doing well worth another year of my trying to get better at helping it happen. May we all be as tolerant as our hearts and heads can permit, and may the world – oy, please! – find a bit more peace and reason in 2013, especially in places close to my heart like DRC and the US Capitol building.
An Island Named Bougainville
When I emailed one of my oldest friends that I’d been in Buin, at the southern end of the island of Bougainville, he responded that it felt like Cloud Atlas territory — which is a reference to one strand in the nested sequence of stories of that novel, about a 19th Century American visiting a south-Pacific island that’s quite remote from San Francisco and where there’s cultural transition going on. He’s right: Bougainville really does feel quite far away from anywhere else, and remarkably beautiful as you will see.
That’s me around Bougainville. There’s the actual island of Bougainville and then there’s the whole Bougainville autonomous region, which aside from the big island of Bougainville includes quite a few other little islands scattered around. Many of these photos were taken on a Sunday when, after productive morning meetings which were one reason I went to Bougainville, we all hopped a boat out to one of the little islands scattered around the deep blue sea around here. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I often get philosophical at the end of the year. I’ll keep it in check today, I think – I’m pretty tired. It’s been a highly intense period since…oh, since about mid-August, when I returned from that fantastic two weeks in Australia where Howard & Gene joined me for a bit.
It’s the constant back and forth, changing from one place to another, meeting and working with new people, and frankly having a fairly high degree of responsibility which can certainly wear one out sometimes. On the other hand, when I think about the car drive down the length of Bougainville island to the southernmost town of Buin, where another MSF section has a project that I visited…or when I think about the rain which caught up with us on our way home Sunday evening, shortly after the rainbow above, and how we arrived home tired and wet but quite happy after a full day in a place none of my family are likely ever to see — well, I do feel pretty blessed. And hey, the world didn’t end yesterday! Now we can start worrying about the fiscal cliff instead. 🙂
…I was interested when this young guy accessorized himself, since that’s a very common male habit in Tari up in the highlands. To non-PNG-habituated eyes, I guess it might look strange but I really enjoying seeing how these guys express their creativity. Check out some of my Tari entries, where you’ll see some more of this, though I’m gonna have to do a full photo study of Huli guys and how they accessorize themselves.
This sequence, several shots above and below, are all during the time I spent on the main island. The boat trip and some of the other shots were taken from the little island of Buka, currently the administrative capital of the region, which is just across the narrow Buka channel from the big island. Below, you’re seeing a few of the scattered northwesternmost of the Solomon Islands, visible from the coast near Buin. If you don’t have time to wikipedia that, it’s another nation-state here in the south Pacific.
This made me feel like I was back in PCH in California: a major landslip from a few months earlier.
Too hungry to be proud, that’s me. That’s also me with Stephanie, whose encouragement to join MSF came from a colleague who did his first assignment with me in Port Harcourt back in 2008 (yup, you can check out those blogs entries just by checking out the archive…), and whom she met when they were both working in Haiti. (So much world…but sometimes it feels pretty small.) We’re with Joe, who drove us back up from Buin and whom I first met when he participated in our field associative debate in April: yup, check out that blog entry too if you want. 🙂 Ah, the connections we make. Love Joe’s shirt, hey?
Yes, you’ve seen many shots of this picturesque boulder which must have dropped off that island to the right – in closeup, farther out, at sunrise, with clouds…It’s directly opposite the house where our colleagues live on Buka. And it’s really pretty. And there’s a porch where I sat and theoretically did work and wrote emails, but actually stared the island a lot too. Don’t tell my boss. 
…goodness, I can actually take my eyes off my potato chips long enough to look at the camera!
Berlin With Autumn Color & Sun…Who Knew?!
Viewing those videos, you may understand why for me a lovely weekend of blue skies, fall foliage, discovering lovingly restored and renovated old buildings along the waterfronts and side streets of Berlin was such a pleasure and a break for me. Other followers of smw, slt may recall last year’s work in North Kivu…and you can imagine my thoughts and heart are absolutely going out to the hundreds of thousands, or millions, of civilians who’ve been experiencing yet another in the ongoing waves of displacements and fighting that have plagued the region for nearly two decades. Please hold DRC and especially the east in your hearts. These folks deserve better from a theoretically humane world order than they are getting, honestly.
But there is always hope, that being one quality which seems so quintessentially to define us human animals. Immediately above is a photo I took right across the street from the hotel where MSF puts us up in Berlin, right by what used to be the wall. The wall itself ran smack down this street for three decades or so. If you look really closely, you can probably see the cobblestones under the lovely smattering of fallen leaves, above, which marks where that slice through the middle of this lovely city ran for three decades too long. It gave me great pleasure to walk along those stones, kicking the leaves, imagining how different the experience would have been ca. 1990.
As I write this, bread is rising and I’m off for some last-minute shopping in half an hour or so, all prepping for a lovely delayed american thanksgiving meal that one of my colleagues is spearheading. My contribution – the oven for the pumpkin pie, and homemade cheesy sundried-tomato bread. We’ll have a few friends from the greater (ex)-MSF family in POM over, we’ll eat drink and be merry, and no doubt we’ll send a thought to colleagues all over everywhere, and miss our families and friends back wherever our homes are. Hope your weekend, hope the start of the hectic year-end season is are going well. Peace.
Two PNG Hikes — POM and Tari
smw, slt is in Berlin for a bit. This is about the annual-plan meetings and preparation for 2013. An aspect to my new role that, well…I think I can learn to like. I won’t go into much detail, but suffice to say that with so many projects and so many missions, so much need for good work in so many places in the world, when it comes to annual budget and planning time, one must really have one’s ducks lined up nicely if one hopes to conduct new activities, improve quality of management or outreach or communications, etc. – it’s pretty competitive and so many missions are trying to do a lot. I’m not used to being involved at this level – more used to defending an individual project rather than having a good bead on the kinds of things that HQ looks at for multiple projects or a mission as a whole. Not exactly an easy transition for me, but enough about that. After the meetings are all done, I’ll have a few days of vacation.
In the meantime, I am taking advantage of being here for some conerts, plays, etc. And of course I’m taking advantage of good, readily-available internet to post whatever photos I have up on the blog. Herewith shots from two hikes I took in the last month — most of the shots from a lovely hike around Tari up in the highlands (above, and all but the last three & the shot immediately below), and then four pics from a bushwalking group hike around POM. The POM ones stand out becuase it’s much drier – was the very end of the dry season; rains started up a few days later, about two or three weeks ago though my sense of time is a bit off these days. I’m trying to get a lot of sleep. Hope everyone is well. Ciao.
Love the contrast of this wooden hut above, and the pre-fab dwellings at the hospital compound below…
OK, one of my total favorite things is how kids everywhere feel they must do something, other than standing there and smiling, when some white guy takes their photo. It’s quite universal – I recall a photo I posted on the blog from Nigeria more than five years ago, remarkably similar to this in the style of the kids, posing as it were for their closeup. It’s great fun for all involved…
When we got to the first village on our hike, the kids came running. Seems we’re one of the more interesting parts of their weekend. 🙂 The hikes are definitely a highlight for those of us who get to go on them. Further below, you see how Tari is really situated in a basin ringed by hills, and all fairly high up in the highlands to begin with.
Below, that’s downtown Tari — which is basically an airstrip, the hospital, a few shops, and some government buildings. The people all still live in traditional compounds, divided by the kinds of steep walled walkways between and among different compounds that you’ve been seeing – and perhaps wondering about (example two shots above, with Katja). The guys on the fence, below, are bidding us farewell at what I assume is the edge of their family’s territory after walking with us, cutting us walking sticks from local bushes when the way got too steep and muddy (man, it’s slippery on those clay-y muddy hills after a bit of rain…), and generally keeping us company for much of the lovely walk.
For the final shots, we’re back to the end-of-dry-season hills around Port Moresby and that excellent hike I did a few weeks ago, last chance I had to get out hiking in POM for the time being. Now the rainy season is back in POM, so it’ll be mud hikes& mildewed clothes for the next several months.
PNG – 37 Years of Independence
On 16 September in 1975, the Independent State of Papua New Guinea came into existence. So this is a big holiday weekend here in PNG — Monday’s an office holiday, and after a full work week which began at our project Lae and ended with a management-team meeting back in Port Moresby, I found myself wanting to show you all just a few images of PNG as it proudly celebrates its 37years of nationhood. On Saturday I took an afternoon trip to the botanical gardens which are part of the compound of University of PNG; there was a big music and dance party as you can see from the images below. The botanic gardens are a great place to hang out, do a barbecue and picnic, and see not only some of the plants native to PNG but also some of the unusual birds and mammals, as you will see below. Hope you enjoy.
It’s in interesting personal note for me to recall that time – 1975, when I was still an avid teenage-nerd stamp collector who studied world maps obsessively. I clearly remember a newspaper notice that the flag of the UN’s newest member nation, PNG, had been added to the ranks of flags flown at the UN Headquarters on First Avenue in NYC, in whose suburbs we lived then. Since the UN was one of my favorite spots to visit at the time, I fondly remember tracking down the new flag the next time I was in town. And here we are 37 years later. Who woulda thunk it… 🙂
…The hat in the first photo has the regular PNG flag on it, as well as one of the provincial flags riding on top of the hat. The national flag, whose elements you see repeated in the t-shirts above and many other places, has two diagonal halves — black background and white stars halved with red background and yellow bird of paradise. The bird of paradise is the national bird of PNG. There are many varieties of bird of paradise, but they all have the lovely long tail. There are said to be birds of paradise at the botanic gardens, but we didn’t find them. We did, as you will see below, find some tree kangaroos — yes, just like kangaroos but they live mostly in trees. It’s true. We also found quite a few very large cassowaries. The cassowary looks like it’s been painted by someone with a box of fluorescent paint, but we believe that’s how they come naturally. We saw lots of children, but none that we saw were painting the faces of cassowaries. 🙂
…I can’t tell if this one here is another tree kangaroo on the ground, or some other variety of marsupial native to PNG. Sorry. As for the cassowaries — they were hard to photograph since they move around a lot, and position themselves where it’s hard to get a good angle shot at them to begin with. And I couldn’t get any good shots of the hornbills (another kind of bird) and the amazing ground pigeons with crowns of feathers. There’s some amazing wildlife here — now, if I could just see some of it in the wilds some time!
Above, a final image of the flag – nearly every vehicle in POM right now seems to have these hood flags. Below is a shot that i took in a hurry from the moving car (not a great place to stop to take a better shot) — the building on the right is the house of parliament, and to the left you see an enormous flag which flies over the government complex which also includes national archive, national museum, supreme court, etc. If you were to do a google search right now for a British tabloid that carried a deeply insensitive, extremist, and offensive article about PNG in response to the announced upcoming visit from a couple of British royals, you’ll see one of the extremes of how people from outside seem to view PNG. It strikes me that the outside world falls into two camps, if they know about or think about PNG at all — it’s either the scary horrifying place described in that dreadful article, or an adventure tourist’s paradise, with amazing diving & snorkeling, mountain trekking, an incredibly rich and vast array of traditional cultures in an island nation chock full of jungle, forest, native flora & fauna that are often unique to this chunk of the world. Naturally, the truth falls somewhere in between — PNG, like most of the world, is struggling to find its national path and identity in a world that’s torn between the desire for globalism and rising-tide-floats-all-boats optimism, and the kind of divisive, manipulative hate-creation symbolized by a certain film from my native land which shall go otherwise unmentioned. I will just say, though — we humans have grown so very globally dominant because we have big brains. So why, oh why, oh why is it that when hate-mongers so transparently try to manipulate and divide us, that so very many of us just go blithely along with it and allow more and more waves of disastrous events and mutual recriminations to happen? To quote another famous American, why can’t we all just get along??? Happy independence day, everyone!
Kakadu, Katherine Gorge & Litchfield – Out & About in NT!
On our last morning in Kakadu National Park, we took a boat ride along the East Alligator River, which separates Kakadu National Park from Arnhem Land, all within the political boundaries of Northern Territory in the contemporary nation-state of Australia. By that point I’d seen Aboriginal rock art that’s been dated back, in some cases, as far as 20,000 or more years. I’d heard how the current estimate of how long Aboriginal cultures have lived in this part of the world is now up to about 60,000 years — as archaeologists continue their studies and dig deeper down the layers, they can carbon date and look other clues to the time of each layer, based on known climate changes or changes in what animals were in which area when.
Anyway, so here we were coasting along this river with a very personal narrative from a guy who grew up here, whose parents grew up here…whose ancestors, one presumes, have been in and around this spot of land on the planet for something like 20,000 or 60,00o years or so. I’m seeing crocodiles much like the one below — huge saltwater (estuarine) crocs that look magnificently primeval and dinosaur-esque, I’m seeing beautiful and timeless landscapes on both sides of this deep green river. I’m imagining the flow of time. I’m thinking about where my own ancestors might have been 20,000 to 60,000 years ago – times when northern Europe was under mountains of ice, so they sure as heck still wandering somewhere else.
My most immediate thought was this: if global warming does sort of end contemporary late-capitalist civilization as we know it; if some of the movie fantasies that show up in films like Water World do come to pass…I bet the aboriginals of Australia will keep on going. So my first thought was about how these are people who have merged their culture with their land, with their fairly harsh environment surrounded by extremes, in ways that I and mine haven’t come anywhere near for millennia, if ever.
This was the relatively simplest expression of a wide range of far more complex reflections that I was having throughout my two weeks in Australia, about race and colonialism, history and society, and so on. While in Darwin after Kakadu, we saw an excellent Aboriginal & Torres Straits Islander art competition. The winner in one category (works on paper, maybe?) was drawn from a few facebook discussion groups about aboriginals, with a lot of really astoundingly racist and ill-informed or frankly ahistorical and anti-reality based comments about what Aboriginals are and represent in Australia. I had that to think about, compared with the (so far limited) experiences I’ve been having in PNG, a colonial-created modern nation, which from 40,000 years ago until about 100 years ago was hundreds of individual cultures…then went through a short phase as an Australian colony and is now working its way towards being a modern nation-state governed democratically by its own indigenous inhabitants who themselves have been around about as long as the aboriginals of Australia have. So there are interesting comparisons – Australia more like the US in that Europeans arrived and stayed, claimed primary ascendancy in governance and politics and rapidly outnumbered their predecessors; vs PNG where Australians did that for a period then left, leaving behind a created state.
There’s no way I could do a decent job of sharing the complexity of my thoughts. I have no conclusions. It worries me that humans are still tribal by nature, at a time when our technology and sheer numbers can have such global impacts. But we’re endlessly creative and problem-solving, we modern humans (meaning our species since about 100,000 years ago or something of that sort…not my field). So here’s hoping we’ll sort this out rather than continue to tear each other and our world apart.
Enough seriousness. Enjoy the pics! Northern Territory, Kakadu and so on ROCK.
What you’re seeing so far… Immediately above: Paul contemplates the impressive scariness of a termite mound at Maguk campsite in Kakadu. Above that, all shots from the various parts of Kakadu where we camped. Below, a suite of shots from Litchfield National Park (closer to Darwin – the two waterfall shots) and then Katherine Gorge (south of Kakadu).
NT is marked by extreme seasons: a very wet wet season, then a very dry dry season, called “the wet” and “the dry” by locals I believe. In the shot of Katherine Gorge below, you’ll notice many trees bending strongly in the downriver direction. This is from the wet, when half of the gorge is full of water and all the trees are deep underwater, and bent over by the force of the current. That’s when saltwater crocs can come all the way south the Katherine Gorge even though it’s hundreds of kilometers from the ocean, because there’s so much water they can easily swim in, then get stranded when the wet ends and the various bits of the gorge get more disconnected by rapids and rocky stretches as below.
…Howard & Gene enjoying a swim at Florence Falls in Litchfield, above; and the sunset at Katherine Gorge, below.
And now, as of the shot of me above, we’re back in Kakadu. Immediately above: rock art showing inflamed joints, interpreted traditionally as the local spirits of a bad place punishing people for being there. Modern science tells us that there’s a lot of uranium in the spots that have traditionally be identified as not good for humans, but reserved for spirits instead. About rock art: the red color can last longest, so in the very oldest paintings it’s only the red that will hold up. The yellow, white, and some of the other colors can last a few thousand years – but the red can last tens of thousands, literally. And below is our tour guide, referred to above, demonstrating how to use a spear thrower to increase the range of a spear. Below that, Paul with the spears after he picked them from the river, once we were back on the boat. Yes, the same river where we’d been seeing 5-meter-long salties. 🙂
A car crossing from Kakadu into the fully-aboriginal-reserved Arnhem Land. Below, me in Katherine Gorge…yeah, some of these are a bit mixed up. Artistic license? 🙂
This is maguk — a waterfall, a big deep swimming hole below and a lovely set of pools above. Immediately below: how Paul spent the better part of an afternoon relaxing at the upper bit of Maguk.
Some views of the nature where we were. Immediately left (if this shows up as I hope once finalized), sunning itself on the sand by the side of Katherine Gorge, is a freshie – freshwater crocodile, not really a threat to swimmers etc. unless you step directly on them. A saltie (esturaine or saltwater croc) is showing off her teeth above. There are thousands of magnificent birds all over Kakadu – migrating waterbirds, parrots and singing or raucous birds of all sorts. And, of course, the ever-present agile kangaroos. And then, below, another freshie doing the crocodile rock… 
The timing of this vacation was set to overlap with my 50th birthday. Howard & Gene had a few surprises on the evening of my actual birthday at the absolutely gorgeous Maguk area – as you see below.
Below: if you wonder how I got some of the angles on water, rock, and the landscape below…that’s me the intrepid travel photographer at work.
Art, Architecture & Sydney’s Lovely Harbor
smw, slt has returned from a magnificent two-week vacation in Australia. The focus of this vacation was the Northern Territory and specifically Kakadu National Park. But since getting into and out of Port Moresby usually requires many connections and long waits in various airports, I chose to break up the trip by stopping in Sydney for a bit on the way in — where I took nearly all the shots in this particular post. In the floral section, below (yes, this blog post has different theme groups just so you can see I’m trying to keep it interesting and show a wee bit of editorial intervention…), you will see a few that were taken in Kakadu and one that was taken in Litchfield National Park…where, as Gene succinctly put it, we spent 1-1/2 hours on our way via Katherine Gorge (4 hours) to Kakadu. Where we spent four days. And could easily have spent another few without feeling bored, from my perspective. But it was a magnificent vacation, a great way to spend my birthday, and I am well rested and delighted to be back with my colleagues here in POM this Sunday evening, with what will no doubt be a full work week ahead of me. (The work inbox, which has now been turned on, is at about 133 emails I believe – actually not a bad toll for 15 nights away from my station!) Happy end o’ northern summer to those of you in the northern hemisphere – and hope you enjoy these.
Above and in the following set of photos you see either Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbor, or in some cases art installations, or the effects of art installations in the case of the mist on a clear sunny day above, at the Sydney Biennale. The Biennale is a fantastic large art show that takes place in many venues around the city, but with a major focus on this island well west of the main city, which over its post-European-arrival lifetime has hosted a prison and shipworks, and is now publicly held and open for tourism (great lodgings there, but not very easy access to restaurants etc.)…and, as you’ll see at the bottom, perhaps the best-located tennis courts I’ve seen. I’d have loved to play there.
You will notice that it was a day of bright sunlight and even though I arrived early, many shots were taken with bright mid-day sun so I just decided to go with the sharp-edged shadow look and try my own hand at a wee bit of artistic expression here and there. Hope you enjoy. 🙂
These yellow flowers appeared in every part of Kakadu where we traveled, so they are a teaser of the Kakadu photos that you’ll be able to see a bit later. We heard many times how they’re an important season indicator for aboriginal or traditional landownders — when they are blossoming is when the freshwater crocodiles have laid their eggs and people can go to the sandy riverbanks to dig for eggs.
The shot immediately below shows the flowers in situ, at Ubirr in the north of Kakadu. There are many, many more shots of Kakadu to come – it was amazing. But I like to go about things in an orderly manner…
Having shown you my “artsy” cluster of photos and displayed yet again my fondness for flower photography, I will now show you what magnificent views I had from the window of my inbound flights on this vacation – first over the islands and reefs of the Coral Sea, above and two below (this is all basically in the area of the Barrier Reef), then of the coast just south of Sydney airport — I started the entry today with my favorite shot from my inbound flight. Then…well, who doesn’t love the Sydney Opera House? Perhaps I’ve overdone it, I’ll readily admit…but I do find it endlessly interesting from all angles and in all weathers. Close second is the harbor bridge, and just the Sydney harbor generally which I really do think is lovely. Hope you enjoy. Cheers til next entry…
Green Hills & Highlands of Tari…Plus Some East Sepik Shots Also :-)
It will, I trust, not have escaped your notice that probably the coastal sunset shot might not have been taken in the same location as the shot of me above. For those of you aware that I’m now finishing a two-week vacation in Australia, it may not have escaped your notice that these don’t look like photos from Australia so much, either. I’m clearing the last photos from my visit to Wewak & Maprik and other parts of East Sepik Province, as well as a recent (late July) visit to Tari in the highlands, so that I can next focus on the shots of this lovely Australia vacation. This way, whenever I get around to it, those shots from Kakadu National Park etc. will sit at the main page of the blog for a long time, since I doubt I’ll do a lot of posts for a while once I get those finally sorted and up….I’ll be ready to do other things with my time hehe. 🙂
But in the meantime I do hope you’ll enjoy these shots from the highlands, with a few shots from the coast, of PNG. For anyone who’s not already heard, I heartily recommend two links to radio interviews given by a wonderful colleague of mine who recent left the mission and did some interviews on her way out; those links are here:
and here:
It will not have escaped anyone that I love flowers. These were all shot on a nice walk I took with the Tari team around Ambua lodge, a tourist near Tari in the highlands where I also saw the waterfall that begins this entry.
Perhaps between the links, and these shots, I’ll keep you busy enough for the moment that no one will mind waiting a bit longer for the shots from Kakadu National Park where I spent a wonderful birthday with my friends Howard and Gene last week. For now, that’s it…Hope all’s well with everyone. Ciao.
Along the Sepik River
smw, slt is at this moment on vacation in Australia. In this exact moment, it’s Sydney, and tomorrow I’ll fly up to Darwin on the top end, as I understand they call it, for some exploration of Kakadu National Park and a few other remote areas rumored to be amazing. To keep myself from falling too terribly far behind on sorting, color-correcting and posting my photos, I’ve decided to pop most of the photos from my recent East Sepik outing up here. The Sepik River – next to which you see me photographed, just above – is apparently one of the longest undammed rivers in the world, is the longest in the nation of Papua New Guinea (1300 km long or something like that), and has various other important comparative distinctions. Within PNG it’s famous as creator of the Sepik Plain, one of the few areas with lots of flat land in this country so dominated by mountains. (Check back on the other photos I’ve posted from PNG, true not really a geographic sampler of PNG but still, and see if any show as much flat horizon as the shot above.)
The people who live along the river are well known within PNG for their amazing woodwork traditions — anywhere you go in PNG you’re likely to see enormous and spectacular wooden carvings which are just lovely. Also renowned are the big houses on stilts that are traditional up there. Since this was a short and full work trip, I didn’t have a lot of time to explore and take as many photos as I’d have liked…but I did do some of my usual walking around town, chatting with folks, and photographing some of the amazing flowers I saw everywhere. Hope you enjoy them. Look for more photos in the coming weeks, from highlands, where I spent some time after this trip, and then from Australia. But first, I’ll need to sort out some computer frustrations. Ah well….
…these three are all carved columns supporting the large house you’ve seen a few other pics of. It’s a guesthouse – not particularly luxurious, but friendly and interesting.
Look a bit closely and you’ll see carvings at the bow of that long canoe, above. This is Pagwi, the first place along the course of the Sepik where a road reaches the river. To the right in this shot, upstream toward West Sepik province and the PNG-Indonesia border where the river originates, are vast riverine region with no roads; to the south across the river is a large area of riverine villages and towns that stretches from the river to the foot of the mountains. We were doing some follow-up visits for the training support we provide hospitals in setting up a Family Support Center for survivors of family and sexual violence – and there are two hospitals in that area that we’ve recently worked with, so we took the chance to get out and learn more about provision of care in the areas.
The long boats, above, ply up and down the main river; the smaller canoes you’ve seen tend to cross the river and head into the smaller villages and towns on the south side toward the mountains. There are also, of course, main market towns up and down the main stretch of river as well.
Second-hand clothing stores are all the rage in PNG – something many expats on our team love exploring. Above, Ruth is chatting with the betel-nut (buai) sellers along the road in Maprik.
(so much world, so little time....) 