I mentioned at the beginning of the Fiji post that I heard a couple of interesting stories from people I met along the way.

The first was a young American called Cade Creason who was working in Wewak on the north coast of PNG on some kind of US government funded educational program for local communities. He had some friends visit at one stage and being young and fit they all went surfing (or was it diving?) at a remote coastal spot. When they got back to their car they found it had been broken into and all valuables stolen, including his mobile phone. Back in town he reported the theft and got a new one. He was able to get a location on the SIM card and they went back and amazingly found it in the dirt by the roadside where the thieves had thrown it out!

Don’t ask me how all this worked technically, but a bit later again he got a fix on the phone itself. This was in a different town to where they’d reported the theft. When they closed in on it they realised it was close by the local police station. They went straight in and told the cops, expecting that maybe they would act on it – knock on a few doors at least. But no. These cops said because it wasn’t their business because the crime hadn’t been reported there!

Cade and his mates gave up on the crime-solving, partly because they had travel insurance but mainly because of the savage reputation of local ‘raskols’. They had no desire to tackle them personally

The second story I heard was from a German man – a travel agency executive who’d been in Port Moresby for that meeting of VIPs I mentioned that was on at the Hilton the day I was there. He’d visited various places on a mission to assess likely destinations for German tourists. He told me he’d actually witnessed a violent robbery that resulted in the victim’s death. He said this happened in Rabaul, also on the north coast of PNG.

He said he’d spoken to local police commanders and the relevant minister who was there in Rabaul about what he’d seen, but, he said, the minister actually told him he didn’t want to discuss it because he was too preoccupied with announcing a new road-building project.

‘They just don’t care,’ he said. I didn’t get the full story because our conversation took place in the hotel minibus, in which we were the only two passengers, on our way to the airport. He was very glad to be leaving, and full of complaint about AirNiugini, which had cancelled flights and forced him to take a 40-hour multi-stop route back to Germany. (It was AirNiugini, remember, who disrupted my travel plans and caused me further expense with a flight cancellation.)

As we both alighted from the bus he said he would recommend to his company that they not sell PNG to German tourists.