Eight hours in Port Moresby

Saturday, August 18, 2012
Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea
After arriving in Port Moresby I took a two hour tour with Jack. He has worked with Niugini Holidays for 15 years. He was telling me he has a sister that was on a PMV yesterday. The rascals sat in the van and pretended to be passengers for a distance and then pulled the van over at a bus stop near a shanty town and then held it up at knife point. Everyone had to hand everything over. Jack's sister resisted and got stabbed in the arm with a knife. She lost everything. She had to go to hospital to get stitched up. He said that they could not find the rascals and it was a regular occurrence but if they could have found them, they would have burned their houses down.

Later Jack took me to see his wife at the Uniting Church where the ladies guild was doing a working bee .

He drove me to see the Koki village on stilts, the war memorial and parliament house as well as a good drive around town. Two hours was all we could do before we ran out of things to do.

Port Moresby seems to be going through a lot of development with the new LNG plant. They are building roads, new shopping centers, new hotels and new high rise apartments over looking the water.

The place has four sets of traffic lights. All in all it is shambles and ugly and is full of settlers camps with people from the bush looking for work and causing problems due to being unemployed. It is unsafe after dark and through the day in many places.

The airport needs bulldozing! At least they ahve started doing some work to it.

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2025-02-08

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