Chopping firewood

It’s been really good having visitors lately (Emily and then my parents in July and August) because it means I have other people who can take photos of me, which I can then put on my blog!

Chopping firewood is something I’ve done quite a lot of times this year, but only now do I have some photos to share with you.

Here I am in action chopping firewood:

We actually took those photos after we’d finished chopping firewood and realised that we hadn’t taken any photos of us doing it, so most of the thicker branches had already been cut and I’m just cutting a fairly thin branch here.

Here is my little backpack of firewood to take back to the village:

And here I am carrying it:

Kokopo pier and volcano

When walking along this pier at Kokopo, you want to make sure you look at where you are putting your feet.

It’s a slightly scary pier to walk along.

But at the end of it, you can get a good view of the Rabaul volcanoes.

The way back to land - doesn't look so scary in this photo.

Yummy cakes!!

Wow! Look at these cakes at a shop in Kokopo! It’s almost unbelievable. When I went to Kokopo/Rabaul with Mum and Dad I was excited by a lot of things at the shops. Rabaul has so much more in the way of products at the shops than we have here in Buka, so it’s very different. It may be fairly normal to see these kinds of cake displays in Australia, but we certainly don’t have cakes like this in Buka.

Teop sunset

Another beautiful sunset view of Teop Island. We just have a great view and sunsets, so I seem to always have photos to post. Hope you can enjoy the view through the photos. You would enjoy it even more if you were here though!

Tomato plants

I brought some tomato seeds back from Australia with me when I returned to PNG in November, so since then I've been growing tomatoes in my little vegie garden. It is fun watching them grow and develop, and rewarding to eat the fruit when it is ripe!

Here is a nursery of baby tomato plants:

Fledgling plant getting stronger:

Tomato plants getting bigger planted out in the garden:

A big tomato plant. I staked them out and some of them are taller than me! I didn't realise that tomato plants grew that tall!


Look at this lovely bunch of three tomatoes! I'm still waiting for them to ripen up and am looking forward to eating them!

The steps to the beach

We live on a cliff here at Buka, which has a wonderful ocean view, unfortunately the beach is a bit inaccessible due to the long drop straight down. Fortunately our neighbours also wanted easier access to the beach and they constructed a concrete stairway to the beach, so now it is accessible.

This is the view from the start of the steps:

Another view, part-way down:

More steps:

Emily sitting on what looks like a stairway up to the sky:

Going down is the easy part – I think going back up the steep steps would kill your legs! Whenever I’ve gone down, I’ve gone back up the long way by walking along the beach and through a village to get to the road.

Cocoa pod borer

Did you know that there’s such a thing as a cocoa pod borer? No? It’s probably not really something that you’ve wondered about. Well yes, there is a cocoa pod borer and it has devastated the local cocoa crops here. People here used to produce a lot of cocoa as their cash crop, but since the borer came in, they switched to copra (coconut). However it is much harder work to produce copra, and recently the value of copra has gone down too.

The World Bank helped to fund the provision of a new type of cocoa plant that is more resistant to the cocoa pod borer. Villagers can buy young cocoa plants and start new cocoa gardens, but first they have to clear the ground of their old and pretty useless cocoa plants, so this was happening a lot recently.

Here are a couple of photos of rather sad-looking, felled cocoa plots.

These cocoa plots don’t look like that any more. They now have young cocoa plants growing in them. I should take photos when I’m there again to show you the difference. There was a while there when people had got their cocoa plants and they were in the village, needing to be taken up to the gardens, and they were carried up in the usual manner here, in the traditional backpacks. It looked rather funny to me, seeing the tips of the small trees peeping over people’s shoulders. I also got involved and carried two plants up once.