A really bad PNG update

I really want to talk about my trip to PNG, but the problem is, I don't really know where to start. It was a two month trip, and I feel weird blogging about things that happened two months ago... Well, here's what an average day was like:

5:30 or 6:00 am--Awake to the sound of a neighbour's rooster crowing. Lay in bed, dozing until the generator kicked on. Put in contacts, make coffee for Andy, have toast or oats for breakfast (with lots of bananas).

7:30 am--Walk to the dive shed, load up the boat with our gear, grab air tanks from the end of the jetty, and ride off to the reef, Matane Walindi (sometimes it was Hanging Gardens or Luba Luba, but most days were on MW). The boat ride to the reef took about 5 minutes. Then our boat driver would put our gear together while we got into wetsuits, masks, fins, etc. In the water by 8 am, for two dives. We saw all kinds of cool things underwater, especially early in the morning because they hadn't been scared off yet.

9:00 am--Batty Coda shows up. He was a pinnate spadefish or batfish, who came around every single day that we were diving at MW. At the start, he hung around in the distance, but as he got more used to us he would get closer and closer. At the end of the trip, he was close enough that I could touch him without really stretching my arms much.

11:30 am--Out of the water, back to land for lunch. At the house, we would smash two or three sandwiches, inhale a few bananas, and re-apply suncream.

1:00 pm--Back on the boat at MW for two more dives.

3:00 pm--Fish start to spawn at the reef top. All the fish were out trying to impress each other, then partaking in some afternoon delight.

4:30 pm--Done for the day. Rinse gear, pack it back into the shed, then go home and fight over the first shower. Eat some crackers with peanut butter and jam. Enter the day's data into the computer.

6:00 pm--Make some dinner. We ate a lot of rice, greens, and kau kau (sweet potato). Every night we had to take our doxycyclene, to prevent malaria. Sometimes other people who lived at the conservation centre would come visit, sometimes we'd be alone. After dinner, we washed up, read a bit or did some crossword puzzles, and lazed around.

8:30 pm--Bed. It seems ridiculously early, but 6 hours underwater tires you out like you wouldn't believe. Sometimes before bed we made oatmeal for breakfast the next morning, so we just had to heat it up and eat. Every night we fell asleep to the sounds of geckos, bugs, and flying foxes.

This was our life 6 days a week. On Fridays we went to town to go shopping for food. First the markets to buy all kinds of crazy leaves (pumpkin, mustard, pepper, celery leaves, and god knows what else), kau kau, bananas, coconuts, eggplants, pumpkins, pawpaws, and whatever else struck our fancy. Then we went to Papindo and K-Mart, the grocery shops, to buy things like bread, pasta, vegemite, and soy sauce.

I'm boring, but I can't think still. I've put my photos up online; they are far more interesting than my stories anyways. Be warned: I haven't really sorted through the photos yet, so there are probably some really, really bad ones up there. They are organized by reef name.

Tomorrow I'll try to write more about our adventures--the mumu, the hot river, the sharks, and whatever else I can think of.

back

I'm back from PNG, tired but tan and happy. I miss it already, even though we've been back for maybe 15 hours. I'll post pictures and stories over the next few days, because I am knackered right now, and trying to unpack and get things settled.

TTFN

That's winnie the pooh for "ta-ta for now".

Catch ya'll on the flip-side (ie. December) with heaps of piccies and stories.

Paxton

My sister just had a baby. By just, I mean at 3:40 am on the 5th of October. It's a little weird, being halway around the world and trying to figure out the time difference and that. They named him Paxton. I'm not sure if there is a middle name, I only talked to my slightly-clueless brother for a few minutes.

Unfortunately, I really don't like the idea of babies. Which has made it hard to feign enthusiasm ever since I found out she was preggers. She doesn't like my jokes about post-natal abortion, I don't like hearing about how the kid kept moving on her bladder and making her have to pee. That stuff grosses me out. I'm glad that she and her hubby are happy and all, but I keep finding myself referring to the baby as "it" rather than "him", so I am glad that I heard from my brother and not my sister. I would have tried not to laugh when I heard the name Paxton, but I don't know if I could squeal and say "that is so adorable" the way she would want.

On the bright side, now that my parents have a grandchild they have nothing to expect from me :-D

Rant: my poorly equipped kitchen!

Until you leave home and start fending for yourself--not in dorms, but really go off on your own--you don't realize how many little things you take for granted. I don't mean little things like having mom do your laundry or make you dinner. I've been washing my own clothes since grade 7 and cooking for myself since I went vego in 2003. The little things I mean are peelers, graters, juicers, potato mashers... kitchen stuff! Our kitchen at home was by no means well-equipped, but we had enough stuff that you could improvise for whatever you needed. I never really had to think too critically about how to do something in the kitchen, or analyze a recipe for it's doable-ness with my supplies.

When I moved to Oz, however, I realized quickly how many things you miss. Andy and I realized ahead of time that we would need to buy plates, cups, cutlery, and pots and pans. But we didn't anticipate veggie peelers, can openers, rolling pins, baking dishes, etc. When we moved into our house (we had it to ourselves for the first two weeks), we bought a few of those supplies, enough to get by. And the owner of the house had put a few things in, like pots, a chopping board, plastic spoons and spatulas, and a microwave. Then other housemates moved in and brought a few things of their own, like wooden spoons, a blender (and about 12 bajillion other gadgets that never get used, like veggie steamers, 3 rice cookers--3!--sandwich grillers.....), and a mixing bowl.

We were still lacking a few things, so although we're broke (I can't work and Andy is a full-time student) we've been slowly stocking up. We saw a sale on Pyrex baking dishes, so we have two rectangle pans and a pie plate. We have plans to buy other things, but since we're leaving so soon it doesn't make much sense to buy them and promptly pack them up. So a good wok, a food processor... they'll all have to wait. We still improvise quite a bit, for example I use a tea cup as my measuring cup, and dinner spoons for tablespoons. Measurements are never exactly precise; luckily this hasn't been a problem so far.

Unfortunately, the best stocked housemates started hating everyone else, and no longer want to share. They get the shits anytime we use their good non-stick frying pan, or their mortar and pestle, and they've hidden their wooden spoons and a few other things. I can still get by quite well, but I noticed it yesterday when I was making pierogies. They took away the rolling pin. How do you roll out dough to 1/8" without a rolling pin??! I had to use my measuring cup/tea cup, which was annoying because you can only roll halfway before the stupid handle gets in the way. I ended up rolling it, cutting it, and then rolling each little piece again. What a freaking hassle. Then I had to boil them in a pot that doesn't heat evenly, and fry them in a pan that sticks like you wouldn't believe.

The pierogies ended up tasting delicious (some were filled with sweet potato, and the rest had hokkaido pumpkin with curry powder), but I really, really wish I had excessive amounts of money for good cooking supplies. Anyone want to start a fund??

On the road again...

Well, in the air again, really. In less than two weeks I'll be leaving tropical Australia for tropical Papua New Guinea. I've made mention of it a few times, but I don't think I've given any details.

Andy's honours project is on "The feeding behaviour of tubelip wrasse in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea". Therefore, he gets to go to Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea. His supervisor is paying for it with some grant money, and part of the funding is for a research assistant. So, despite the fact that I barely know how to dive, and I know even less about marine biology, he's taking me. I will just be recording the number of bites taken by different fish on corals, and following them around to determine their territory size. More often, I think I'll be inputting data into the computer, and doing things like cooking nummy food when Andy is out diving (he reckons I'll get bored, so I don't have to go out every day if I don't want to). The trip goes from October 11 to December 10. Two months of hiding out in the jungle isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I think I'm going to love it.

Kimbe is located on the north side of West New Britain Island, which is just off the main island of Papua. This map is from this website, which also has a lot to say about West New Britain in general, and Kimbe if you follow some links. This site is good, too. According to the websites and Andy, who spent two months there earlier this year, it is an amazing little town. Palm oil is the biggest industry, as well as dive tourism. About 40 minutes drive from the airport, we'll be staying at the Walindi Plantation Resort. Walindi is a dive resort, and the owner has set up a bit of a conservation centre/research station. James Cook University has its own accommodation within that research station, so we'll be staying there. The accommodation is a 3 bedroom house, and I think we have to share with another researcher for the first month, but after that we're on our own. It's pretty remote; phone calls are expensive and the very slow internet (at the resort, 1 km from the house) only works when it's sunny out.

We'll be diving about 6 days a week over there. (Andy will be. We'll see how often I go out.) We get our own banana boat, with a local boat driver who knows where all the reefs are. When we're not watching fish eat coral, we can go to the markets (there will be so much fresh produce!), get a guide to take us to the top of a volcano, visit some hotsprings, or just lounge on the beach. We won't have much free time, because the days go from about 7 am to 5 pm, but hopefully we'll get to see a few of the local sights. It seems silly to go all the way there and not do anything besides dive.

Although, apparently the diving is some of the best in the world. Part of what makes it so good is its proximity to the shore. Rather than spending 4 hours on a boat, the way you do to get to the Great Barrier Reef, you're at amazing reefs in a short little 20 minute boat trip. There are volcanic caves, a steep drop-off, wrecks from WWII, and every other kind of diving possible on a reef, I think. We should be over there during the coral spawning, so we're hoping to get out for a night dive to see that. Andy says it's really cool, and it only happens once a year, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

So, even thought tubelip wrasse aren't the most colorful fish, it should be a good trip. I'm pretty sure I won't be blogging at all while I'm gone, but don't forget about me! I'll be sure to post a good update when I get back, with cool underwater photos and stuff. Plus, I'll be around for the next week.

I'm "kitted out"!

Yesterday was a tiring day. Andy and I woke up at the ass-crack of dawn (really 8 am) to go shopping all over town. We went to 5 or 6 different electronics stores, and nearly as many sports stores. Andy is looking into getting a laptop to take to PNG with us, so he can enter data. Also so we can watch movies. The sports stores were for me. I got my own scuba gear! Luckily, I didn't have to search to find vegan schwag, because everything is all rubber/latex/whatever. The rest of the stuff in the sports/outdoors shops had leather and wool and down all in them, but not the scuba stuff!

I got a wetsuit, booties, and open-heeled fins. My mum and dad said to put them on my credit card, and they'll pay them off for my birthday and gift-mas presents. I didn't buy the top-of-the-line gear, but got some mid-range stuff. Since I'll be diving about 6 days a week in PNG, I figured it wouldn't be a good idea to get cheap shit that will fall apart. (To make things more appropriate, these photos were taken with Andy's underwater camera.)

Cool, huh?

Food Round-Up

I’m stealing this idea from Bazu, who recently posted a Friday Food Round-Up. Unlike Bazu, however, I don’t take as many pictures of my food (I totally would, but Andy makes fun of me for being such a vegan nerd), so it won’t be as good. Also, I’m not committing to any specific day of the week because, well, I don’t like rules. Actually, I’m too inconsistent to try and stick with a plan, at least when it comes to blogging. But anyways, I’ll be doing periodical re-caps of the food I’ve been eating lately.

Last Friday I had an urge to bake, so I decided to fiddle around with a recipe for orange-cranberry bread. We had half a pineapple that needed to be used (it was a bit too tart to eat plain), and two mandarins (tangerines) that were also not that nice to eat. So I thought about making pineapple-mandarin bread, but we don’t have a loaf pan. So I made pineapple-mandarin tea cake. It was gooey and delicious, and a good way to use up fruit that wasn’t good on its own. And it’s my first attempt at radically altering a recipe for anything baked, so I was impressed with myself.

Pineapple-Mandarin Tea Cake
2 c. flour (add a few extra tablespoons if you don’t like your cake very gooey)
1 ¼ c. raw sugar (or less if the pineapple is sweet)
½ t. salt
1 ½ t. baking powder
½ t. baking soda
2 T. vegetable oil
Zest and juice of two mandarins (or one orange)
~1 c. minced fresh pineapple (try to catch as much of the juice as possible, too)
egg replacer for 1 egg (I used flax, but if bananas weren’t $15 a kilo I think they would be ideal)

Preheat the oven to 160 (about 350 F). Grease and flour a 9 inch pie plate, or any small-ish baking dish. In a large bowl, mix dry ingredients. In a smaller bowl, combine oil, mandarin juice and zest, pineapple, and egg replacer. Fold wet ingredients into dry ingredients, combining until uniform, but be careful not to over-mix. Pour the batter into prepared baking dish and bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until it’s golden-brown on top. Cool a bit and loosen the edges before removing from baking dish (or just serve it like that). Next time I think I’ll try adding either poppy seeds or some combination of cashews-macadamia nuts to the batter before I bake it.

Saturday we had two bottles of wine—it took forever to find one that wasn’t processed with milk, eggs, and fish, but we finally found a few and settled on two different kinds. We had a Frontignac and a Riesling, so we decided to have a nice dinner to go along with the wine. Friday I volunteered at the Women’s Centre, sorting bread donations that women can take whenever they need, so I grabbed a loaf of wholemeal bakery bread. First we toasted that up, and then spread the slices with some black olive tapenade from Vegan Planet. The tapenade was just olives, capers, garlic, and parsley, but Andy thought it was too salty so we topped the tapenade with some tomatoes and basil. We ate those with the Frontignac, and although I know fuck-all about wine, I thought they went pretty well together. After a little break to let the food settle, it was back into the kitchen, where we made some Pad Thai (a really, really bastardized version). We used these fresh noodles (not rice but wheat), some browned up tofu, broccoli, a small Lebanese eggplant, red capsicum, and a tomato from the garden. First I sautéed up the veggies, then added a sauce made from soy sauce, brown sugar, and lime juice. Then I mixed in the noodles and the tofu, and it was ready to go. We dished it out and topped it off with a bunch of bean sprouts, a big handful of chopped peanuts, and wedge of lime, and a few orange cherry tomatoes. The Riesling said it accompanied asian dishes well, so we opened up that bottle for dinner. I had never made Pad Thai, and Andy had never eaten it, but it’s definitely something we’ll be making more often. Maybe it was just an effect of the wine, but he loved it.

We woke up Sunday (no hangover, woohoo!) and went to the market. markets that we know of, and each has stalls selling produce, crafts, and random shit. Since I got here in May we’ve been visiting the city market, but for the past two weeks we’ve gone to a different one. The new market has sweet potatoes for $2 a kilo, so we’ve had a very sweet Townsville has at least 3 potatoey couple of days. We also got heaps of apples, capsicums, avocadoes, a honeydew melon, tomatoes, and carrots. Add this to our weekly visit to the Tight-Ass Saturday Sale (when the supermarket marks down produce on Saturday afternoons) and our fridge was chockablock. We tried chicory for the first time, in a pasta bake with eggplant and oregano, and we bought some baby wombok so we can make spring rolls sometime this week. And we’ve still got one black sapote left from a few weeks ago, just on the verge of ripeness now, in front of the honeydew melon.














Last night we had some left over pasta bake with a salad. Here's Andy chopping up veggies for the salad. It had orange capsicum, bean sprouts, tomato, carrot, and basil leaves from the garden.




















Here's a close-up of the salad.













And the chicory-eggplant pasta bake, super-yummy even two days in a row!

beta

I've joined the crowd and gone beta. I don't really know what it means, but I've been fiddling around with layouts and stuff, so hopefully I don't accidentally delete the internet for everyone, or something catastrophic like that.

tomayto, tomahto

When we moved in to our new house, Andy and I set up a bit of a garden. Even though we are renting for only 7 months, we wanted to grow some things, for a few reasons. One, to give capitalism the middle finger. We don’t like buying things that we can make ourselves (especially buying them from the gigantor supermarket corporations… the farmer’s market is a different story), and in the tropics, you can grow almost anything. Sure, we’re not exactly revolutionaries, but these are the things we can accomplish right here and now. And we’re tight-asses. The other reason was to make this place more like home. When we lived here alone for two weeks (those were the days!) we got seeds and seedlings, tried to grow pineapple tops, dried out the seeds from our chillies and planted them, planted an onion that was starting to grow leaves when we bought it for half price…. Neither of us is very experienced in gardening. We know the basics, but that’s about it. But we gave it a shot, and it’s come out quite well. Here are our tomatoes, who started out so tiny, and ended up becoming massive, tipping over the stakes, and sitting green on the vine for 4 weeks. We ate our first red tomato last night, and I can see little patches of pinkish-orange that mean we won’t be buying tomatoes this weekend.

And the little herb garden off the patio. We started with two Thai basil plants given to us by our old housemate and a bunch of seeds. Now it’s a bushy little semi-circle filled with basil, Thai basil, parsley, and coriander (cilantro). We also have heaps of herbs planted between the tomatoes (supposedly they keep bugs away), and we’ve got baby chilli plants scattered everywhere as well.

And here’s our Vietnamese mint, mild at first bite but with a tongue-numbing spiciness when you eat it straight off the plant.

We bought it at the market for AU$2, and a month later we’ve already had to move it into a flashy new home (ie a bigger pot).

Despite the negative atmosphere of the house (I know I sound like a hippy, but seriously, this house is miserable), life seems to be thriving. Aside from all of the plants taking over our mini-garden, I opened the window a week or so ago to find these gecko eggs. The picture is really blurry because they were so small; that’s a 2 cm long picture hook next to them! Aside from the two in the picture, there were broken shells all around, which leads me to believe that others had recently hatched. The morning after I found them, one shell was hatched open on the floor beneath the window sill. We went away for the weekend, and when we got back the final egg still hadn’t hatched. I don’t know gecko gestation periods, or even when that thing was laid, but we had a feeling it was a dud. We didn’t get to find out though, because that evening Andy watched as a big gecko came and ate it. I know, circle of life and all that crap, but the idea of tiny baby geckos is so freaking adorable…