These past two weeks our company has been fixer for the BBC program, By Any means, starring Charley Boorman (famed for his Long Way Down shows with Ewan MacGregor, which are so well known that we barely had to refer to them to open doors for the production everywhere). The premise is that Charley, a lovable rogue, jumps on any and all forms of transport to get from point A to B, and in this series he came north through Australia, traveled roughly east to west through PNG, and will now move on to Indonesia, the Philippines, China and ultimately Japan—sometime in August. We’ve had a ball with these guys, who are a crew of four: Charley, Sam Simon the Director, Robin Shek on camera, and Claudio Planta on camera, traveling with Josh Meraveka and Chris Dominic of our company. Understandably, PNG has had a few more rough edges than other places, but they’ve been exceptionally good natured throughout, from a seaplane on Horn island that never flew—and required them to charter a plane at great cost; to a Trans West Transport lorry along the Markham Valley up to Goroka; to Ela Motors motorbikes down the old Bundi Road from Kegesugl to Madang (a truly heroic journey). We have to thank Peter Boyd in Lae, Peter Jackson in POM, Megan Taureka at Ela Motors, Marcel Poole of the VSO in Goroka; John and Cynthea Leahy in Goroka; Emmanual Yama on the Bundi Road, and Betty Higgins in Kegesugl for that long and absolutely trouble-free leg of the trip.
In Madang they slept all over our floors and caught their breath before pushing off up the north coast road on a PMV (waiting for which, and loading, could have been a segment in itself---downtown Madang with crowds of well-wishers), to dinghies that took them through the Muruk Lakes and into the very tiny remote village of Gapun, smack dab between the Sepik and the Ramu Rivers, where the hung out with anthropologist Don Kulick for two days, hearing about his follow-up linguistic work with these people who, thanks to Don’s brilliant first book (1992), Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction, have taught us (and by us I mean anthropologists and PNG students) much of what we know about language loss in PNG today. From there they motorcanoed to Angoram, PMV’ed to Wewak, trucked to Aitape, and banana-boated to Sissano to stay with m daughter Joyce’s family, the Rainbubus, before pushing on to stay with Gabriel Ellis of the VSO in Vanimo, and checking out the border, just prior to fling out an on to KL. Whew, Im breathless. Great travelers, keen for everything, boundless enthusiasm, minimal vanity.
Among the millions of other people to thank---Including Martarina in Wewak, Maran Nateleo and Ben Keri of the Aitape Foundation, Dixon Mandengat and his Uncle Arthur, Don Kulick, and Gabriel Ellis….we have to say thank god for mobile phones, for Digicel first, but then on the north coast, for B Mobile, where Digicel doesn’t exist. They sure ate a lot of our budget.
So to Charley and Co., we miss you---happy travels. Come back soon --with Ewan eh?
Keep rollin' Biker B!
Posted by: Mike | June 15, 2009 at 07:41 AM