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Number of days of toil and sweat it took me to cover the final 100 miles to<br />Port Moresby: 12“Present fears are less than horrible imaginings? - William Shakespeare<br /><br />“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome? - Samuel Johnson

The Long Struggle to Port Moresby- The surprises of Papua New Guinea

Rob Lilwall
2007-12-01 15:13:45

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nothing needs to be stored for winter (there is no winter) and because everything rots so quickly, that the culture is not geared to forward thinking and to quickly producing a successful economy? In the cities however, people have less space to grow their own food, and discontent grows. Politicians often slide into blatant nepotism. AIDS is also becoming a serious issue.

Anyway, one of the results of a country being in such a state of fragmented discombobulation is that many of the bored, frustrated young men have turned to gang crime - deadly characters which are known in these parts as "rascals?. During my first weeks in PNG I was again and again warned of the rascal threat, and in the middle of many a night in some hidden forest village, I would wake up with horrible imaginings of being ambushed, while thinking to myself: "what an earth am I doing here??. My only consciously close encounter with rascals came as I bumped through the potholes of a string of villages along the "main road? on the north coast. Whenever I spotted groups of local youths who fitted my imagined picture of rascals I would usually reply to their cheers and yells that I should stop, by waving, smiling and shouting "good afternoon? in my friendliest possible way - and by not stopping but rather zooming on and out of their lives. On one
occasion as I turned to wave and smile to a particularly menacing posse, I managed to crash my bicycle into the ditch. In an instant they were up on their feet and sprinting towards me. I saw them just meters away as I wrenched myself and bike back onto the road and took off as fast as I could... I only just escaped into the distance, leaving a trail of dust behind me. (Of course, I have no real idea if their intent was to harm me, or just to come and have a chat... but such was my fearful state of mind at that point).

The rascal menace aside, the terrain, climate and roadlessness of PNG were a challenge in themselves... enough to make ...