Ukarumpa

A morning view from our balcony across to the surrounding hills.

It sounds like something from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, looks like something from The Land that Time Forgot and feels like something from Little House on the Prairie. Ukarumpa, home to the largest community of linguists on earth.

We spent 2 1/2 weeks there with the aim of finding out whether this base at 5000 feet in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea could viably be a home for us for two years or so from August 2010. It seems so.

The base was created in the 1950s from disputed land. Tribes had fought over the valley land for generations and when the Summer Institute of Linguistics requested land from the then Australian PNG government to set up a base here, they didn’t hesistate to hand it over.

Security is still something of an issue with the Highlands having a reputation, as I’ve said before, as being a little like the Wild West of yore. As a result, a fence was constructed in the ’90s to improve the situation here. It’s not foolproof but it’s a deterrent. On the whole though, life here is very peaceful. People were really friendly to us and it was good to see a mixture of ex-pats and nationals working on the base.

A view of the fence snaking away to the valley and the surrounding fields.

It’s a very large base. There must be several hundred people there and, despite our best efforts, we failed to make it all the way around the perimeter. We did walk many of the unpaved roads, up hills and round corners exploring as much as we could. The settings for many of the houses are idyllic and those who have bought their own places here have often gone to great lengths to make them cosy homes.

We started off in the guesthouse but then had the opportunity to rent a place and self-cater which gave us a much better impression of what it would be like to live here.

We lived in the right hand half of this house.

Feeding ourselves meant that we got a lot of experience of using the great store here which stocks a surprising array of products. You can get a lot of tinned goods and frozen stuff there with most of it coming from Australia and the US.

We also had to head to the market which is three times a week from 6-8 in the morning. It must be the quietest market in the world. Unlike many countries we’ve been to where hassling customers to buy and bargaining loudly are mandatory, in PNG, prices are fixed and the only noise is subdued conversation to pass the time of day before a purchase is made. It’s kind of eerie and will take us a bit of getting used to but it adds to the peaceful early morning atmosphere.

What £5 will buy you at the market.

Everything happens early here. People start school and work way before 9 often and finish around 4. This is because, once the sun sets around 6:30 there’s not a lot to do. People who invited us over to eat usually asked us to come at 5:30 or 6. Meals were finished fast and we often found ourselves back home around 9pm staring at each other and wondering what to do with ourselves for the evening when we thought we’d be out. It’s a good place to read and watch DVDs!

We saw a tremendous variety of people here of all sorts of backgrounds, nationalities and jobs. It was good to see such a range as it adds both to variety and the chance that there’ll be someone somewhere who can relate to how you feel about being there. Everyone’s welcoming though and quite tolerant of cultural and theological differences.

What there is to do is entirely self-made. If you want to do something, you just go out and do it. There’s a pony club, archery, a motorcross track, quilting, crossstitch, cafes in people’s homes, day trips out shopping and more sport than you could possibly manage each week. I played tennis, indoor hockey, football and ultimate frisbee as well as went for a hike up a local hill to get a view back down the valley.

With a teacher from the high school and a local guy to guide us up a nearby hill. No prizes for guessing what that plant is in the foreground!

Getting off the base isn’t too easy if you’re a single woman. But if you can get a group together or, better still know a national who can go with you, there’s plenty of walking to be done and a whole world of villages to explore. To do so safely is simply a matter of building the right relationships. This takes time but is a great investment for all those who’ve done so who we spoke to.

Being in such an isolated location can give people a bit of cabin fever but, as we heard many say, life there is really what you make of it. We had two weeks and we made the most of that. I’m sure that if we had two years, we’d not do too badly at all.

For more photos than you know what to do with, check out our Smugmug Ukarumpa gallery.

PMVing to the Highlands

After four days in Madang, it was time to move on. We had to make it up to the base at Ukarumpa in the Highlands because John’s future boss was due to fly out shortly and he didn’t want to come all this way and miss out on meeting with her. So, the only way we could get from the coast up to the Highlands was by PMV.

PMV stands for Public Motorised Vehicle and basically means public transport. Usually, they’re minibuses but they can be motorboats too down at the coast. We’d had mixed advice when we’d asked about the logistics of getting one for this trip. They ranged from there being absolutely no problem with them through to them being about as life-threatening as swimming in liquid steel.

The threats were numerous and worth considering. Firstly there’s the simple physical state of the vehicle. They can lack brakes, windows, seats, lights or tread. If only mechanics in these countries were as dedicated in their maintenance of these as they are with horns and radios which never fail to work.

Then there’s the physical state of the driver. Apart from many being national chain-smoking champions, they’re also likely to spend most of the trip chewing buai, a mildly stimulating drupe that is addictive and gives the chewer heightened awareness which, for PMV drivers, equates in a belief in their own immortality.

A fellow passenger exemplifies the buai school of dental hygeine

Finally, there’s the physical state of the roads. While there are many paved roads in the country, you can bet yourself that they won’t go where you want to go, at least not the whole way. Often natural disasters such as landslides, flooding or massive Chinese construction projects cause large sections to be virtually impassable. And if you do find your way cleared of these phenomena, there’s always the outside chance that you could be held up by raskols, bandits who’ll take everything you possess off you including, from time to time, your own life.

So, it wasn’t without some prayer that we headed down to the morning market in Madang in order to track down a spinning PMV. Spinning is what drivers do to collect passengers and consists of circling around town and accosting anyone who happens not to be in a vehicle and shouting their destination at them. When the PMV is full, they’ll set off. This can take anything from 10 minutes to a period of time that feels like the life-expectancy of a Japanese fisherman’s wife.

Thanks to our friend Don’s experience of living here since time began, we were on a PMV that left pretty much as soon as we got in. It had tread on the tires, brakes that worked, a driver who not only spoke English but was to literally go the extra mile for us later on. Apart from the fact that the windscreen was held together with Catholic icon stickers and what looked like large chunks of pre-masticated chewing gum, it was roadworthy.

There were about 8 other passengers. These were squeezed in between what was obviously more precious: 25 sacks of buai for sale in Goroka. Clearly, our driver wouldn’t be lacking stimulus and, just so we could see how stimulated he was, we were given seats of honour next to him in the front where Sheena made use of the only seatbelt. “God is my seatbelt” I yelled above a screaming gearbox to the driver. How he laughed at that.

The road out of Madang lasted about an hour before degenerating in the Finisterre mountains into pitted gravel. We bounced along one of the world’s longest pipelines which carries waste from a massive nickel mine to be deposited off the coast of Madang. This has controversially been built by Chinese who can’t speak English. This is important.

In PNG, you cannot be granted a work permit unless you can demonstrate particular ability in conversational English. As resident anthropologist Nancy Sullivan explains on her blog, officials were encouraged to ignore this particular law in this particular case. Ahem. Given the recent rioting over the economic dominance of Chinese immigrants in PNG, this kind of beauracratic fudging quite understandably incenses people here. Recent history of PNG seems full of stories like this and it does not bode well for its future governance.

Eventually, we found ourselves in the Ramu valley. This is absolutely massive and is dominated by the huge agribusinesses of Ramu Agriculture including immense palm oil and sugar plantations and beef ranches.

At the end of this is the Kassam Pass and here’s where the Highlands really begin. The view from the top back down the valley was remarkable.

The Highlands are temperate in climate but not in personality. Many lowlands people still fear going up here. Highlands people have a reputation for being much more aggressive than their lowlands counterparts and this is reflected in historically there being many more examples of inter-tribal conflict.

Because of this, the whole area has a kind of wild west feel about it. When we reached Kainantu, where our PMV driver should have dropped us off, he turned off the main road and headed a considerably distance out of his way towards the Ukarumpa base. When we protested that this really wasn’t necessary, he said, “Dis ples planti kauboi.” I think you can get the gist of that!

Well, he valiantly followed a road up into more hills. We hadn’t the faintest idea where he was going so felt helpless. In the back, the buai sellers were all complaining that they hadn’t paid to go to Ukarumpa and wanted to get to market in Goroka. We understood how they felt but were in our driver’s hands. Eventually, within 1km of the entrance (although we had no idea of that at the time) he gave in to pressure from his passengers and headed back into Kainantu and dropped us off in the centre of town.

We weren’t helpless. Don had given us a mobile phone and we used this to call Bonnie, the survey team leader John will be working with next year. It turned out that a couple of families from the base were having lunch in town and a quick call to them had them show up in their red pickup. We all piled in the back and minutes later we somewhat bizarrely found ourselves eating steak in the grounds of a hotel with tree kangaroos in a nearby cage.

After lunch, as we rolled across the bridge and through the gates of the Ukarumpa base, we had quite a strange feeling. Here was a place we’d heard so much about over the last two years and now here we were, here.

Nobnob

On a hill overlooking the town of Madang is the village of Nobnob. When the Germans settled this area in the late 19th century, the Lutherans set up a mission station here. The site was good, away from the heat and higher humidity down by the coast which meant less chance of malaria and more chance of rain and cooler clouds.

The view down to the coast from Nobnob

The mission station has been gone for many years. Now, the Summer Institute of Linguistics leases the site from the Lutheran Church and uses it to run the Pacific Orientation Course (POC). Usually this is run twice a year in January and August. The full course lasts 14 weeks although you can do a shorter version of 6 weeks. We were a special case and managed to leave after 4 days.

Sunrise

Sunset

The course is designed to integrate you into life in Papua New Guinea. It also aims to help you come to terms with living and working in multi-cultural teams. Apart from PNG nationals, there were people from Australia, the US, Canada and the UK there. Often there are many more nationalities than this.

The dining room one lunchtime

The course consists of language study (Tok Pisin), cultural lectures, anthropology and physical training (hiking and swmming) and preparation for a 5-week experience of living in a PNG village. It’s quite demanding and at some and often many points, participants feel so far from their comfort zones they can’t even remember what they felt like.

The room where we have all our lectures

As we were sitting in on just the first four days of the course, the pressure was off us. We knew that, if we return next year, our time would come. But, for now, we could relax and take it easy, doing only what we felt like. Thankfully, we felt like doing most things.

We had heard that swimming a mile in the sea was one of the physical challenges of the course. Every Wednesday, there are trips down to the nearby coast where a 100m rope is strung between two buoys out from the shore.

The cove where we go swimming seen from Nobnob

16 lengths of this will, roughly, see you hit the target. Not only did we manage this but we also were part of a brave few who walked down to the beach beforehand. It felt good to know that we were up to it all physically.

Sheena shows the best way to cope with the mud on the walk down to swimming

Everyone in the truck after swimming

Culturally though, I think things may be more of a challenge. The idea of living 5 weeks in a PNG village where we may not have any electricity, we’ll probably have to fetch our water and will be cooking all our own food on an open fire is something that may well be a challenge. More of a concern though is how we’ll get on for the other 9 weeks of the course living with ex-pats from a wide variety of backgrounds who are all going through differing amounts of culture-shock. That’s the real challenge!

We got to have our first Tok Pisin lesson a few days in. After smashing our heads against a wall of Japanese for six years, Tok Pisin is remarkably easy for us English speakers. 70% of the vocabulary is borrowed from English and sitting through our first sermon in the language we picked up about 50% of what we heard. That would have been a good Sunday near the end of our time in Japan.

John strains to hear some Tok Pisin

We also had a chance to see the area around Nobnob on a community hike that we took. This was our first experience of hiking in PNG. How can we describe it? Well, imagine that horizontal doesn’t exist. Everything is either uphill or downhill. And every slope you walk on is orange mud through the lush rainforest. Falling over is pretty much mandatory at some point.

Everyone we met on the hike was welcoming. The course participants probably provide so much entertainment for people on the hillside that they can’t wait to see us.

Sheena crossing a bridge that the POC staff made for a nearby village

The hike took us through forest with all sorts of plant-life and fruit trees. At one point, when I asked a village elder what a particular fruit was he promptly whipped out his foot-long bush knife, hacked a pod off the tree and then spent a hair-raising few minutes hacking the pod open with the same knife only millimetres away from his fingers with each swipe. It was worth it though – coconutty seeds that were nice and cruncy. Forgotten the name now…

We left on the fifth day of the course having seen enough to get an idea of what we’re in for next year. We couldn’t stay longer though as we had to meet someone up in the highlands. This meant we had to brave a PMV trip. More about that next!