The nice sights of Arawa

As well as some pretty roads, there are some other nice sights in Arawa. Here is their beautiful river, which is right in the centre of town. You pass it, going over a bridge, just after the market (or just before the market if you’re going the other direction!).

How cool is this sculpture of the world? which, ironically is missing PNG. Apparently it used to be even cooler, as it used to be a bit of a fountain with water flowing over the world. Sounds great.

This is a lovely mural on the side of a building in the middle of ‘Beautiful Arawa.’

This technically isn’t a ‘sight’ because it is inside a building, but I was so excited by it that I had to share it anyway. It is the inside of the relatively new supermarket. Look at it! It’s so bright and shiny and clean and spacious!! And it has a lot of stock – things you can’t get in Buka. I even took photos of the food on the shelves, but I’ll spare you them, as I’m sure you know what good supermarkets look like.

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.

Shopping in Ukarumpa

Well, there's not a whole lot of choice in terms of shops in Ukarumpa. If you want computer related items, you go to the computer department, for fresh fruit and vegies, you go to the market (3 times a week and early in the morning) and for about everything else, you go to "The Store". The Store sells food as well as a variety of other things such as plates, wool, bath mats, stationery, cleaning products and toiletries.

A lot of products are brought in from Australia and the USA, but there are also locally produced PNG products and some cheap Indonesian and Malaysian products. There are even apples in The Store occasionally which are imported from Australia. They cost about 60c each.

Of course sometimes they are out of stock, like recently when there was no onions in the store for a few weeks, and the past couple times I’ve been there, there’s not been any eggs.

One day I went to The Store and wanted to buy macaroni and some other type of pasta, and I walked down the aisle that has the pasta and all I saw was Black and Gold pasta spirals. I thought, "Is that all they've got? Just spirals? I guess I'll have to wait and get macaroni another time." Then it dawned on me that I had just completely overlooked a whole section of pasta that was an American brand. There was all sorts of different types of pasta in the American brand, so I was able to get macaroni (elbows). It is funny how I am so used to familiar brands that I just did not see what was right there in front of me in a different brand!

Madang town (post by Bill & Liz)

Madang is a large town on the north coast of PNG that in some articles is described as the prettiest town in the South Pacific. Well, the location is certainly picturesque enough but the urban area is not really pretty.

There are quality schools.


There are many small stores that sell small amounts of all sorts of goods.


There are larger shops as well, the pink coloured building was the Papindo store which had a supermarket on the ground floor with a clothing and general merchandise area on the first floor. This store is air-conditioned. The closer building, ‘Beckslea Plaza’, had a chemist and several shops that sold clothing, sporting gear, CD’s and electric goods. A large proportion of local people use the second hand stores to purchase clothing.


This is the street where most of the banks were located; the security guards prevent people loitering in front of the banks.


And the Post Office was just around the corner.


This is the view from one of the restaurants that overlooks the main shipping channel into Madang harbour – large ships and local water PMV’s (water taxis) could be seen while eating your meal.


There is a Coastwatchers memorial overlooking the sea in Madang. This memorial honours the men and women who observed Japanese military movements from behind enemy lines during WWII and reported this intelligence to the Allied forces.

Kainantu (post by Bill & Liz)

Kainantu is the nearest town to Ukarumpa. It has shops and a market for all your shopping needs. It is on the Highlands Highway, where the road splits to go to Goroka or Lae. To our Western eyes it is quite a messy place.

Kainantu shopping precinct:

We visited several shops, the Cultural Centre and the market. We feel very conspicuous walking among the local people and they have no inhibitions about staring at the white strangers.

The market had separate areas for bilums and clothing and there was some undercover fruit and vegetables with sellers sitting at tables. Others were sitting on the open ground with their produce on a plastic sheet in front of them.

Kainantu market:

Buka town and market

For the past three weeks I have been the kitchen manager for the Centre here while we have people attending meetings and workshops. Now the last course is winding up at the end of the week. A large part of my job was to drive to town with the two cooks, who do our market shopping, and I buy whatever food we need from the shops. We went to town three days a week to buy supplies for the kitchen (Monday, Wednesday and Friday). Today was our last trip into town for shopping.
 
Buka is a nice, basic little town and it is clean and tidy too (see picture above). There aren't many fancy Australian products in the stores, but they do have cheese sometimes. I bought a 250g block of Mainland cheese for myself the other day for about $5 (AUD), which I think is probably double what you would pay in Australia!
 
The market has fresh fruit and vegies, cream buns, banana chips, smoked fish and traditional tourist items (eg. shell necklaces, woven baskets). I don't know who their tourist market is though, as there aren't many overseas tourists here, but there are several aid organisations around who have expats working here.
 
I am thrilled that they have banana chips. These are made from savoury bananas and they salt them, so they are just like a regular packet of crisps (potato chips), except with bananas instead. I love them. They cost about 50c for a small bagful.
 
Most of the market is under a shelter, which you can see in the background two of the photos above. In these photos, you can see some outside sellers, and people buying peanuts.