Shopping in Buka town

When I’m not in the village, I’m in Buka town and that is where we buy food to take to the village for our meals. If I’m only doing a small shopping trip (where I’ll be able to carry everything myself), I get a bus in to town from where we stay at Hutjena. The bus stop in town is next to the green shop in the photo below. You can just see the front of a bus on the left in this photo. We get off the bus here when we arrive in town and this is where we wait when we want to go back to Hutjena.

The market is under this big roof.

Here are some of the shops in town:

This one is one of the few stores that sometimes (occasionally) sell cheese:

We do most of our shopping for the village at two shops, and then we run around half the rest of the shops just to find some elusive items that our two main shops didn’t have. The elusive items usually are eggs, chicken stock and coconut powder (for making coconut milk). If we can’t get the coconut powder, it’s not too big a problem, there’s plenty of fresh coconuts in the village! Anyway, the blue shop in the photo below is one of the two shops where we do most of our village shopping.