That's my boy....

It’s been over 27 years since I have spent any time in a maternity ward and Kavieng Hospital was not really on my photographic “to do” list when I headed off to New Ireland in February for two weeks diving with Lissenung Resort.

But when Angie Amon told me she was going to the maternity ward  one afternoon and asked if I wanted to tag along and take some photographs – I decided to keep my camera out of its underwater housing and do some land photography!

Angie had coordinated a shipment of used baby clothes from good friends  in Cairns and three large bags of almost new, really high quality, baby clothes had made it all the way through PNG customs and were ready for distribution.

Brands like Osh Kosh and Cabbage Patch are basically unheard of in Papua New Guinea, so a free delivery of such great quality baby clothing was just fantastic.

My wife Liz is the Sydney fundraiser for the Bumi Sehat, a not-for-profit organization that provides health services for pregnant women and children under five for free in the area of Ubud, Bali – so I know a little bit about how difficult it can be for women in need.

It was a really interesting afternoon and it was simply heart-warming to see how much the local women of Kavieng appreciated Angie and her friend’s efforts to help them!

For me, it was a great photo-opportunity and I tied my very best to photograph the women and their husbands with their new babies.

I have to say that people photography is not really my forte, but I gave it the college try…

At the end of the day newly born babies are special everywhere and the sheer paternal joy was very evident and I felt highly privileged to be allowed in the maternity ward!

Kimbe Bay's Mitsubishi Zero Wreck

The wreck of the Mitsubishi Zero sits serenely and remarkably intact in just 17m of water near the northern tip of Kimbe Bay and is one of the “must-do” dive sites for any trip to that part of Papua New Guinea’s New Britain Province.

The Zero is believed to have crash landed on the 26 December 1944 and had sat undisturbed for nearly 60 years till the day local villager William Nui found it while fishing for sea cucumber.

The circumstances surrounding how the wreck was found, how the wreck was identified and a brief history of the Mitsubishi Zero have just been published in the latest issue of X-Ray magazine and you can download the full magazine from their site.

Alternatively you can download just the article on this LINK

Go To: Mitsubishi Zero Page and Image Gallery

Timor Leste article - X-Ray magazine

The juvenile salt-water crocodile was near to death when the small boy found it stranded in a swamp far from the sea.

Although greatly afraid, the boy decided to try and save the crocodile and eventually managed to get it back to the sea where it quickly recovered. The two became best friends and went on to travel the world together, with the boy riding on the back of the crocodile as it swam across the seas.

But as the crocodile grew older, and the time came for it to die, it told the young man it would transform itself into a beautiful island where he and his children could live until the sun sinks into the sea…

The tale of the boy and his cold-blooded friend is well known in East Timor and told often to explain the island’s crocodile-like shape and why the Timorese have a special affinity with the large reptile that is said to inhabit the creeks & pools along much of the south coast of the country.

X-Ray magazine have just published an 11 page article of mine on scuba diving and travel in Timor Leste and you can download the complete issue from their site or just the article on this LINK on my site.

Go To: Timor Leste Overview

Go To: Overview of Scuba Diving in Timor Leste

Go To: Dili Dive Sites – Tasi Tolu

Go To: Dili’s Other Dive Sites – Dili Rock & Pertamina Jetty

Go To: Coastal Dive Sites East of Dili

Go To: Coastal Dive Sites West of Dili

Go To: Timor Leste Dive Operators

Go To: Timor Leste Coastal Dive Sites Image Gallery

Go To: Timor Leste Tasi Tolu Image Gallery

Map of Timor Leste (East Timor)

A quick look at the map provides the first clue… Timor Leste is located just below the remote islands of Alor and Wetar  – the most easterly of the chain of islands called the Lesser Sundas, which form the southern boundary of the huge Indonesian archipelago – and the Ombai Strait between them is one of the main exit points for the Indonesian Throughflow as it surges south towards the Indian Ocean.

What that means is the north coast of Timor Leste is touched by one of the richest nutrient flows on the planet and there just has to some good diving in this remote location!

I did a two week trip to Timor Leste just over a year ago to dive the coastal sites in the capital Dili itself, and to the east and west of Dili.

In Dili I dived Tasi Tolo, Dili Rock and the Pertamina Jetty a couple of times each, while to the east I dived Secret Garden, K41, Bob’s Rock, One Tree and Dirt Track – again at least twice at each spot. To the west I did a few dives at Maubara and tried to dive Bubble Beach but it was all fenced off.

Superb bommie at Maubara, west of Dili in Timor Leste

Timor Leste is an interesting place with a traumatic recent history that sinks in all the more when you are there and diving the coastal sites involved daily road trips which I was initially dreading, but came to really enjoy them because of the scenic coast road.

I really enjoyed the majority of the dives and it really did wet my appetite to go back and do some boat based diving, because if the shore dives are good there must be some pretty special offshore sites!

Did not get the chance to dive Atauro or Jaco Island because no boat was available, but maybe next time….

I finally got round to updating my site with several location pages for Timor Leste, starting with this one on the country itself: LINK – just follow the links at the bottom of each page for the rest, or use the Locations tab on the menu bar.

If you want to skip the history lesson…. here is the LINK to the scuba diving overview page and just follow the links at the bottom of each page from there.

B17 Black Jack Wreck in PNG

The wreck of the Black Jack B17 bomber sits serenely in 50m of clear blue water just off from the village of Boga Boga, on the tip of Cape Vogel on Collingwood Bay. Almost completely intact, the wreck is an amazing site to behold as you descend the steep slope from the fringing reef and the huge plane looks like it belongs on a Hollywood film set!

Little wonder that many who have dived it consider the Black Jack wreck to be of the best aircraft wrecks in Papua New Guinea.

Discovered in 1986 by Australians Rod Pearce, Bruce Johnson and David Pennefather during a dedicated expedition organized by Pennefather after being told by the villagers of Boga Boga that a plane had crashed near the reef during WWII.

They had no idea that the wreck was a huge B17 and believed the wreck was probably an Australian Beaufort A9 that had been reported crash landing in the area of Collingwood Bay.

The discovery of Black Jack is a great story in itself, but the subsequent one about how the original pilot Ralph De Loach was tracked down in Marina del Ray in California and then brought all the way back to Boga Boga village is an even better one!

Download the full X-Ray magazine article on the B17 Black Jack wreck on this LINK

Or go to the detailed  B17 Black Jack location page on the LINK

The full B17 Black Jack image gallery of underwater pictures taken on the wreck are on this LINK

Kimbe Bay's Mitsubishi Zero Wreck

As the story is told around the bar at Walindi, the day the wreck of the Zero fighter was found was soon after a small plane had crashed on take-off from Hoskins Airport at Kimbe Bay.

So when local villager William Nui saw the wreck laying on the sandy sea floor he thought he had found the wreckage of the recent crash.

He had no way of knowing that what he had found was the wreck of a WWII Japanese fighter plane that had remain undisturbed for nearly 60 years!

That the wreck was actually spotted in the first place is an interesting story in itself, because William was free-diving for sea cucumbers at the time when noticed what seemed to be a large shadow on the sea bed.

Like many people in PNG, William is very superstitious and as he got closer he thought that he was looking at a ghost lying face-up with its arms outstretched, soaking up the sun.

Terrified he shot to the surface and to the relative safety of his canoe, eventually summoning up enough courage to go back down to take a closer look – realizing when he did that it was the wreck of a plane rather than some demon of the deep.

Read the full story of the Zero wreck, its history and how to dive and photograph it – plus a full image gallery on this LINK

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Local fishermen on Tofo beach

The tiny fishing boat seemed hardly capable of even carrying its crew of three, never-mind their nets and catch, as they rowed furiously back through the surf to the safety of Tofo beach.

The southern end of the beach is where the boats are dragged up on the sand after they return from their trips to the offshore reefs, and all the activity drew me there as I looked for some last photo-opportunities to round out my trip.

An early morning walk when traveling is often the best time to feel the pulse of a location, and it’s certainly a great way to end two weeks diving in Southern Mozambique with the area’s famous mega fauna.

Cliches about freshly caught fish for the local market were on the tip of my tongue and the last thing I was expecting to see was a vignette in to the ugly underbelly of the seemingly insatiable Chinese demand for shark fins.

Shark finning....

In the boat, underneath the piled up fishing nets was a barely alive but fully mature mobula ray, which was quickly pulled out on to the beach and slaughtered in front of me as I struggled to capture the scene.

Then I realized that one of the fishermen had a shark fin in a plastic bag and that the victim had obviously been thrown over the side after being parted from its prized appendage.

It was a totally shocking scene and one that was made even worse by the realization that similar events had probably taken place everyday that I had been in Tofo had I actually looked for them.

While it is very easy to self-righteously tell the Tofo fishermen that they should not do such things, the fact is that my stomach was full from a pleasant breakfast at my guesthouse while the fishermen need to earn money to do the same for themselves and their families.

With very few employment options available, fishing is a logical and reasonably sustainable way  to do that, however the lure of easy money is understandable and local Chinese “businessmen” have established a lucrative trade in shark fins.

Fetching up to US$700 a kg in Hong Kong, shark fins are procured locally at a fraction of that from the local fishermen who think they are doing well from the deal…

Not only is the trade severely impacting the local shark population, the methods used by the the fishermen create significant damage to the greater marine population – such as the mobula ray.

The Chinese have moved into Africa on a grand scale as they seek control of the resources and raw materials the second biggest economy in the world needs to keep growing. The merits of their investments in the continent are beyond the scope of this post, but there is no doubt that some of the activities of Chinese entrepreneurs who set up businesses are beyond the pale!

Andrea Marshall & Simon Pierce of the Marine Mega Fauna Foundation in Tofo are trying to establish a Marine Park in the critical 200 km Tofo corridor that will achieve the dual objectives of protecting the area’s mega fauna while allowing the local population to benefit – not just the hotel & dive shop owners…

Let’s hope they are successful…

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Tofo – Death on the Beach Image Gallery

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Oro Province Facial Tattoos

One of the most visually intriging things about the local villagers around Tufi in Oro Province are the facial tattoos worn by many of the women – something you would not really be aware of without making the effort to visit them…

Tattoos, and body art in general, have enjoyed a significant renaissance in western society over the last 20 years or so and have become both a badge of honor for those seeking to firmly establish their non-conformity and a trendy fashion accessory to others.

So it was quite fascinating to see them as an integral part of village customs rather than a recent phenomenon.

From an anthropological perspective the practice of using colored pigment to make permanent marks on the skin has been found in almost every major culture in history – for example the Egyptians were using tattoos to decorate themselves around the time of the pyramids and the Chinese are known to have adopted them around 2,000 B.C.

Tattooing was especially prevalent in the South Pacific islands and the word itself is a derivative of the Polynesian/Samoan verb tatu – meaning to strike, and the first recorded use of the word was in a 1796 diary entry by the British explorer Captain James Cook.

However 20th century colonization, and in particular religious missionaries who very much frowned upon the practice, effectively wiped out the practice in many locations.

Of all tattoos, facial ones are the most striking, as they are so permanent and almost impossible to miss.

Facial & body tattooing are reported to have been widely practiced in coastal Papua at the time of first European contact, but quite why it stopped in some areas and continued in others is not clear. Many of these earlier early tattoo patterns were said to have been quite simple, but the “women of Tufi” were known for their elaborate & intricate designs.

The tattoos are made when a girl reaches her full maturity at around 18 years of age and are a very visible indication of that “coming of age” and that she is now ready for marriage.

The process of applying the tattoos is a long & quite painful one involving a technique that is only practiced by certain women in the village who have been taught it by their mothers & grandmothers. The completed facial tattoo can take up to 2 months because it is applied in sections on a daily basis, which gives previously completed areas time to heal.

You can download the full article (600kb) on this link or check out the location pages on Oro Province and Tufi on this link and then follow the links at the bottom of each page.

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Tofo Whale Shark

On the southeastern seaboard of Africa, along a 200km stretch of the Mozambique coastline, Mother Nature has conspired to create what can only really be described as the perfect underwater biological storm.

For it is in this remote area that several major African & Indian Ocean currents converge, producing some unique counter-cyclic eddies that suck up rich nutrients from the deep trenches to the south and create huge quantities of zooplankton, the life source of oceanic mega fauna.

This unique mechanism has been occurring largely unnoticed for thousands of years, and has undoubtedly played a major role in the evolution of two creatures at the tip of the mega fauna food chain – the whale shark and the manta ray.

The area around the small town of Praia Do Tofo, in the southern Mozambique province of Inhambane, is host to some 20% of the world’s population of whale sharks and an estimated 1400 individual manta rays, one of the largest populations of manta rays identified anywhere in the world.

I spent two weeks diving the Tofo area at the end of 2010 and my article on the experience has just been published in X-Ray magazine.

You can download the complete article (4MB…) on this link or you can view the comprehensive location pages I have added to my site on this link.

Either way, check out Tofo – there is a lot happening there!

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A Kiap Returns...

I have to be honest and admit that I had no idea what a Kiap actually was until I met Doug Robbins & his family over a drink on the verandah of Tufi Dive Resort’s main lodge.

Doug had been a Kiap in Papua New Guinea for 4 years from 1969 to 1973 during the Australian colonial rule, and two of those years had seen him & his wife Annette stationed at Tufi.

Kiaps were officers of the Australian colonial administration stationed in remote locations to provide the overall management of that area.

They were very much multi-functional and required to cover a wide range of tasks, from basic law & order through to census surveys and collection of customs duties.

Like many Australians, I had no concept of the role the country played as the colonial administration of Papua New Guinea so it was interesting to learn about those days from people who had actually been there.

I spent many hours chatting with Doug about what Tufi and the Oro Province region had been like back then.

This article was published in Our Way, the in-flight magazine of Airlines PNG.

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