Peace adds to Kavieng՚s beauty

By THOMAS HUKAHU
CHANGING jobs and moving from one workplace to another is often challenging when you have for years enjoyed the conveniences of one.
All workplaces have advantages, as well as disadvantages. Living and working in a city like Port Moresby has its upsides.
Things, like groceries from the shops as well as most items like electronic gadgets and electrical appliances, are usually cheaper there than in most other centres in the country.
However, there are also disadvantages of city life. Heavy traffic and the constant need to be extra cautious when you go out at night, and day too, are two examples that instantly come to mind.
These downsides of living in Port Moresby become more profound when you make home in one of the smaller peaceful urban centre such as Kavieng.
This is my third month of living in this idyllic, peaceful town. For the most, I might be here for the next two years.
I have no regrets about leaving the city, except maybe, for the fact that I had hoarded so many books and papers over the seven years I spent in POM and caused so much inconvenience for a former colleague and my family when trying to move these around for storage.
I am loving the life here, being in one of the most peaceful towns in Papua New Guinea, where even the people who live here seem to give you a special smile if they – after half a minute of looking at you – realise that you are a newcomer. Here, people who do not even know you greet you on the street if not too many people are walking the path that you are taking.
I am getting used to young people on the road or working in shops calling me “uncle”, or specifically kandere (Uncle in Tok Pisin).
Towards the end of last year I made plans to move from the city to a smaller town and I was thinking more of Manus, where an aunt is married to a local man there.
However, things turned out the way they did and I was given an opportunity to move to Kavieng.
An answer to a prayer In fact, I see it as an answer to a prayer, since I told myself a few years ago that for someone who has never spent time in any province in New Guinea Islands region, I wanted to make a trip over a holiday period either to Manus or Bougainville. That would help me develop my knowledge of our beautiful country.
Having travelled a fair bit abroad over the years, or interacting with foreigners arriving in Port Moresby, I am someone who describes my country to others with first-hand information, as in “been there done that”.
I do not want to tell them something I read in a textbook or magazine about my country, I want to go there and see the place and people for myself.
Having been to all highlands provinces as a child growing up there in the 1970s, having been to all urban centres in the Mamose region except Vanimo and having lived in Port Moresby and moved around Central and Popondetta, in Northern (Oro) for some time, the sad thing is I have never been to New Guinea Islands.
Hence it was in my to-do list to take time this year or the next to visit some centres in NGI.
If I can fly now from Kavieng up to Manus and Kokopo in East New Britain, that will leave me with Vanimo in Mamose, Daru and Alotau in Papua and Kimbe and Buka as the only provincial capitals in PNG that I still have to set foot on.
Upsides of living in Kavieng Despite the higher prices set on store goods like canned meat or fish, living in Kavieng is rewarding. For one thing, the market offers you some of the best vegetables and protein as anywhere in the country. I particularly love the smoked fish sold here at the market, particularly on Saturday mornings. In fact, you can stock up your refrigerator with fish and do without the expensive canned sweet pork that you are used to buying at a shopping centre.
The smoked fish goes very well with the baked creamed tapioca wrapped in banana leaves or with sticks of rolled sago cooked with coconut.
If you buy enough of those, you can do without store food for half the week. On top of that, grab a number of kulau (fresh coconuts) to wash down the food.
You can actually spend about K10 and get enough for three meals – which include some smoked fish, sago sticks and three fresh coconuts.
In fact, if you are visiting Kavieng anytime soon, I urge you to take a moment on a Saturday morning to walk down to the market by the sea and check out some of the foodstuff.
Having lived in Nauru, in Micronesia, for almost two years and upon tasting the very tasty fish there, I commented one time that the fish there tasted better.
A local, 60-something lawyer, who has travelled a fair bit in the region and has been to Papua New Guinea, said something to the effect that “Nauruan fish is tastier because those creatures there live in the middle of the Pacific Ocean where no river as in the highlands of PNG empties into the surrounding sea and spoils the natural saltiness of the ocean”.
That made a lot of sense. So I thought. But now that I’m in Kavieng, I can say the same thing.
Around Kavieng town there are no big rivers and the sea creatures are as salty as those in any Pacific island state in the region. In short, the fish is tastier, possibly healthier than those in Port Moresby where the runoff water from the city may have diluted the saltwater near the city, places where fishermen may have caught their fish.
Getting around Kavieng and beyond The town, which is situated in the north-western part of New Ireland, is spread over a small area and if you are living in a suburb there, you can walk to the furthest side of town in about halfan hour.
If you are in a hurry, there is a bus route for people travelling within town.
Other routes serve areas outside of town, including up north to Kopkop, Utu Secondary School and the National Fisheries College, so I am told. There are taxis here that can ferry anyone in one part of the town to another for only K10.
If you want to traverse the length of the island, then you can from here, in the north, get on a route 7 bus and head down south along 193km-long Boluminksi Highway, the longest road in the country.
Your journey should take you past Konos, a developing centre in Central New Ireland and finally in about four hours to Namatanai, the bigger centre in the south of the island.
From there, mainland New Britain should be in sight on the western coast of Namatanai.
I should mention here too that off Kavieng, to the west, are many islands that are worth visiting.
Kavieng has been dubbed bilas peles (beautiful place) and it indeed is with the peaceful and comparably cleaner atmosphere it has as well the beautiful islands that pepper its coastline.
I will definitely be traversing the main island, and the islands, and will keep you posted on these visits.