Ross Kaminsky’s Travel Journal – Papua New Guinea, August 2002
Flag of Papua New Guinea
From the evening of Friday, August 16th until
Sunday, August 25th, I traveled in Papua New Guinea (CIA
Factbook Info), in the highlands of Mt. Hagen for the world-famous
“Singsing” and on a boat down the middle and lower Sepik River regions, finally
ending with a couple days in Madang, on the East coast of PNG. Following is a
travel log with the highlights and pictures. I've also put in a few items
of cultural information. I hope you find it interesting!
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Friday, August 16th: Met my friend Norm Friedland and his two daughters, Marcia and Amy, at Cairns airport for our flight to Port Moresby, PNG. (I flew to Cairns from Sydney the previous night.) New Guinea is due north of eastern Australia, and east of Indonesia. (see Map of Oceania, Map of New Guinea, and Detail of Northern New Guinea) Port Moresby has a justifiable reputation as one of the world’s most dangerous cities and we didn’t leave the airport, but we didn’t have a long time between connections and after only a 1 hour delay, we got on another jet to Mt. Hagen.
The Highlands of PNG are a world of mountains and thick jungle which were not explored in any serious way by white men until around World War I. Most highlanders lived an essentially stone age lifestyle until the 20th century! The terrain is (was) so impassable that villages which were only a few miles from each other had no contact for years at a time, and therefore, PNG is home to over 800 separate languages! People who lived just a few miles apart could literally not understand a word each other would say.
Highlands View from Airplane
These days, most people who are anywhere near a city or near the unfortunately common missionary (Catholic, Baptist, 7th-Day Adventist) schools speak Pidgin and some English. Pidgin is an interesting compilation of island and colonial languages, much of which is understandable if you listen carefully. (see this Pidgin-English dictionary) For example, “Noken kai-kai buai insait long teminel” means “You may not chew betel nut inside the (airplane) terminal.” (For someone else's pretty good betel nut story, click here, and hit cancel if it asks for login/password...)
Young people speak elementary school English routinely. School, up through 6th grade is compulsory. Students who test well enough can then go to high school, and students who test well enough there can go to University. Very lucky and smart students sometimes have the chance to go to an Australian University.
Arriving in Mt. Hagen, we flew over a lot more metal buildings, paved roads, power lines, (non-native) cows, and other signs of “progress” than I expected (or wanted). While I’m not one of those “greenies” who thinks that progress is bad, it certainly has had some negative consequences in the Highlands, including the now-rampant dirt and crime in Mt. Hagen which apparently rivals Moresby in terms of “places you don’t want to go out alone or at night”. We checked into the “best” hotel in town, the Highlander, which was well protected by two guards, a vicious-looking dog, and a barbed-wire covered gate. We ate dinner, and went to sleep before the first day of the Singsing.
Poolside at the Hotel* Guard and barbed wire*
Saturday, August 17th: These days, progress has brought contact among the many villages and tribes in the Highlands, and especially the Western Highlands (where Mt. Hagen is.) There are never the sorts of conflicts among villages that made Highlanders (in)famous for headhunting, but there is a lot of street crime in the city itself, caused by too many unemployed people with too much free time.
Mt. Hagen Street Scene*
After breakfast, got a ride to the showground, a rugby field in other times, to watch various Singsing groups prepare for the show. The Singsing is a local singing and dancing cultural show which is truly spectacular, and in my experience matched only by the Paro Tsechu in Bhutan (in April for those of you who are interested.)
Singsing grounds
The Singsing typically brings between 300-400 tourists, who are treated with incredible respect and courtesy by the locals, both because that has historically been their nature with Americans and Australians (PNG still remembers how the Japanese treated them during the war) and because tourism is the main hard cash industry in the area, as well as down the Sepik River. Literally the most generous and sincere levels of trying to make the tourists happy that I've ever encountered.
There are actually two fields at the area where they put on the 2002 Singsing. (It wasn’t at the usual place. More on that later.) One field was fenced off, for the actual show, and the lower field was available to everyone and was where most of the groups prepared, meaning put on face paint and traditional skirts, shells, headdresses, etc.
Most of the groups were from the Highlands, but there was also a group from Madang (wearing headdresses with images of the ubiquitous flying foxes in that area) and a couple of groups from the Sepik.
Madang Singsing group and detail with flying fox headdress
Some villages had groups of men and women together, and some had separate men and women groups. There were a couple of highland groups which appeared to have men only with no corresponding group of women, but this could have been more of an issue of transportation than tradition. Many groups from near Mt. Hagen have similar styles, but they can be differentiated if one looks carefully.
Preparing Face Paint Dancing in the Singsing Highlander Chief and Wife
(all 3 pictures above are Mt. Hagen area Highlanders)
Mt.. Hagen Woman Simbu group member Sepik Singsing group
At about 11 AM, the groups were ready for the show, and an announcer called them, in Pidgin, to come to the main show field, where only the groups, Singsing officials, and tourists wearing the proper pin were allowed in. (The 2nd day, they didn’t allow the tourists in for some time because they got in the way of the rest of the tourists who were trying to take photos from the edges of the field.) The groups came in one at a time and paraded around the field, each group doing their own dance or march most of the time as they went around.
One group which was a crowd favorite was from Simbu (not the same group as the picture above, but the same area), and were painted as skeletons who were pretending to chase a monster which looked like a cross between a bear and a gorilla. The group, mostly kids, would run up behind the monster, pretending to hack at it with axes. Every few yards the monster would turn on the group, and the group would run screaming or turn their backs to the monster and shake their rear ends at it in mock fear.
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Simbu Children with group sign Simbu group leader with shield Ross with Simbu group
Simbu Singsing group "on the hunt"
