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"Yes, that's right, a thousand dollars a week".  "U.S dollars?".  I was outraged. "Yes, U.S dollars. And that's only for the apartment rental. We also rent a small storage room. That costs an additional one hundred   dollars a week". I did the math in my head. More than fifty thousand dollars a year to rent an apartment! Granted, it was a nice place, the sort that you read about in the classifieds -3 BR, 2 Ba, ocean vu, fully furn, must see to appreciate - that sort of thing. But even so, a three-year stint was going to set them back a buck-fifty in rent, more than enough to buy a nice house back in Sydney. Papua was not a cheap place to live.

My friend Bob Baden and I were visiting Papua. To be more accurate, Bob had won two free round-trips to Australia and I had quickly become his best friend. Our first stop had been in Sydney. While there, I had tried to contact my cousin Lakshmi, who I knew studied at the university. The secretary at her department told me that she'd taken a leave of absence for a year and flown up with her daughter Shalini to Port Moresby, the capital of Papua, to join her husband. Aru worked as an auditor at Deloitte, Touche and Tohmatsu, and had accepted a transfer (and an expatriate comp plan) the previous month. The money was much better, and a promotion would come easier.

I called their number in Papua to express my regrets at not being able to see them on the trip. I was told that I'd never be forgiven if I didn't stop by and visit, especially after having made the ten thousand mile flight from San Francisco. Overcome by Indian guilt ("if you don't visit your relatives, you will be reborn as an insect"), and also vaguely thrilled at the prospect of visiting a new country, I told them I'd check into flights. A remarkably voluble Qantas agent sold us the air tickets for $300, but only after engaging us in conversation for three hours. She spent one of those hours debating the merits of Anthony Hopkins acting style, and another expressing disbelief that people could agree to arranged marriages.

Papua is one of the largest islands in the world, and rests squarely above the northeastern tip of Australia. It measures more than six hundred miles from west to east, and four hundred from north to south. The islands of New Guinea are scattered to its east, with names like New Britian and New Ireland, oddly inappropriate for the South Seas. Together they form the country of Papua New Guinea, almost always abbreviated to PNG. The country achieved independence only in 1975, and its population numbers three million. There are over seven hundred languages spoken by the populace, with the official language being Pidgin English. The Sepik river in the Papua highlands flows with a volume of water second only to the Amazon. There are tribes there that still include animal sacrifices in their religious ceremonies.

When I was a child of eight, I remember reading a book by R.M.Ballantyne, called "Coral Island". It was an adventure fantasy, all tall volcanoes and green jungle and white beaches and crystal blue waters and coral reefs. Papua looked exactly like that from up above in our Air Niugini aeroplane.  Port Moresby Airport was a sleepy little hangar, with a heat wave that hit you as soon as you stepped on the tarmac, and with ceiling fans that whirred lazily inside in the immigration lounge. Hundreds of people lounged around on the pavement outside, chewing betelnut, squatting on their haunches, moving around in groups and talking loudly. It reminded me of the airport at Bombay or of every railway station I'd ever been in India. One of life's unfathomable mysteries is why so many people loll around aimlessly at centers of transportation.

Lakshmi and Aru and Shalini arrived about a half hour later, in a beat up sedan. Lakshmi was very pleasant and talkative, and complemented Aru nicely. He was laconic, with a dry sense of humor, and a deep, whooping laugh that reminded me of a cow breathing its last. His friends in Sydney called him Kanga, no doubt amused by the purity of the name Kanga-Aru. He specialized in feeding us amazing facts about the country, and then slipping in a blatant lie every so often, just to see if we'd fall for it. For instance, he told me that all the traffic in the one main road in Port Moresby drove in one direction on odd hours, and had to reverse direction on even hours. So, if you were driving from the city to the airport, you had to do it between one and two o'clock, because traffic flowed in the opposite direction only between two and three. He had me going for a few minutes before breaking out in his asthmatic-attack laugh.

There were only three traffic lights in the entire capital city. Nobody paid any heed to them at all. We ran through all three on red, and when I asked Aru how he decided whether to drive through, he said that he just looked at the traffic around him and followed the pack. All roads were named in relation to the central point in the city. Hence Twelve-mile road, Seven-mile road, Three-mile road. It was the simplicity of genius. Crime in Papua is higher than almost anywhere else on earth. Every house we passed was surrounded by fences up to a height of eight feet, topped with tight curls of barbed wire. One of the largest businesses in the country is the selling of guard services. Thievery is rampant, and most everybody had stories of rape and grisly murders. The streets are deserted at night - not one pedestrian, the only sound that of a few passing cars.   Lakshmi's apartment had guards at the entrance to the garage, locks between the garage and the apartment building, and two locks on their door. As a result of the high crime, the entire country had only eight thousand tourists in 1993. We went to two dance clubs the first night, maybe an eighth of a mile apart. But rather than walk between the two, we charged out of the door of the first one, straight to the car, locked the doors, and drove down to the parking lot of the second, which had armed guards.  The discos were something else, though. Wall-to-wall people, highlanders with dark beards, Melanesians with electric smiles and skins the color of coffee. Above the shouts and the smoke and the constant chatter, you could make out the sound of Salt-n-Pepa. American pop music is something that you never escape.

Aru told us a story about the Port Moresby golf course. Since it was out of the main city area, and located between two warring tribes, the golfers got mugged all the time, by either one tribe or the other. The owners of the course hired a security agency at enormous expense. No effect. The muggings still went on. In desperation, the owners went to the tribes and told them they'd pay them each money to patrol the course. Tribe 1   would be on security detail for one week, and protect the golfers against the depredations of Tribe 2. The next week, Tribe 2 would be on watch. That way, each of them got paid an equal amount of protection money. The ingenious part of this solution was that the owners saved almost ninety percent of the fees they were paying to the ineffective agency. Aru said that often when he drove past, he'd see one of the tribal guards perched on the branch of a tree in the golf course, holding a bow and arrow, and meditatively chewing betelnut.

Pidgin is a wonderful language, and one that I hope English takes some pointers from. I think of it as rational English, something that is both phonetic, and which has terms to express indescribable things. For instance, if something is good, you call it Namabawan ("number one"). Also, you spell words exactly as you hear them. Hence "beer" is spelled bia. Let's say you have a Sam Adams nestled in your hand, and your friend asks you what you think of it. In Papua, you'd point to your bottle, nod your head vigorously while smiling, and shout "Nambawan Bia!". The CEO of your company would likewise be the Nambawan Boss Man.  If you and your friend came from the same tribe in Papua, you'd speak the same language or "one talk", and he would therefore be your Wantok.  When Aru introduced me to others, he'd point to me and just say "My wantok". This also happens to be the name of the main newspaper in Papua.

It was unique in not bothering to have a section for world news. While perusing an issue, I'd work my way painfully through the Plis Ripot ("police report") and advertisements for Fri Baibel Kos ("free bible course") before finally reaching the sports pages that gave Provinsal Soka Nius ("provincial soccer news"). I even managed to decipher a story in the society column. It seems this matron had just hired a new maid, and asked her to mop up the kitchen. The poor woman had misunderstood directions and mixed two whole cups of chlorine powder in two liters of water to make the cleaning solution. When she put the mop in it, the entire thing got corroded away, and she went running to the lady of the household, yelling "Boss, mop i nogat gras" ("boss, mop he no got grass").

We spent a day at Lolloata Island, about an hour away from Port Moresby.  While preparing for Australia, I had been told by friends that the best scuba-diving and snorkelling in the world was in the Great Barrier Reef.  However, it was a two-and-a-half-hour boat ride out to the Reef from Cairns, on the north coast of Australia. The water was quite choppy and I succeeded in not only losing my breakfast on the way out, but also my lunch on the way back. Lolloata, in contrast, offered the most beautiful of coral reefs less than thirty feet from shore. It was a fairytale scene underwater, with coral in every color of the spectrum, and rainbow fish, sea cucumbers, grouper, swordfish, starfish, sea-urchins and thousands of translucent bananafish. I got so carried away with snorkelling that I got quite sunburned and spent the evening wincing every time an air current so much as whiffed past my back.

The market in Port Moresby was open-air and quite messy. Kangaroo haunches and wombats were offered as steaks, and it was quite sad to see the dead faces of the animals. We proceeded from there to the national art museum, which was deserted, and for which nobody could tell us an opening time, or indeed, whether the museum would even open. We waited   a half-hour and finally rousted a sleeping guard who grumpily took our money. There were only six visitors in the hours we were there, walking past  war-canoes, and masks, and paintings bright with ochre and ash. There seemed to be a strong school of carving, and we saw beautiful woodcuts and  statues of crocodiles and birds of paradise. One of the native forms of adornment was to wear a penis-sheath made out of coir. Of course, the more mighty a warrior you were, the bigger you made your penis-sheath. Some of the sheaths were a foot long, which I dismissed as ridiculous. That didn't stop me, however, from feeling inadequate.

Lakshmi refused my offer of buying them a salt and pepper shaker set carved out of teak, and shaped like mighty penises. The museum shop had a section of books on Polynesian art, with a warning sign in front that read "Please noken readim ol buk". It didn't seem to prohibit us from readim haf or kwatter buks, so we browsed.

The island holds ten thousand expatriates, mostly from Australia and New Zealand. They form a closed social circle, living in beautiful apartments high on the hills, behind guards and security alarms and locked doors. They get paid two or three times what they would in their home countries, and have all their living expenses covered. They come for periods ranging from one to three years, and every expat I spoke to kept count of how many more months he or she had to stay. Twelve channels of cable television are piped to the island (which allowed me to keep track of my beloved Duke basketball team). Foreign papers are days old by the time they get flown in, and the local ones seemed to advertise no movie theaters. The expats lunch at each others places and have grand cocktail parties or sit on their balconies and chug SP beer. At a bar, I shook hands with a jovial bearded Aussie, who had his hand around the shoulders of a Punjabi woman. They were part of a drunken group of about fifteen. "How do you all know each other?", I shouted above the loud roar of a Cut-n-Move song. "We all sleep with each other", he shouted back.  Another foreign resident, a burly Sikh by the name of Surinder, told me how he and his wife had been on their way from Singapore, where they lived, to Canada, where they had gotten green cards. A friend of theirs had told them to stop by at Port Moresby on the way there, to see how easy it was to make money. They came by, originally on a two-week visit. At the time I talked to them, they had lived in Papua for six years. They owned a small pharmacy store, and imported medicine and cosmetics from Australia. The markup brought them twenty thousand kina a month (a kina is worth slighty more than a U.S dollar). They had tried vainly to move on to Canada, but they were making too damn much money to move. They owned a duplex in Port Moresby, a house in Boroko sixty miles away, and a condo in Hawaii. Life was hard socially - their young daughter had no-one to play with, and there was little for the wife, Jaspal, to do, other than watch television. They thought that once they had saved a lot of money, they would get away to Vancouver, but Surinder confessed that it was quite possible that it might never happen. He thought Canada was too prone to recession.

The food on the island was delicious all through our visit. There was fresh seafood, long-grained rice, taro, coconut, and range chicken. I had the juice of fresh sugarcane for the first time in years. The coffee was strongly flavored, and grown on the island.  

On the last afternoon, as we busied ourselves with airport taxes and security checks, we met Lakshmi's neighbors, a couple that handled the advertising pages for the Wantok. I was curious about Pidgin, so I asked the husband if he'd teach me a few key phrases. "Well, if you want to sleep with someone, you point to your body and say, your bisnis i bilong hia", he said. "That's not what I meant!" "Well, what do you want to learn?" "How do I say hello?" "Simple. Alo".  They were calling our flight. We all hugged, and Bob and I started walking towards the tarmac. "Thanks for everything! Goodbye!", I yelled. "Look yew um!", they replied.