PNG TOURISM

I am still waiting (2years) for Peter Vincent of the Tourism Board in PNG to contact us regarding a holiday refund from an operator who ripped not only us off but several Americans and Italians as well. We met him in Brisbane and he assured us he would be extraditing the PNG operator back to PNG and also his wife who was studying tourism in Australia!!! Well Peter if you are ereading this you know who i am and please resolve this issue.
in the meantime we have been visiting Western PNG through a company called Adventure Indonesia and it has cost 60% leass and better tourism. Get your act together PNG. People will only stand for so much. Three trips now and each one coating a loss of thousands! not a good lookEH!!!!

well not every one has a great holiday. Every nation in the Pacific has a few furphies.

have you written to the relevant tourism body in PNG or have you just sat and waited for this Perter character to get back to you?

I have written to the governement and to Peter Vincent Tourism chief executive with no reply at all.
I think i might as well give up as there are toher places to go like the indonesian area.

I would be very reluctant to support the Indonesian government in Papua, who would be the ones benefitting from tourism there. The rest of the Melanesian countries are very concerned about the eroding of rights and repression of the indigenous Papuans. Also, the place is being taken over by the Javanese, the dominant ethnic group in Indonesia and immigrants from other parts of Indonesia, who have government support, but no permission from theth ethnic Papuans.

Well that might well be but there again one could argue that we are supporting the local peole by spending our money in their community.At least we did not get ripped off

I can definitely say that ALL Papuans I have met in West Papua and who had any opinion on this matter, only wanted more tourists to come, not fewer.
But anyway, far fewer seem to visit than say 10 years ago.
Government travel warnings may be the main reason, the disappearing of traditional dress (long the main attraction of West Papua to most visitors) another.

Papuans are actually far better off now, both financially and poltically, then they were before the "special autonomy" deal. In fact, pro-independence feelings seem to have subsided - on this trip I have not met a single person bringing up the topic, whereas back on my first trip pretty much everybody did.
Times change.

As a side-note I might add that contact between the two halves of the island are now on the increase.
PNG souvenirs are now widely sold in Jayapura, and most interestingly, the very typically Melanesian PNG Pidgin pop songs are heard all over West Papua, even though most locals can't understand them! In fact they seem to be more popular than local pop songs, and have been influencing those.