Sailing through the land of ‘sing-sing’
Stanley Johnson voyages into the breathtaking interior of Papua New Guinea – and is greeted by elaborate song and dance at every turn
STANDING next to the captain on the bridge of our cruise liner, I spotted a cargo ship anchored in front of the tight sandbank at the mouth of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. For most ships, negotiating the path ahead would have been a struggle. But sticking as close to the main channel as we could without colliding with the rust-bucket, I watched as our vessel somehow nosed its way past.
I was on board Oceanic Discoverer – a ship designed for such situations. ‘Unlike most other cruise ships, this one was designed and built with a very shallow draught of just
10ft,’ explained our captain Angus Moore, referring to the distance from the waterline to the bottom of the hull.
‘This is vital if you’re going to negotiate the sandbar at the mouth of the river, as you need to draw less than 14½ft. That means we can go where other ships can’t.’
Two days earlier my wife and I had flown to Rabaul, capital of Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province, having caught an early flight from Cairns in Queensland.
I should really say ‘ new’ Rabaul because the old town, 12 miles away, is no more. It was buried under the volcanic ash deposited when Mount Tavurvur erupted in 1994. You can see the still-smoking cone as you come in to land.
The Japanese captured Rabaul at the beginning of 1942 and built miles of tunnels as shelter against Allied air attacks. Outside the little museum at nearby Kokopo, officially known as the East New Britain Historical and Cultural Centre, you will see Japanese tanks, planes, guns and ordnance of every kind.
That same afternoon, we boarded Oceanic Discoverer but it was only now, as we headed to the mouth of the Sepik at dawn on the third day of our voyage, that I finally took advantage of the ship’s ‘open access’ policy on the bridge, where Captain Moore was pleased to see me.
After his successful attempt at manoeuvring past the cargo ship, by mid-morning we were 40 miles upstream.
ONE hundred schoolchildren from a small village on the Lower Sepik greeted us later that day. They sang songs, some i n English, some in ‘Tok Pisin’, the pidgin language that is the lingua franca in this part of Melanesia.
The head teacher invited us all to be upstanding for the national anthem of Papua New Guinea. As their neatly uniformed schoolfriends sang, two young girls proudly hoisted their country’s flag to the top of the pole.
After the children, it was the turn of the adults. That morning, in that little village, we saw a superb, totally memorable display of tribal dancing.
The repertoire included the ‘sack’ dance, the ‘fish’ dance and four or five other dances whose title and significance I failed to catch. These were just a few elements from a ‘sing-sing’ menu which, by the end of our tour, we had sampled quite extensively.
The ‘whip’ dance, for exam- ple, which we saw in Garove Island, on the Witu group of islands as we crossed the Bismarck Sea en route to the Sepik River, sticks particularly in my mind. This seemed a kind of initiation with young men whipping each other as they danced, with a view to demonstrating that they were impervious to pain.
On that same island, the children of St Michael’s School had performed the gentler ‘paddle’ dance which, as its name implies, involved simulating the action of rowing out to sea, with graceful, rhythmic movements.
And on a neighbouring island, so I was told, which like the rest of Melanesia had suffered much during the Second World War, a special favourite was a dance called ‘Japani Ha-Ha’, commemorating the defeat of Japan in the Pacific War.
If its shallow draught was one of Oceanic Discoverer’s most useful features, as demonstrated by our time on the Sepik River, other vital statistics were equally important.
On day eight, when we entered Tufi Fjord on Cape Nelson in the Northern Province, I once again visited the bridge.
Captain Moore, a charming Scot who emigrated to Australia three decades ago, gestured towards the sheer cliffs that seemed to close in on us.
‘As you can see, this fjord is pretty narrow, not much wider than the ship,’ he said. ‘No problem getting in. The crucial thing is getting out. With a length of just 200ft, we can handle that. We can just about turn in our own length if we have to.’
Another brilliant feature was its excursion tender, the Xplorer. I’ve been on other ‘adventure’ cruises where elderly passengers have had some difficulty negotiating the transfer from ship to zodiacs in tough seas. In contrast, the Xplorer is simply winched straight into the sea from the rear deck with a full complement of passengers.
That morning the Xplorer headed out of the fjord, bucking dramatically in the wind as we hit the open sea, then rounded the point to enter Maclaren Harbour, a narrow inlet with a small river running into it. A cluster of outrigger canoes was waiting for us, the paddlers – both men and women – garlanded with flowers.
We clambered on to the canoes and wafted upstream through a mangrove forest, before emerging in a natural clearing which, even as we arrived, was filling up with tribespeople. Alex, a Papuan member of the crew who served as our guide and facilitated contact with the ‘natives’, looked at the crowd and explained: ‘They have walked in from the villages in the interior or else have canoed over from nearby coastal settlements to greet us. This is the first time in many years a boat has come here.’
We learned so much that day. An old lady showed us how to create a traditional facial tattoo, using her granddaughter as a ‘volunteer’; another man demonstrated the key role of the sago tree, pounding the sago pulp into a sticky edible puree.
Others set up a riverside market, offering, for a pittance (or so it seemed to us), necklaces made from shells, carvings made from rosewood and ‘bilums’, or bags, woven from tough dried grass.
Around noon, with the sun still hidden by the trees, we were treated to one of the most colourful ‘sing-sings’ yet. The
feathered headdresses of the dancers took my breath away. ‘The yellow feathers come from the yellow-crested cockatoo or from the rainbow lorikeet,’ said Alex. ‘The black feathers come from the cassowary, and the brown come from the raggiana bird-of-paradise, the country’s national emblem. The feathers are passed down from father to son, generation to generation.’
As I look back over that ten-day trip, I realise how large a part the ‘singsing’ played in our whole experience. I thought, after the first couple, that I might grow tired of this spectacle before the end of our tour.
How wrong I was. Every performance was different. Every dance was different. Every song was different.
TOWARDS the end of our trip when we were visiting the Trobriand Islands, we witnessed a splendid rendition of the ‘Cricket Dance’. It bore a strong resemblance to the Maori haka, which the New Zealand rugby team chants before a match.
If you are a scuba diver or a snorkeller determined to see some of the finest and most diverse corals in the world, go to Papua New Guinea. There are sights you will never forget: brain corals, soft corals, and mushroom corals, corals of every shape, size and colour. For those who don’t like diving or snorkelling, Oceanic Discoverer has a glass-bottomed boat that can carry 20 passengers. The waters of Papua New Guinea give a whole new meaning to the term ‘marine biodiversity’.
The most spectacular coral reef we visited (on day ten) was off Sanaroa Island, in the D’Entrecasteaux group, at a site known as the Twin Towers, denoting two ‘bommies’ or coral sea-mounts rising from the ocean floor to the surface.
Twenty-four hours after our visit to the Twin Towers, we were disembarking at Alotau, a town at the eastern edge of the mainland.
We took off at noon, flying over Milne Bay towards the Coral Sea on the way back to Cairns. Milne Bay, a superb natural harbour 21 miles long and more than nine miles wide, is where the Allies notched up the first crucial victory over Japan in the Second World War.
In town earlier that day, we had seen the memorial to the servicemen who had lost their lives in that battle. Now, from the air, I had a magnificent view of the bay itself and the mountains behind.
What an amazing country Papua New Guinea was, I thought. So rich in history and culture, and blessed with a natural environment as beautiful and diverse as any I had seen in a lifetime of travel. Noticing me glued to the window, a passing stewardess politely invited me to fasten my seatbelt. Then she asked: ‘Will you be coming back, sir?’
‘You bet I will,’ I replied.
The second volume of Stanley Johnson’s memoir, Stanley I Resume, is published by Robson Press, at £25.