Village – Coconut scraping (post by Bill & Liz)

Coconuts are used in many ways within the village. One day Julie was asked to help scrape the flesh out of coconut to make coconut cream. She had to sit on a stool that has a special attachment for scraping the inside of coconuts. The flesh is caught in a bowl underneath and mixed with water to make the coconut cream. Then this is used in meals.

Here’s Julie working hard, her hands are over the coconut and you can see the stool that is used for scraping.

Village – Sago (post by Bill & Liz)

Sago is used as a supplement to the villagers’ regular diet. They grow the sago trees in their jungle gardens and chop down the tree whenever required. Once a tree is chopped down, the men pound into the soft wood to make a rough woody pulp.


Here’s Bill having a go at it. All his toes were still intact afterwards!


The wood pulp is collected and carried to a nearby river and washed through hessian bags and the residue is caught in containers beneath them. The sago settles in the bottom of the bowls and the water is poured off later.

Here is Liz trying her hand at washing sago.


We were served sago for breakfast the next day and it was not our favourite meal. It looked like a brown jellyfish!

Village – Laundry (post by Bill & Liz)

The village had all mod-cons, such as a tap for doing your laundry at. We appreciate our washing machine much more now!

Here is Liz filling up the ‘washing machine’.

Julie washing clothes.

Liz doing the final rinse.

Some of our little laundry ‘helpers’.

Village – Coconut drinks (post by Bill & Liz)

If we were out walking and felt thirsty and coconuts were available, it was no problem for somebody to get a coconut for us to drink.

Here is one of the villagers (Paul) going up a tree to get some coconuts.

Here are some pictures of us enjoying a drink of coconut juice. It was always very refreshing and sometimes fizzy.

Village – Kaikai (food) (post by Bill & Liz)

While in the village we ate as the locals eat. Meals mainly consisted of various types of potatoes such as kaukau (sweet potato), taro, Chinese taro, yam and cooking bananas. They were served with greens, which are various locally grown leaves of plants, similar in appearance to spinach leaves. Usually there was fish on top of it, either fresh or occasionally tinned. It was all served in a thin soup. Nearly always, they were huge meals and we struggled to eat them, especially when another family decided to feed us as well shortly after we’d already eaten a big meal!

At all the villages we visited, everybody was very generous with their food and friendliness.

Here we are eating on the verandah of our house.

Village – Our humble abode (post by Bill & Liz)

We stayed in the village for 5 nights. In the photo below is the house we stayed in. It was newly built for when Julie did her orientation course and stayed in the village for 5 weeks. The family have lived in the house since then and generously shared it with us while we visited.

This is a picture of our bedroom. You can’t see much of it because of our mosquito net.

Here is the toilet, which we shared with many nocturnal creatures.

Here is our open air bathroom. We bathed in the river, which is in the foreground. The sea is on the other side of the sandbank. The water in the river is amazingly warm, it feels like you’re hopping into a nice warm bath.

Madang market (post by Bill & Liz)

Madang has a market that operates every day except Sunday. It is quite big and sells fruit, vegetables, many varieties of potatoes, peanuts, bilums, meri blouses and craft items.

Some of the sellers are undercover and have tables, while others have to sit outside on the rocky ground which can turn muddy after rain.

We were a regular visitor to the market and mainly bought fruit and vegies there.

Here’s Liz and Julie looking at craft items.

Julie buying peanuts.

Part of the open air section of the market.