For Americans, Papua New Guinea is an exotic, exciting and culturally rich place.
“”Try telling that to Australians,” says Bob Bates, ex-patriate Australian owner of Ambua Lodge in the PNG Highlands.
For Australians, the place is a violent, Third World hell-hole.
The typical response I got when telling of a pending PNG trip was, “”I wouldn’t go there.”
Americans are in blissful ignorance. Virtually no news from PNG goes to America, so their image of the place is straight out of National Geographic. Australians, being closer and more involved, get a steady news diet of violence, coup attempts, political instability, corruption and environmental rape. Stories include the recent daring raid on Port Moresby’s main bank by five or six armed men in a hijacked helicopter which resulted in most of the raiders being shot dead by police.
As a result of the poor press, few Australians go to PNG as tourists. Bates gets more people from Finland staying at his lodge than Australians.
On this occasion, the truth does not lie somewhere in the middle. It lies at both ends. PNG is a violent place laced with corruption. It is also an exotic, culturally diverse and idyllic place where people go out of their way to help.
Ambua Lodge is 25kms from the Highlands town of Tari — right in the centre of PNG. It takes an hour and a half along what is ambitiously called the Highlands Highway. Nearly all the National Government money allocated to the highway has been spirited away on unfulfilled contracts to clan members and misuse of trucks for private business. The average speed for a min-bus is under 20km/h.
Arrival in Tari is bizarre. “”Just waiting for a gap,” the pilot said, like a nonchalant cricketer. He warns the descent might be rapid once the “”gap” (in the clouds) is found. It was and then below was a valley with a patchwork of gardens in a hundred hues of green and not a road nor building anywhere amid the dense settlement. People in this valley had not seen Europeans until the 1930s, some not till the 1950s given that the war interrupted things after the first contact. And even now a large number of people live not much different from the Stone Age.
Six or seven hundred people (out of a population in Tari of 900) lined the airport fence. Was someone important aboard? No. There are five flights a week from Port Moresby and they greet each one this way. There is not much else to do.
And what an array of people. Utterly unself-conscious men and women in traditional dress from local plants and animals are among the crowd. That’s what they wear. It’s not some tourist gimmick; they can’t afford anything else: feathers, paint, woven lap cloth and tanket leaves covering the rear, suspended from a belt of cassowary wing. Men wear kina (mother-of-pearl) around their necks. Women in grass skirts. Most in western dress. But most are in an hilarious mix. Here a man with tanket leaves (arse tanket in Pidgin) wears a Canberra Raiders jumper and there a woman in a grass skirt is wearing a T-shirt with “”Anytime” on it. Jumpers and T-shirts improbably marked with things like, “I Loved League at the Gabba”, “”Deloitte’s” and “”City to Surf” worn by bare-foot people, most of whom have never left the valley. The second-hand clothes are brought up by missionaries from the bins of Australian cities and then traded.
But the traditional hangs on. This is the home of Huli wigmen and the spirit dancers.
In Poribu village near Tari is a wig school. Boys pay 200 kina ($A150) or a pig to attend. Here they learn to grow, groom and shape their hair around a cane hoop. It can take more than two years. When it is cut off and taken to the wig maker. Some are made into pancake shape wigs for ordinary wear and others are made into ceremonial wigs that look more like a hat. One man we met had been growing wigs on his head consecutively for seven years.
I couldn’t get a satisfactory response as to why they make and wear wigs other than ornamentation. But perhaps it is an elaborate form of hat to keep warm made from local material. You often see men in the highlands wearing the wigs for everyday use. It seemed a huge amount of effort – particularly the difficulty of sleeping while growing hair for a wig on a cane hoop. But then it seemed little different from a suburban hair salon in which European women sit under domes having their hair coloured, tipped, cut and groomed.
The Hulis only use their own hair. Other PNG people mix sons and spouses’ hair. A wig will last 20 to 30 years and every non-Christian Huli has at least one. About half the Huli population is non-Christian keeping traditions like wig-making, polygamy and spirit dancing.
Tourism is helping to keep spirit dancing and other ceremonies alive, though families of sick villagers still employ spirit dancers to help bring a remedy. The drumming rhythm is quite infectious and certainly more melodic than the disco in downtown Moresby. Shell and kina necklaces – once a rarity in the highlands – are on sale, along with spears, bows and arrows, grass skirts, indeed any part of the highland dress. One American told his wife, “”This is all rubbish. Very primitive.”
Well, quite.
Meanwhile, another American couple told me they had shot 72 films the previous day at a mock highlands battle. They each had two cameras and were dressed for a safari. I could imagine them being a more legitimate subject for anthropological study than the people they were photographing.
There were not many Europeans around and I didn’t come across any Australian tourists in Tari or surrounding villages. It was a reversal of the usually pattern: Americans scared away by the slightest danger and brave Aussies travelling the world. It is a shame. We have a wonderful, exotic culturally diverse country on our doorstep. Sure, there are dangers of robbery and violence as there are in Los Angeles and Sydney. But it is worth the risk. Take care and go.