Vojtech Novotny

This unassuming little book turns out to be one of the most charming travel books I've read for ages: it's a delightfully whimsical and rather random set of short (column-length) pieces on the perils and rewards of living in Papua New Guinea and doing scientific research there, from the point of view of a Czech entomologist who runs a research station "on the shores of the Bismarck Sea".

After some ten years in the country, he writes about the oddities of New Guinea society not in a dry, anthropological kind of way, but in the kind of affectionate terms you might find in a similar book written to advise Czech expats of the perils of life in Belgium, say, or Denmark. He's obviously spent a lot of time working together with New Guineans on his research projects (and theirs: he evidently makes a point of encouraging his local assistants to spread their wings independently as research scientists, whether or not they happen to have university educations). Whenever he tells us about some particularly odd or alarming aspect of New Guinean behaviour, he's always able to turn it round wittily, and suggest to us how odd our own way of looking at the world must seem to someone from a village in the remote highlands.

Even when he gets to the discussion of cargo-cults, he can't resist proposing that the behaviour of someone sitting in a home-made control-tower with coconut shells clamped to his ears, waiting for a plane full of luxury goods to materialise, is every bit as rational as that of his communist-era academic colleagues who sit in their offices going through the empty forms of scientific practice and publishing papers in pretend-journals, expecting "significant discoveries" to materialise in front of them...

In between all the quaintness, there's a lot of solid insight to take hold of as well, in particular his thoughts on the difficult relationship between development and conservation. As an entomologist he has a rather more precise idea than most of us of how crucial tropical forests are, but he has also plenty of experience of how unrealistic — and unfair — it is to expect people to go on living a squalid subsistence lifestyle "in harmony with nature" once they have been in contact with the rest of the world and understand that they have choices. And he also has a pretty good idea of how hard it is for sustainable development initiatives to generate decent incomes for people in really remote areas. Eco-tourism has become a new form of cargo-cult, apparently, with villagers in places several days' trek away from the nearest road or airfield optimistically building tourist "hotels" and expecting that they will magically fill with guests.

Malaria — the classic hazard of life in the tropics — is a running theme throughout the book, both for the dreadful toll it takes of local people and for its repeated, unpredictable assaults on peripatetic scientists (inevitably either in a village far from medical services, or back home where it's difficult to find a tropical diseases specialist).

The lively drawings by Benson Avea Bego, wittily mixing the styles of traditional body-decoration and scientific illustration, really add to the charm of the book.… (altro)