Bumpy 4WD roads

Four-wheel-driving isn’t a hobby in PNG, it’s an unavoidable part of life! There aren’t a lot of sealed or graded roads, so many roads are constantly deteriorating. When it rains and the roads become muddy, it’s even worse!

Here’s one road that we travelled up in the back of a ute on a rainy day. I took this photo when we actually got bogged. Another 4WD had to tow us out.

If you go 4WD-ing, you would know that your body bumps around all over the place as the car goes up and down ditches. Sitting on a padded seat with your seatbelt on helps to restrain you a bit though. Now, imagine what it’s like in the back of a ute, sitting on a wooden plank, with no seatbelt, and metal bars not far above your head. Quite a different experience!

I focus on two things – 1. Holding on tightly. 2. Bending over to keep my head low so that it doesn’t hit the metal bars – I have hit my head a couple of times with sudden jerks in these cars; being tall doesn’t help!

Dragging a car out of the village

This was such a fun event – everyone was in stitches laughing the whole time!

We had a shell of a car which had been an eyesore in the village for years, and the community decided that it was time to beautify the village and thus we needed to get rid of the old car.

Here’s what it looked like when I first visited in August 2009.

First they had to turn the car upside down and attach ropes to it for pulling.

Then they dragged it from the village out to the road.

After that we dragged it along the road for a while (you can see me in my pink hat in these next two photos).

Next they took it a little way into the bush (not very far from the road).

It was turned over again and positioned in its final resting place. It is next to an area where some copra work gets done, so now they put their bags of dried copra inside the car to hide it from the rain.

Catching car to Buka

This may be a thing of the past now, since our village now has its own car, but before then, to get to Buka, we had to wait for other cars travelling past and wave at them to get them to stop and take us.

It was usually quite a problem as by the time many of the cars from further south get to our village, they are already full, and we’d have a long wait, sometime up to two hours to find a car that had space for us.

There’s a bend in the road just before our village, so we only have a short bit of road to see cars coming:

Standing by the road waiting for a car:

Here’s our luggage:

Finally, here we are squeezed into the back of what they call a ’10 seater’. It’s a four wheel drive that has the seats in the back going along the side instead of the usual way.

Travel to and from Teop

In order to get to Teop from Buka, first you have to cross the Buka Passage, the water between Buka Island and Bougainville Island. As you can see from the photo, it is a pretty narrow passage, so it is just a couple of minutes on a little motor boat to get there.
 
After that, there is a two hour or longer trip on the back of a truck to get to the Teop area, and there was no shelters over the top on the trucks we travelled on, so we were exposed to the sun the whole time.
 
It's a bumpy two hour trip on dirt roads, sitting on hard wooden planks, squashed between two other people and with cargo at your feet. But it's not too bad and there are some nice mountain views. There were also some river crossings, some had good bridges, while at others, the truck just drove through them (the water wasn't high).
 
In the photos above, you will see me on the truck on the way to Teop, and a photo that I took of how packed in we were on our return trip. I think I counted about 42-44 people on the back of the truck.