Back in Madang as of a few days! Enjoying autonomy and access to cold things. 

To get here to Madang I had a 2.1 day journey with about a dozen other people. Parts of the trip were pleasant, like when I collapsed from heat and thirst and fell asleep on some (stationary) driftwood in a cold stream. But mostly it was just miserable, and so I got grumpy, which is bad because here you have to be agreeable all the time. I had barely slept for two days, and we were making our way to Madang in the middle of the night in the PMV (=truckish bus). I got sat next to the driver. Around 1am as I was calculating the likelihood of my surviving the trip, he offered me this leg of goat he had gotten from some person on the road. He put it right in my face, I mean it was so discolored and pungent and obviously old so I wasn’t at first able to even recognize it as meat, and I said (in Tok Pisin) ‘Nope. I don’t want it.’ (“Nogat. Mi les.”). That was taken as pretty impolite apparently so the other passengers corrected me – apparently in that situation I’m supposed to said ‘I’ve had enough’ (“Mi inap”) even though I hadn’t actually eaten anything. 

In unrelated news, I’ve now chewed betel nut a few times. It’s this bizarre kind of sour fruit thing that you chew and it puts you in a good mood and makes you chatty. The betel nut alone turns your spit white, and you have to spit all of that out. Then you take this other sour thing called daka that resembles a furry green bean, and you dip it into a container of crushed sea shell powder (kambang) and then you bite the end of the daka with the kambang on it and you chew. That combination results in a chemical reaction that turns everything red and makes you salivate, and so then you have to keep spitting out your red spit. It’s actually rather nice, and puts you in a good mood. Everyone here chews it constantly and people’s social lives are basically centered around it. And there’s always red spit all over the ground everywhere. Anyways here’s a picture of me the first time I chewed betel nut.