Papua New Guinea Local Custom Tips by Bwana_Brown Top 5 Page for this destination

South Pacific Festival of Arts

The South Pacific Festival of Arts was held in Moresby one year, as it did its once-per-year cycle around the countries in this part of the world. It was quite a show with delegations of indiginous people and dancers from all over the area - Aborigines, Cook Islanders, Tahitians, Bouganvillians and so on. The photo was taken from a peak in downtown POM, showing various sailing canoes from all parts of the South Pacific after they arrived at Ela Beach, Moresby for the opening ceremonies.

The Asaro Mudmen

The Asaro Mudmen performed their dances in the hills surrounding Port Moresby and we would sometimes travel up on a weekend excursion to take in their performance while also escaping the heat and humidity of the coast! Pidgen English is the language used by most locals to compensate for their many local dialects (over 500 languages spoken in PNG). Pidgen is an interesting 'twist' on the English language. For instance, your best friend is a 'wantok', which is derived from the fact that if he can speak your language out of all those dielects (one talk) in such a diverse country - then he must be quite close to you! Similarly, when an airplane takes off it 'loosim ground' or 'loses the ground'. The word for 'me' is 'dispela' which translates as 'this fellow'. Now if you want to remove or get rid of something it is 'rousim', based on the original "rouse him out". If something is broken it is 'buggerup' or if it is badly broken it is 'buggerup tru' or "truly buggered up".

Sepik River Council House.

I came across this traditional Council House at Angoram on the Sepik River on one of my trips to a remote diesel station. Following a regular airline flight to Wewak on the north coast, I flew into Angoram with a Papuan assistant on a small Cessna charter aircraft. Flying over miles and miles of dense rain forest made me conscious of the fact that I hoped the pilot knew where he was going! Another interesting fact was that it was still possible to see World War II bomb craters (filled with water) beside the airport runways at Wewak and Popondetta (just over the mountains from Port Moresby) when landing or taking off! Also the revetments used to protect fighter aircraft in that war were still there beside the runways.

Payday Alert!

There were another couple of local customs that were new to me: 1) Payday was every second Friday for most workers so, in order to prevent the men from drinking away all their hard-earned cash before their wives could get their hands on it, all of the beer/wine/liquor outlets had to close on the preceding Thursday evening (for the whole weekend as well). That still did not stop a booming "bootleg" business on Friday! 2) For some strange reason that I never did figure out, at Elcom the regular day's work ended at exactly 6 minutes past 4 PM !