| Subject: Message for foreign tourists, but a concern for PNGs backyard |
Author:
Simetu
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Date Posted: 01:22:53 06/09/01 Sat
A very discriptive article below by an American expatriate, which brings the whole PNG backyard out to America and the whole world. Land of the unexpected with multiple definitions and PNG could be known as Paradise Live, but bloody thorny to set a foot by foreigners. Who do we blame - civilians, or unthinkable, homeless nomads in PNG cities or the floppy goriellas in Waigani?
Read this for your info!!!!!!
Papua New Guinea: Paradox island
By Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea —
This sun-splattered city, with sidewalks
stained in the red expectorate of the chewed
stimulant betel nut and evenings punctuated by
occasional gunfire, may not exactly be a
Melanesian Heart of Darkness. But Joseph
Conrad's Kurtz would have enjoyed a long
weekend here.
This island nation seems literally at the end of
the world for Americans. And it is: nearly 15
hours from Los Angeles to Sydney and
another 4 1/2 north to Port Moresby, the
capital. If Americans know New Guinea at all,
it is as some distant battleground for the
Greatest Generation or the place where a
young Rockefeller vanished 40 years ago, by
some accounts into the hands of island
cannibals. If anyone scrambles to arrive, it is
the hard-core been-there-done-that crowd
eager for a new, exotic stamp in their
passport.
And while the Peace Corps is pulling out for
safety reasons and the U.S. State Department
offers Americans a primer on how to avoid
the robberies, rapes and carjackings in this
and other Papua New Guinea cities, these
urban areas are no more representative of all
New Guinea than Hell's Kitchen is of all
Manhattan.
"The situation is not unreservedly bleak," says
the online primer (www.travel.state.gov).
The No. 1 travel lure is what is outside the
cities. It is the nation's vast, unspoiled
wilderness and primitive cultures: a polyglot of
800 different languages, 700 varieties of birds
(including 38 of the world's 42 bird of
paradise species), 2,800 types of orchids
(one-sixth of those on the planet), volcanoes,
rugged highlands, tropical rain forests,
beaches, the world's largest butterfly (the
Queen Alexandra Birdwing — wingspan,
nearly a foot) and some of the best diving and
snorkeling anywhere, combining spectacular
coral and sea life, with an overabundance of
World War II wreckage sites.
So the nation is like this giant rose, complete
with menacing thorns. Small wonder that the
cash-poor national tourism office struggles to
sell what's good about the country, but
doesn't have far to reach for a theme:
Paradise Live.
There are untouched tribal cultures here,
villagers glistening in palm oil and face paints
with a childlike sweetness to their social
graces, barely exposed to the world outside
New Guinea.
"I've been in villages where for kids 8, 9 years
old, I'm the first white person they've seen
because nobody's been there for a long time,"
says Frank Bonaccorso, an American
expatriate, who is chief curator of natural
history at the Papua New Guinea National
Museum and Art Gallery here. He was lured
to the island by a fascination with the giant fox
bats with 6-foot wingspans that thrive here.
"It's one of the most exciting places I've ever
been," he says.
"There are fabulous things to see here," says
U.S. Ambassador Susan Jacobs as she
bounces along a dirt road in a caravan of
day-trippers to Varirata National Park outside
Port Moresby. "The problem is the reputation for crime and lawlessness that
exists and makes people reluctant to come."
Jacobs is a career foreign service officer seven months into her posting. This is
her second chance to visit this lush mix of eucalyptus savanna and rain forest.
Site of a meticulously reconstructed treehouse of the warriorlike Koiari tribe,
the park also is near the famous, trans-island Kokoda Trail, where Australians
valiantly parried a Japanese ground offensive in 1942. (Hallowed ground for
Australians, the trail was closed because of violence but has recently and
partly reopened.) Jacobs was invited on a hike in this park last November but
chose instead to go snorkeling.
"I can't tell you how happy I was about my decision," she says.
Another woman who joined that outing was raped at gunpoint in the park by
men wearing ski masks and armed with homemade guns. Today, Jacobs and
her embassy caravan have armed police as escorts.
Fast-growing region
Part of the British Commonwealth, Papua New Guinea is a young nation,
birthed in 1975. It comprises island chains, archipelagoes and the eastern half
of New Guinea, the second largest island in the world, a nearly roadless
expanse of lowland plains and central highlands with peaks rising to 16,000
feet and tropical glaciers. The western half of New Guinea, known as Irian
Jaya, is part of Indonesia.
Researchers like Theodore Levantis, an Australian economic development
consultant who is authoring a book on tourism in Papua New Guinea, say the
country is a great paradox. Though thousands of miles (and dollars) away for
Americans, it is in one of the fastest growing travel regions — East Asia and
the South Pacific — where the share of world travel receipts doubled from
7.5% to 15.2% from 1980 to 1999. Yet Papua New Guinea's slice of that
broadening pie actually shriveled to less than one-tenth of 1%. Indonesia, to
the west, and Australia, to the south, annually draw 10 million tourists. Papua
New Guinea had only about 60,000 visitors last year — a third of whom are
estimated to be true tourists — fewer than Fiji or Samoa, Levantis says. (U.S.
visitors number between 5,000 and 6,000 annually, a distant second to
Australians among nationalities worldwide.)
Local raskols
"Nature has given Papua New Guinea a terrific array of attractions to woo the
tourist," Levantis writes in a draft of his book, "(But) the law and order
situation is devastating."
He blames the crime rate on poor law enforcement, high unemployment in the
cities and an organized banditry known locally as raskols (pidgin for rascals).
Outside the cities, mythic dangers of the past — that perhaps contributed to
the disappearance in 1961 of 23-year-old Michael Rockefeller,
great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller, during a hunt for tribal artifacts —
ended years ago. "Nobody is going to get killed and eaten by cannibals
today," says Paul Taylor, a Smithsonian anthropologist who studied
cannibalism in New Guinea and believes it ended in the 1970s.
But intertribal warfare between people armed with machetes and knives (and,
increasingly, with firearms) continues and has left road travel in the Highlands
a concern. After 20 years of operating there, the Peace Corps pulled workers
out in December after attacks on some of their volunteers in the area. Earlier
this week, the organization announced it would withdraw entirely from Papua
New Guinea. "Crime against persons, not just property, is widespread and
increasingly violent," says a Peace Corps statement released this week.
'Majority in harmony'
Tourism operators here insist that the nation's reputation for crime has been
overblown. "We do not like being defamed, the greatest majority of us live in
perfect harmony," says Peter Barter, who owns and operates resorts and
luxury Sepik River cruises and says none of his clients have ever been
victimized.
But the net result is that expense, danger and exoticism have left this nation
largely to the high-end adventure travelers who buy packaged deals that keep
them secure and quickly shuttled through Port Moresby, which has the only
international airport and thus is the principal gateway.
"Spending less than an hour in Port Moresby and then connecting to Madang
(a resort area) or Rabaul (famed for diving), this is what we want to see
happen," says Jim Yomapisi, acting heading of Papua New Guinea Tourism
Promotion Authority. "We don't want tourists hanging around in Port
Moresby."
That leaves, for example, adventure kayaking with Mountain Travel Sobek
for 16 days for about $3,200 (excluding air travel from the USA) or, at the
highest end, $39,950 for a ticket (double occupancy) on the Around the
World private jet expedition of Seattle-based TCS Expeditions. Three days in
Papua New Guinea are part of a dizzying global mix.
Keeping the island nation remote in every sense — culturally, environmentally,
affordably — has evolved, by design or accident, into a national tourism
policy.
"We want to do this slowly," Yomapisi says of building a travel industry. "We
want to keep our interest on the adventure tourists. They don't care about the
expense. They don't care about the remoteness. But they still come."
PNG: Paradox Island by Gregg Zoroya, USA TODAY
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