Camping at Koitaki Country Club (Part 1)

Camping is best done together with our family, but if we don’t have our immediate family to share this refreshing outdoor activity with, our closest friends or fellow OFW’s will do just fine.

Koitaki Country Club is the only place that I know of in Papua New Guinea where an expat can spend a night out in a tent and enjoy the feeling of being in one with nature and become temporarily disconnected from our  usual busy lives.  The photo of me above is taken in one of the open fields in the areas within the club.

Except for the car on the far left, all of these vehicles are from our group. I went with the grey SUV on the left. Our belongings have made up most of the space in it thus, we were left with a very little legroom to wiggle around. Some of the Filipinos that I went with were cracking jokes all the time during the entire trip and it somehow made the occasional bumpy roads less noticeable. The establishment behind is the restaurant with a balcony overlooking the entire fields.

This is the pathway going out to the gates. Back in my younger days in the Philippines, we used to play baseball in an open field like this in the afternoon; looking at this picturesque view seemed to remind me of those days. If your place has this kind of road, you wouldn’t want to walk on these during the summer or the rainy seasons. It might get dusty if it was totally dried out by the summer heat or muddy during a heavy rain.

If you remember a scene from The Terminator 2, where the "Liquid Metal" robot was poured all over with liquid nitrogen, his feet were sticking onto the road as he walked over to the T1000 robot, which was played by the younger version of Arnold Schwarzenegger. From that scene, one can probably surmise the difficulty of keeping up a regular pace while walking on a muddy terrain.

Here’s an interesting billboard that you won’t miss to see if you happen to walk up to the restaurant. It has all the reminders that a first-timer guest should know for one’s safety and what’s not to do.

There’s a pond in the middle which is probably man-made to encourage the arrival of wild birds. Walking over the bridge are my friends from a different workplace. That pond bridge is nice, but I reckon it would look nicer with people waking over it so I stayed behind and snapped this photo just when they’re about to cross it.

The three colourful houses on the far right are the guesthouses. You can stay in one of those for K250 or K350; that’s about $79 and $110 US dollars. We were on a camping trip so we didn’t take one except for these friendly couple in the picture who booked one for an overnight stay because they tagged along their children with them.

Our camping spot is up the hill behind the houses.

This particular camping spot that we chose was on  top of the hill. The dusk was fast approaching so we hurriedly unpacked our things. This bag is mine and I only put emergency things in there like a bug spray, toiletries and a solar rechargeable lamp. I also brought the tent that I wrote about in one of my post last year. The green thing is a yoga mat. I figured it was more practical to bring one than an inflatable bed.

But it was not as comfortable.

The tent with a blue and orange colour is mine. It was super-easy to setup, all I need was to pull some strings up and it was standing on its own. I got this from a bargain sale at City Pharmacy for only $14 USD. The couple in the middle is Paul and Cess and they were setting up their own tent, which was really bigger. Unlike mine, their tent has an extra space for visitors apart from a private room.

Hmn, visitors, that I didn’t expect.

The management of KCC was thoughtful enough to consider placing a picnic table on top of this hill. It was a nice gesture. Just a suggestion to the management from this young blogger, I think that it’s also nice if there's a big umbrella or a shade of some sort to shield our foods from rain if it happens suddenly. But anyway, this table and the fireplace nearby are of the trivial things I am thankful to have around.

Thanks to the Koitaki Country Club management.

We camped nearby these two cylindrical water tanks. Here’s Cess preparing to cook our dinner on the designated fireplace. The people at the back are OFW’s from a sister company where Cess is working at. I think that another important aspect of camping is being able to experience cooking food in a primitive way. Here, the management has supplied us with firewood for a minimal price.

It’s fun cooking foods this way if you don’t mind the billowing smoke going to your direction every once in a while.

All of our tents were standing before the sun has set.  I was expecting the temperature to be cold but that wasn’t until dawn. But generally, it was slightly less warm in Koitaki than it is in POM proper. It was probably because of the higher winds that were constantly sweeping by the mountain skies.

On the few selected locations are these solar lamps mounted on a movable pole. It provides enough light for a certain area only, say, a good 2 meter radius underneath. We were given two but only one lighted up by itself when darkness came. 

The most economical application of solar power by far is through streetlights. I like the idea of having my own solar lamppost someday.

Just before the sun has set, we took the time to grill up pork meat and hotdogs. These would be added to our menu for the night. 

Someone from our group was kind enough to bring a hammock and attached it in between these trees. It looked nice from where I was sitting at because it seemed to complement the sun setting down from the horizon.

I swung my camera around and found two pairs of horses grazing around. If it were not for the houses nearby, it was easy to imagine that we were in some kind of paradise, with all those wild animals roaming around freely.

To give you an idea of how high this hill is, this is what the houses looked like from the top.

Before the night fell, I went down to see the other sites in the club. I ended up standing before a seasoned picnic table in between an old tree and a solar lamppost.  I kind of envision this area as a perfect place, aside from the comfort of our bed, to skim through the pages of an X-men comic.

X-men? Yeah, I know, I’m old.

When the night came, a blanket of total darkness covered the place. I switched on my solar power lamp to see how my tent would look like from the outside. The skies didn’t yield many stars on that night and judging from the amount of humidity, it felt as though a rain would come.

That begs a question, how does one know if it's going to rain without looking at the clouds? Long ago, I’ve read somewhere that if you can smell the scent of a flower from a distance, there’s a good chance it will rain.

I had smelled our dinner from my tent.

Here’s Jake, Malou, Cess and I. While the others were sitting next to the table, we were seated at the back of Paul’s pick up truck because the table could only accommodate so much. It did rain a little but disappeared quickly.  The night was filled with laughter from the funny stories everyone was sharing.

As the night grew deeper, we began to pipe down a little. The fireplace gave off waves of heat, keeping us warm from the slowly falling temperature. The firewood burned off slowly and we decided we’d just let it burn to discourage snakes that may happen to come around.

Here’s what the inside of my tent looked like in the night. At 9:30pm, I was already feeling sleepy. Perhaps because I was a bit tired from the office or because the sight of my tent was inviting. I told them I’d hit the sack and went straight to my tent. To keep my tent ventilated, I let the door open but kept the mesh on to prevent mosquitoes from coming in.

These are all about what we did on our first day in Koitaki Country Club. On the next post, I’ll continue about what we did on the next day.

Enjoy your weekend everyone!

Season's Greetings!

Merry Christmas everyone! Ho ho ho! I wish you all happiness for this Christmas.

I haven't been really active with this blog lately because the last quarter of this year was so full of action that it kept me busy at work.

There was this new wholesale company that our mother company had set up this year. It required me to come up with an inventory system of some sort and an online website from whence our client could visit and check out our new products.

There were also some challenges regarding our ailing hardware that needed repairs or replacements. Telikom has also migrated to GSM recently and as a result, twice in just a couple of months we've had some serious disruptions to our telephones lines which took some days to reinstate.

But the majority of these challenges are solved now and I have once again, shifted my focus to the normal routines in the company. For example, I am back to assisting the floor managers for any POS machines issues, inventory queries and did some programming for tanGosoft.

And just recently, making some designs for the posters and banner for our Lucky Chance promo.

This is the first design that I drew with a Hanvon Art Media using Paint Tool SAI+ and Adobe Photoshop. It did not get a thumbs up from the management. Later on that day, it has come to my knowledge that it was considered too sexist for the general audience to appreciate, hence it was dropped.

Here's a revised poster to which the management has agreed on getting printed. I used a lot of blue here to establish a connection between the promo and our company's logo, which is also blue.

The Lucky Chance being mentioned is all compressed into this little space we call the Lucky Chance booth. The mechanics of which is to give a chance to any customer who has bought a minimum of K100.00 (P1,400.00) to win a prize or get sorry. I created a program that will select the prize automatically once a finger is scanned on a biometric machine attached to this computer.

Here are the certificates that I designed in Photoshop. The awardees are carefully selected through the recommendations from the floor managers. The awards for this year are Perfect Attendance Award and the Long Service Award. Not all of whom had been recommended would be given awards but only those who had passed through the careful scrutiny of our Branch Manager.

That's all for this week. Happy holidays everyone! 

Drawing and Coloring with Prismacolor Color Pencil

Just recently, I've thought about creating a Youtube channel to broadcast my "How I Draw Portraits" work in progress. The aim of which is to feature speed-videos of me drawing portraits with color pencils, charcoals or watercolor.

At the bottom of this post is a video showing how I added colors on this sketch. I later uploaded that video on the channel. I used the Prismacolor 24 PCS color pencils that my cousin, kuya Jun, had sent me a week ago. He has three identical sets of this so I asked if he could sell me one. He actually ordered the Prismacolor 72 pieces on Ebay but got slightly disappointed when the seller sent a package of three Prismacolor 24 pieces instead.

So, 24 x 3 = 72. Seems valid, right?

I'm not sure if it was false advertising or a lack of clarity from the part of the seller that has misled my cousin into believing he was getting the right thing but the whole bunch of problem could have never happened if things were right in the first place, like putting in the correct description, for example.

Anyhow, he did send an email to the seller, politely informing him of the ruckus. I don't know what has happened after that but I have volunteered to buy one from my cousin so that I could try it. Here's the video of that test.

Painting and Mont Marte Watercolor Paints Review

Painting is an extension of drawing. It adds life to a pencil sketch or an inked art. While almost all of us have started as children who can doodle vivid images straight away from our little visual imagery with just about anything in hand, not all will grow up as descendants of Picasso or Da Vinci.

Perhaps as we grow older, our fondness for art subsides to a cryogenically preserved state due to intervening circumstances. The quest for getting good grades, house chores, new found friendship or even having unsupportive parents are just some of the things that may get in the way.

But why revive a hibernating fascination to art, you say?

Well, uhm, according to some scientific studies, getting oneself immersed in some artistic undertakings can have a positive effect to our brain and to our well-being. Sketching, for instance, increases our creativity and improves motor skills.

Painting, on the other hand, can have more beneficial impacts than drawing alone. According to Fox Hill Residences, painting could improve the overall quality of life. The following are six great benefits of painting that promotes mental health and life in general:

·         Fosters creative growth.

·         Strengthens memory.

·         Builds Problem-Solving and Motor Skills

·         Offers Stress Relief

·         Promotes Optimistic Attitude.

·         Nurtures Emotional Growth.

I guess I was in the right direction when, in the latter months of 2014, I began to scale down on other stressful activities and chose to resuscitate the dying artistic side of me.

Having said too much about painting, I feel a bit guilty for blowing up the introduction. Hence, let’s move on to our simple review of the Mont Marte Paints in 12 tubes.

Here are my Mont Marte watercolor brushes that I bought from Theodist. As opposed to acrylic or oil brushes, these have soft bristles. I originally did not know that watercolor needs particular brushes, until I noticed that I had been damaging papers from using the wrong brush. 

There are four ingredients to a good watercolor painting: perseverance, the quality of paints, the strength of paper and the right set of brushes.  If you have any of these, consider yourself lucky. 

Just recently, I discovered these two items at Theodist. I’m not sure why other stationery shops here in Papua New Guinea do not bother selling quality art materials like these, but I’m thankful that Theodist does.

The Mont Marte Watercolour Pad, in A4 size, is a 300-gsm cold press paper. It’s thicker than the average photocopy paper and is textured. The Mont Marte Watercolour paints come in 12 tubes filled with richly pigmented colors.

That is a good addition to my Mont Marte Two Seasons watercolors, which has 18 tubes of more subtle colors. I have a similar post about the Two Seasons which you can read on this link.

Here’s my sketch on the Mont Marte Watercolour paper for this painting. After some experimenting, I have established four types of pencil sketches for different media. For anime-inspired sketch, pencil sketch is more sharper. For charcoal portrait, it needs to be firm but subtle. For color pencil, the sketch should be almost invisible and for watercolour, the lines have to be sharp and the shades sketched roughly or a little bluntly.

The model that I’m about to paint is of someone that I browsed from Google by typing “Beautiful Face” on the search bar. It’s funny that when I browse this again, her photo doesn’t show up in the list anymore.

I hope she doesn’t get on me if she finds out that I made a watercolor portrait of her.

Here’s the sketch taped on the board. The board is just the backboard of an ordinary A4 photo frame. I’m using a masking tape to stretch the paper on the board. The paper usually warps when applied on with too much water. This technique, somehow, reduces that effect.

I love to use the medium-sized brush in the beginning. I usually start with applying transparent colors on areas that I expect to have darker shades.

Here’s the final product of using Mont Marte Watercolour Paints and Mont Marte Two Seasons Watercolour. Both watercolors complement each other very well and adheres nicely on the Mont Marte Watercolour paper.

A Men’s Day Special and a Tent Review

A week before the Father’s Day, many storeowners in Port Moresby have probably thought of this as a good time to ramp up sales while disposing off slow moving items. The idea manifested itself through a barrage of promotional gimmicks offering big discounts on selected items.

Of the particular targets whose marketing strategists have in mind for the special occasion are men in general and a more socially acknowledged title for such promotion is “Father’s Day Special.”  But I somehow feel that such title is restrictive on its sense and is just specifically aimed at enticing all fathers alone.

It was probably one of those widely approved, yet hastily thought of millennial catch phrases and I think that this, in particular, has a downside of potentially alienating married men who haven’t had the luck of producing offspring.

Therefore, to appreciate married men of all sort, childless or with children, legally separated or not, divorced or still counting years, this young blogger shall refer to this event as “A Men’s Day Special” instead.

During such occasions, shops are full of surprises indeed. I bought this tent for K50 ($16 USD) at City Pharmacy, which is just next to our office. The regular price is probably around twice the amount. I have misplaced a small paper that is attached to its bag. It has its brand name of Chinese origin, which I find too verbose to remember.

I’ll edit this post up once I found that piece of paper.

This tent has frames like that of an umbrella which is visible once spread out. As much as possible, I refrain from buying things that I have no need for the time being. But I got some friends from other companies who were planning a camping trip to Koitaki and it was probably wise to buy a tent ahead of the schedule. It was one of a kind, to say the least.

I have never slept an entire night out on a camping site away from the safety of familiar sleeping quarter. But during my younger days, I used to sleep out the nights close to rice paddies on the harvest season if you could count that as camping.

The tent did not come with an instruction manual so I had to sit down and figure this thing out for a while. There is a string that went to the bottom of the frame and was knotted at the end. I thought that if I pulled it all the way up, it might do some wonder.

And it did, to my surprise.

Just like that and the tent is set in an instant all after literally pulling some strings up.Some tents are not so hard to assemble after all.

There were plenty of grounds in which our cute tent could be tested and an ideal location was our parking area but I did not want to risk looking silly so I set it up on my bed instead. A 1-Person tent has a standard size of 7x5 feet but I think that this one is a bit smaller. There is a tiny window at the opposite of the door and a mesh to screen off bugs.

The screen mesh alludes to the idea of having the tent fortified with basic protection against malaria or dengue-carrying mosquitoes buzzing around the camping area.

The door has a sufficient opening to which I could comfortably go in and out.

It can be zipped up from either sides. Similarly, there is a mesh to filter off insects when you decide to snug in.

Here’s the view from the inside overlooking the, uhm, grandiose view of my study table.

Looking forward to that camping trip.

Filipino Associations In PNG: FAPNG and LFAI

One of the prominent Filipino associations that I know of in Papua New Guinea is the FAPNG whose office is in Port Moresby. There is a similar association based in Lae called LFAI or the Lae Filipino Association, Inc. 

While it's a fact that they have been functioning around for quite some time, I haven’t been too concern about joining. Perhaps during the past few years, I was fine with doing things by myself and I didn’t see the merit of being in one of the group.

Just recently, the talks about an election of officers for FAPNG have reached our doorsteps through a co-worker named Levi, who is also a candidate for the secretarial position. And a few days ago, kuya Tony, who is an old-timer in PNG has sent us a couple of membership forms.

Now that I have started blogging about my experiences in PNG, I might as well try and blog about the good things that FAPNG is doing to promote camaraderie among the Filipinos living in this country.  But I am more interested to blog about their projects and community services that directly relate to the betterment of local communities.

So it has come to pass that I’ve decided to join.

This is the logo of the FAPNG (pronounced as fapnang) and I took this shot during one of our company’s Christmas Staff Parties which was held at FAPNG’s Club House.

A couple of days ago, I received this receipt from them confirming my payment for the membership fee. The document behind is a list of certain privileges that a Filipino can get as benefits for being an active member of the association.  The paper with colorful prints just behind the receipt is, I guess, a flyer from one of the aspiring parties trying to inform us of their good intention to serve in administrative positions if they win the polls this upcoming FAPNG officer election.

That will be on the 30^th of October, 2016. I am off by then so I’m looking forward to drop by the Club House and cast my vote.

This is one of the activities that happened during our Staff Party at FAPNG Club House: a few staffs are seen enjoying the music while some are lining up at the background to check on the free food.

What I love about our company is that it makes sure that all of the staffs are not going to go home hungry. Here’s one of the staff with his fair share of the freebies.

Mmmm, isn't that cake lovely?

Like how a party venue should look like in the end, we actually have left behind some garbage around despite our efforts to keep the place clean.  But it’s a good thing there’s not much of rubbish to clean for these two gentlemen who immediately came to sweep around as soon as everyone was out.

Thank you guys!

Mont Marte Two Seasons Watercolor

Two years ago, I posted on my Facebook page that I would not be painting portraits anytime soon. This is because during that time, my accompanying art skills were on par with that of a Kindergarten learning to draw. My favourite tool back then was a mechanical pencil, which was a gift from my friend, Ali, who came to work for our branch in Daru. Nowadays, I believe that my art skill is still around the Kindergarten level, but with a slightly pronounced improvement. I have also welcomed the opportunity to try out other art mediums, like the watercolor in particular.

This is the Two Seasons watercolor from Mont Marte, which I bought for K30+ kina from Theodist. The paints come in tubes that look pretty durable. Cheaper watercolor brands in tubes are often plaqued by unnecessary problems like a leak from the bottom and breakage along the lines near the cap. But with Two Seasons, you can get your money’s worth and you couldn’t be happier.

Here’s a pencil sketch that I drew for this blog entry. Most of the art pieces that belong to a watercolor artist begin from a simple pencil sketch.  I drew mine with less shade and a little subtle so the lines wouldn’t show up too much in the end product.

I have a well lit custom-made drawing table where I carry out my sketching. However, it doesn’t have enough space to accommodate all these panting tools so I had to clear up the things on my laptop table and did the setup there.

This brush holder is the latest addition to my painting tools. The price is around K9+ from Theodist. Those watercolor brushes are new ones too. My first impression of brushes is that all brushes are the same and are all suitable for water-based paints. My updated realization is that not all brushes are cut out for watercolor painting. There are brushes that look subtle in appearance, but can become a threat to the paper in an instance so it is always a good thing to check the labels before making the purchase.

These brushes have a “watercolor” label on the package.

I’m very new to watercolor painting. Having said that, I guess I am allowed to use a “scratch pad” for testing the intensity of paints before I actually apply them on the drawing. One surprising advantage of watercolor painting is that you can easily dismiss a mistake for style.

As the scratch pad is filled up with psychedelic swatches of paints, the art piece itself is slowly taking form. The pencil strokes becomes less visible and the once two-dimensional drawing becomes a bit alive from the constant application of shades.

Here’s the end product. Overall, I have spent roughly thirty minutes for the pencil sketch and some two hours for the application of watercolor paints.

Happy painting everyone!