18 April 2006
Paradise and pain
Insects abound
© Greenpeace/ Behring
It’s another night of heavy rain. Even near the equator, we have to use a sleeping bag and I still feel a little cold in the middle of the night. It seems funny to catch a cold in such a hot place, but it’s happened. At present PNG is changing from the rainy season to the dry season. Lucky for us, it only rains at night, or the solar battery at our base camp couldn’t be charged.
When you don’t need to think about reality, raining is interesting to think about! It sounds like someone is playing a drum when the raindrops hit the roof here, accompanied by all kinds of strange noises made by the insects and the singing of the birds. Sometimes, we’re woken up by the sound of snoring or people talking in their sleep. And whenever anyone turns over on a sleeping sheet, it sounds like a small earthquake.
The rain usually stops in the early morning. The green leaves shine. After a bath in the lake, we’re ready for another day to begin. Before I arrived here, I heard there were six-metre long crocodiles in Lake Murray – but they only seem to have existed in legends from eighty years ago. In fact, the crocodiles I have seen are raised in the village, reach about two-metres long, and are sold for between 300 to 600 Kina.
Except the weather, the biting from mosquitoes and other strange insects is annoying. Japanese volunteer Kyoko hung a small banner written in Chinese on the wall of the base camp’s office: “Welcome to our itching Eden”. Even an ant bite feels like needle pricking, as I experienced on the first day here. At the beginning I got heat rash, too.
When we stay in the bush to do the boundary marking with the foresters, I’m sure that new and undiscovered problems (itches?) will be waiting!
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