Goldie River, Central Province, PNG

Yesterday, my friend asked me if I wanted to go to Sogeri. As I haven't been there for a while, I agreed. However, this plan quickly changed this morning when we got at the meeting place over at Erima and I was told that we were going to Goldie river.

The road to the river takes you through the Hiritano highway. You take the left fork at the nine-mile intersection. You will go through three narrow steel bridges, several copses of trees and a bit of rough track once you turn off from the highway. You turn right before you see the rubber tree plantations. The dirt track is very muddy and slippery. There is also a part where you have to go over a shallow rocky stream.

I was told by a local guide that there is a gold mine closeby hence the name. The river is composed of two strongs streams of water flowing down and converging into one. The banks are rocky and the river is quite shallow though there are parts where it is deeper and you can take a dive. There are some shallow rapids here where you can lie down and let the water refresh you all over.

The foresty department has an office here and several picnic huts have been set up for visitors to have a barbeque. There are grills available and our group brought lamb chops, sausages and of course, some foil to cook the meat on. The picnic area also has some sandalwood and eaglewood trees surrounding adding to the pleasantness of the area.  There are quite a lot of butterflies fluttering around the area.

It was indeed a pleasant afternoon spent with friends having a good feed and a yarn. On the way back to Port Moresby, we passed by a curious sight. A hunter was selling some wallabies by the road.

I recommend visiting this place on the weekend. It's nice and close to the city. Ciao!

Anti-Piracy Raid in Port Moresby

A lot of people think that Papua New Guinea is far behind from the rest of the world. This is far from the truth and even modern crime has reached its pristine shores. Piracy has hit Papua New Guinea in a big way.

In 2009, the Asian shops around the country specifically the Asians from China introduced a battery operated boombox to which you can attach a flash drive to play your music. This device proved to be disastrous to the music industry and in 1 year, industry sales fell by more than 20%.

The company that I work for is the biggest record company in the country and through the years, we have done many raids. I personally have led quite a number of investigations and raids. It used to be that piracy was done on cassettes and CDs. Today, it has gone all digital and shops around the country use computers to sell MP3s. These unscrupulous businessmen not only sell illegal digital copies of music, they also sell videos including pornographic materials which they sell to anyone who can pay including young people. They do not care if they corrupt the country's youth.

We have been investigating a number of shops involved in piracy around the city with the police and we finally got the search warrant to go after these pirates last February 29, the leap day of all days. We had 11 teams as this was to be a simultaneous raid as we knew that the pirates had their own network and they only need to hit the delete button to destroy all evidence. I joined the team for Gordons market, the toughest area amongst all the ones we investigated.

We deployed at 10am after a briefing by Chief of the Criminal Investigation Division. We had a heavily armed mobile squad with us who were armed with AR-15 rifles. As soon as we arrived at the location, members of the mobile squad quickly secured the perimeter as the area can quickly explode into chaos.

I along with 3 policemen from the mobile squad quickly went up to get the customers to serve the warrant, leave the premises, and conduct the search. Our search quickly bore fruit as the computers were loaded with thousands of songs and videos which included pornographic material. The shop keepers, one of which could barely speak english were asked to produce their work permits & passports. We quickly rounded up all evidence and took them back to the Boroko police station to do a more thorough search on the contents of each and every computer.

Here are some photos from the day:

mobile squad securing the perimeter

inside the computer shop

going through fake windows and other fake software

the various computers containing illegal copies of music

I hope these pirates learn their lesson. In today's world, so many people disrespect copyright. In fact, most young people these days think it should be free not thinking of the cost of production and all the time, effort and resources that went into making a song. Three cheers for the good work done by the PNG Royal Constabulary specifically the CID.

Ciao!