10:51 It is fair to say, that both of us were more or less nervous before going to Papua New Guina. Information on internet is very limited and not many tourist go there – It has probably a lot to do with media propaganda, that is frightening people with constant stories about robberies, murders, shooting and rapes. Yes, these things do happen there, but not much often than in any other developing country or not very touristy area. What a hell of an adventure it turned out to be 🙂
It’ is a long ride from Jayapura to Vanimo, long time to let your brain come up with every possible crazy scenario – Ooh what a powerful tool the brain is! I think Veronica asked pretty scared questions for several times. After pretty interesting border crossing we were officially in PNG, about 13 000km from home! On the positive side, everybody talks decent or good English in PNG, what makes everything just so much easier.
We hopped on a PMW (public motor vehicle) nd started moving towards Vanimo. The road is narrow, surrounded by thick jungle, that is starting to grow on the road already and the asphalt is beaten up bu recent earthquakes and landslides. On the bus I see a lot of smiling people around and that makes me ease up and actually feel happy, that we have made it so far – We are hungry and havent had a good meal since early morning, but I gladly share an apple with a local kid.
The people there are completely different, they are not anymore Asian looking brown skin Indonesians, they are completely black Afro american looking – so we stick out from the crowd.
We had no plan, no accommodation, no connections no nothing, just about 100 kina (or 28€) in our pocket and recently both yoga mattresses for the worst case scenario. We did knew that it is going to be really expensive (even compared to Europe), but we were baffled how bad it actually is.
Luckily we had very friendly and helpful PMW driver – After dropping off all the customers to market, he was more than happy to look us around the small town of Vanimo to look for the cheapest accommodation. For our surprise, the cheapest one we found was 200 kina for 2 persons 1 night (56€) for very basic and you could even say dirty sleeping arrangement.
The hotels cost about 300 kina or more per 1 night (I dont even know if this is the price for 1 or 2 persons). Just wow, you could expect this price from places around Germany or Amsterdam, but we are talking about small paradise village far far away.
We were already getting ourselves into the thought we might end up sleeping on the beach with our mattresses, get the Indonesian VISA next day and get our bottoms back to Indonesia as soon as possible. But world had very different plans for us. Our friendly PMW driver dropped us of to his mothers house, saying to wait few hours for him to come back and find some better solution for us.
Hours and hours passed, hes still was not back and it already started going dark. At the same time we had a lot of time to talk with her mother, about the rascals and how unsafe in PNG. Here warned us not to sleep on the beach or walk around alone – this made us little nervous again.
Finally, a car drove into the driveway, pickup full of firewood and a lot a people. We didn’t know what to expect, I helped to unload the goods and then we got acquainted. We were both suprised by the generosity of those people – They were really warm and immediately made us felt like home.
They offered us to stay around for few days (actually as long as we need to stay, we misunderstood, as it came out later). Could you imagine taking in few random hikers after just meeting them few minutes ago? What a crazy place the world is!
The same night they cooked an awesome dinner, we got a glimpse of local cuisine, talked about a lot of things, got to know each other and afterwards went to sleep to our very narrow but better than nothing bed – not to complain, it was enough for us, but sleeping in about meter, and few more centimeters, wide bed takes time to get used to 🙂
To be continued…
