One Heck Of A Ride

194 Chapter 26 I was helping the driver load my luggage when a young woman jumped into my taxi outside Port Moresby’s Jackson International Airport in Papua New Guinea. “Mind me sharing your cab?” She didn’t wait for an answer before settling into the front passenger seat. On the drive to the hotel, she apologized for commandeering my taxi, but said she would explain later. I noticed that she asked the driver to lock the doors on the five-mile drive to my hotel. Over coffee in the hotel’s dining room, she said the country’s capital city was not safe for anyone, anywhere, not even at its airport. It was not uncommon for women traveling alone to be forced into cars in the middle of the day while waiting for friends or family to meet them and taken somewhere where they were beaten, raped and killed, she said. “My friend was running late and I didn’t feel safe waiting for her at the airport,” she said. “I called when we got here and told her to meet me at this hotel.” Before her friend arrived, she told how most of the businesses, including every hotel, in Port Moresby hired security guards to protect their property and customers. Pickpocketing, armed robbery, violent assaults, kidnapping, carjacking, theft and rape by “Raskol” gangs and freelance thugs made the city’s crime rate among the world’s highest. Many public servants were corrupt, and law enforcement response time was rated in hours, not minutes. The U.S. State Department ranked Port Moresby at the very bottom of its “livability index.” Up to half of the city’s three million residents were unemployed and lived in lawless squatter settlements. “I’m from a town about a hundred miles from here, where crime isn’t that bad. We only have earthquakes, volcanoes, cyclones, landslides and the odd tsunami to worry about,” she said. The pilot from Port Moresby to Bensbach Wildlife Lodge I sat next to the pilot during the 180-mile flight from Port Moresby the next morning, and for some reason he wasn’t happy when I snapped a photo of him. My first thought was that he might have sought out this remote corner of the planet to escape someone or something, but I wasn’t going to ask him about it. Instead, I apologized for not asking his permission to photograph him and concentrated on watching the seemingly endless jungles, savannahs, floodplains, rivers and swamps below us. When the pilot banked the twin-engine plane as we approached a narrow dirt strip I noticed for the first time that the instruments on the panel behind the controls weren’t working. He got us down safely, though. I was the only passenger on the flight, and the entire village turned out to get a closer look at the first American in four years to arrive to hunt at the Bensbach Wildlife Lodge. In a typical month, the only other aircraft they would see was the police helicopter that patrolled Papua New Guinea’s border with Irian Jaya some fifteen miles away. The South Pacific Rusa Deer in Papua New Guinea