River Travel and Bore Tides

March 10-11, 2016

Dear Friends,

Today (3/10) was a rather unique day for my team here on the M/V PNG on the Bamu river. It highlights something I want to write about, river travel. We live on the ship, take our breakfast and dinner there, enjoy great accommodations, but the real work of being here right now is in the villages. To get to the villages we travel by smaller crafts that will either hold 8 people and some gear (Zodiacs) or a larger dual motor boat that they call the “Falcon” that can hold up to 20 people and gear. Everyone sits on the sides of the craft and holds on wherever they can!!

Today, my Engagement team plus one of the Primary Health Care (PHC) teams all left together on the Falcon to travel upstream from the anchored PNG about 30-minutes to a small village for the day. When we left the ship it was low tide. I will try to explain this, but it’s pretty crazy, so we are riding in a craft on a river that is at least a mile wide. There is a lot of debris in the river, everything from sticks and coconuts to entire trees, so the driver has to be on his guard all the time to move around these obstacles. Hitting a tree is, well, bad for the boat!! At low tide, there are a few channels you can be in, but most of the center of the river is a sandbar! If you have to cross the river to get to the other side (as we did), you have to brave crossing the sandbars, where the water can get as shallow as thigh deep (2ft?).

It’s one of the disadvantages of sailing in an uncharted river that we didn’t know where the channels across the river were. So, unfortunately we (17 of us) got stuck in the middle of the river!! I got out and the water was just over my thighs. About 5 of us manhandled the boat for a while, but we couldn’t find our way out. After about an hour we finally got back into a channel and found a way across. It took about one hour forty-five minutes to come to the mouth of the stream that would take us to the village. However, at low tide this stream was mostly mud and a good 6 feet above the water level. This meant if we wanted to get to the village, we’d have to get off about 200 yards (182meters) from the village on a steep mud bank and haul all our stuff there! We really didn’t want to do that and as were making a decision, we found ourselves in the middle of a very unusual  situation called a “bore tide.”

The bore tide only happens in a few parts of the world. To have a bore tide, you need a large body of water that leads into a funnel shaped river. The tide and gravity of the moon combine to pull the water UPSTREAM and create a wave that’s called a bore tide. Normally the wave is about 1 foot and comes in sets of about 10 waves. It also raises the water level 10 to 20 feet!! The Bamu River is one such place in the world where a bore tide happens. When we experienced it the other day, two exceptional celestial events also lined up. One was that the moon was on a rotation that brought it the closest to the earth and the other was a partial solar eclipse. With these two events, it became a “super bore tide” and as the tide moved up river into the narrow end of the funnel the waves piled up as high as 3 feet!! One of our boats went right through a 3-foot wave and everyone got soaked!!

The bore-tide is a little dangerous for us, because if we were trying to get off-loaded in the mud while the bore-tide was passing, it could easily sweep someone away. Our boat had to turn to face the waves until they passed, the first set was 12 waves and about 10 minutes later we had a second set of 8 waves. After the second set passed the river had risen high enough for us to drive our boat all the way up to the village!! Remember, this wave is working upstream!! It’s wild!

Once we made it to the village (Arkinape), though, it’s all about the people. They live very primitive lives with no running water (in fact, the cleanest water they will probably ever drink is catchment rainwater. Many drink from contaminated wells or the river, which is very muddy!). There are only outhouses or the bush for a bathroom, no electricity, almost everyone is barefoot and wear clothes that must be washed in that dirty river water, so it always looks dingy. 

The people are gentle, quiet and friendly. One of the nurses remarked how remarkably devoid they were of high blood pressure. They are very patience, generally, and take such good care of their little ones.

Next time I’ll talk a little more about village life. Today is Saturday (3/12) and thankfully a day off!!

Mark

PS- here’s a couple of pictures. The first is of the side stream to the Arkinape village, if you look closely, you can see a few guys on the bank and notice what looks like a mud bank, which is really the mouth of the stream. The second is of a classroom where we do children’s education, every class looks a little different, but this is a good representation. I worked with the two PNG volunteers (Sophia and Philip) all week with the kids.