BomaiCruz in Goa for the Technical Assistance Program in Marine Scientific Research (TAP-MAR)

It has been a while since I last posted and that was because I was back home in Papua New Guinea. The absence of my internet presence is in itself testimony to how hard it is to have good internet access in my part of the world. I did have access to the internet but it was through a BlackBerry smart phone I bought specifically to have access to my email. I did try to put up a post in my blog but again the smart phone I had could not allow me to do so.

Anyways, I am in Goa, India now and am hoping the internet access I have here is much better than that I had in PNG so I could put up some posts. I am here for the Technical Assistance Program for Marine Scientific Research (TAP MAR) organized by the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) in Goa. This is a joint program between NIO and the International Seabed Authority (ISA). I am really looking forward to getting started and am really stoked about meeting other scientists from this and other parts of the world to see how we can share information and learn from each other. In the next two months, I will try to post daily updates about what we are doing here.

Since this is going to be my first post in a while and the first post from Goa, India, I am going to start with my trip over from PNG.

I boarded the plane out of my home town of Goroka on the morning if Friday October 15th not even sure if I was confirmed to fly out of PNG the next day as I was still getting calls at 2 am from the ISA head quarters in Jamaica informing me of changes to my itinerary. I arrived in Port Moresby an hour later and went straight to the Indian High Commission where I collected my passport and Visa. I left the next day for Cairns, Australia and then Hong Kong where I changed flights for Bangaluru and finally Goa.

Bengaluru was my first stop in India and what I saw at the air port was a totally different scenario from what I am seeing here in Goa. Maybe the best is yet to come but someone once told me that India was at the crossroads of being a developed nation and a developing nation. I believe that statement stands as the best way to describe my experiences of India so far. Bengaluru was a totally different experience from Goa. Bengaluru does have that touch of a developed country topped off with a very modern air port. Goa on the other hand was more like being back in one of the smaller towns in the northern part of PNG. It had everything I was used to seeing, over grown hedges, palm trees and animals everywhere, the only thing different is that there are no Papua New Guineans here!

I guess I have to get used to this life of continuously moving around, meeting new people, making new friends and learning about different cultures. Coming to think of it, this is just how I described BomaiCruz to be in the Science Online interview a few months back. In that interview, I said “Bomai” in the Simbu dialect was a term used to describe very primitive people and “Cruz” was the tok pisin form of ‘cruising’ thus BomaiCruz was a person from the primitive world cruising around and yes I have been travelling around.

My trip here completes a year long trip spanning almost the breath of the world. In the last 6 weeks alone, I travelled from the Eastern Seaboard of the United States of America across the Pacific to my home in PNG and continued to South-East Asia to India now where I am in the middle of the Indian Ocean.

Anyways, so much about my travels, I am now looking forward to learning as much as I can from my friends here and to make a comparison with what I have learnt from my time in the USA. Keep an eye out for my posts about what we do here.

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2 Responses to BomaiCruz in Goa for the Technical Assistance Program in Marine Scientific Research (TAP-MAR)

  1. Good to see you back online. Cruisin’ the world for sure.

  2. Pingback: Best of the Network: September through October « The Gam

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