Canoe carving

Canoes are made from canoe trees in the garden. They are carved down to shape on-site, where the canoe tree has been cut down, as it isn’t very practical to move it to the village until it is much smaller.

One day when I went to work in the garden, we went to see two canoes that were in the process of being carved to shape and hollowed out in the centre. Here are two photos where you can see both canoes, and lots of wood that has been chipped off.

Stormy tropical views

Here are some views from our village with dark clouds in the sky.

Looking towards Irue with canoe on the beach in the foreground:

Irue closer up. I like the canoe going past on the right.

And another canoe-on-the-beach photo with Teop Island in the background.

Ukulele

We had a wonderful guest visit our village for several weeks, and he brought with him a couple of ukuleles, which became the flavour of the month in the village. Everybody wanted to sit and strum them, including Simone and me.

We sat together and made an interesting noise, while I sang a short song. I gave my camera to Simone’s mother and asked her to film us. It was so funny, because we had Simone’s sister howling with laughter in the background. I’d love you to see it, but the file is too big to upload. Instead, here are some still shots taken from the video.

Port Moresby

Since I have been in Ukarumpa recently, I have had to fly through Port Moresby, staying overnight there. As I travelled from the airport to the guest house where I was staying, I took some photos of various Port Moresby scenes.

Some parts of Moresby look a bit like the scenes you see while travelling on the train line to Melbourne:

Other areas look quite different – lots of green grass.

Bohara shellfish

As mentioned earlier, ‘bohara’ is my favourite type of shellfish. It’s small and not as chewy as some of the others. I don’t know what it’s called in English. Rebekah did some research a while ago and thought that they might be a type of ‘cone snail’, so maybe that’s what they are. Most cone snails are fatally poisonous if they sting you, and some aren’t fatal, but they still hurt. However ‘bohara’ do not sting or ‘bite’ or hurt us in any way, so in that way, they don’t quite fit into the description of ‘cone snail’. They do look like the pictures of cone snails on the internet though.

Anyway, to answer your question of ‘what is bohara?’ – here are some photos.

Bohara with shellfish still inside it:

Clean bohara shell:

Empty bohara shell:

Cooked bohara shellfish (quite close up):

Flowers

Enjoy some of God’s creation through looking at some of these flowers that we have in the village.

There are several different colours of this flower, which I think might be a ‘New Guinea Impatiens’, but I don’t know for sure. So here are a few of the different varieties I’ve seen.

Unonovi views

It’s a long story, so I won’t go into it, but back in December, I stayed overnight at a village called Unonovi. It is about a 5-10 minute walk away from where we live.

I got up early in the morning when the sun was still low in the sky and took some photos, which I will share with you now.

Early morning light on the trees:

If you go to the beach and look to the right (or south-ish), this is what you see:

If you look to the left (or north-ish), you see Teop Island:

Here is a zoomed-in photo – half of Teop Island and also the smaller uninhabited island called Teovorana.