Tag Archives: Png

A Day with Dave. 12th July.

As Dave and his family had been so kind to us we invited them to lunch on the boat on saturday afternoon. He turned up with his father and younger sister. He was delighted to come into the yacht as he had never been in before. Basically its a white mans club, if you are white you can get in with or without your key, if you are black then you get questioned and can only be invited inby clubmembers, sad but true.

We took them to the boat and chatted for the afternoon about PNG and their different cultures. Sadly Daves sisters only ambition seemed to be that she wanted to marry a whiteman because they could take care of her because of money. It seems that a lot of ex-pats are coming to PNG to get young wives like they do in Thailand, etc. The country itself is very rich having found coal, gas, metals and all sorts of other raw materials but sadly the wealth seems to be gojng to corrupt politicians or heading straight out of the country.  Port Moresby has an unemployment rate of 95%, many thousands have come to the capital from the hills and surrounding areas to try and find work but then have been unable to return when they haven’t found any jobs. A few years ago it was a town with 100, 000 people, now it is somewhere between 800, 000 and a million.

Wanting our Indonesian Visas

We are currently waiting to get our Indonesian visas and passports back from the Indonesian Embassy.  They said three working days and its now been five already, but i wasn’t expecting much else. We have phoned them but they hardly ever phone back, last we heard they said next week maybe the week after, we enquired as to why and they said the printer had broken. Another call later in the day it might now be ready on friday afternoon. We intend to leave when we see an oppourtunity in the weather, its looking like monday/tuesday of next week.

There are some other yachts here that are also waiting to go to Indonesia and join the same sailing rally, everybody has itchy feet !!

Met a canadian guy last night who had only just come in, he had a catermaran built by a company called Prout who were based in Essex. He was a single handed sailor who sounded like a bit of a nomad, been working/sailing/travelling for over 40 years. Said he sails to get away from people but seemed to enjoy our company and told us many stories of his travels. Spent along time in Singapore/Malaysia/Asia/Indonesia/everywhere it seemed, worked in the oil industry on oil rigs in various parts of the world. You meet all sorts.