Daily log: Clive's voyage through CBD COP 10 in Nagoya, Japan

Daily Journal 17 October - Clive Hawigen is a 25 year old now interning with the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP). He was born and raised in a village in the highlands of Papua New Guinea in Goroka. For Clive, traveling is a new experience - he had never left Goroka until he ventured to Samoa to start working for SPREP.

This is a daily journal of Clive's voyage during the CBD COP 10 in Nagoya, Japan. He will share with us his adventure as it's his very first time to leave the Pacific region and travel far across the World.

Please read and enjoy reading Clive's log of his journey, its a personal account of his expeience of the CBD COP 10.

Read on!

"My first train ride from Nagoya International airport to Nagoya city is an experience I’ll never forget. Trains and subways always reminded me of movies like the Matrix or even the scarier Midnight Meat Train.

My trip to Nagoya as part of the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) team to the 10^th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10) is a journey down countless daydreams and fantasies of wanting to experience the western world.

I come from a small town of Goroka in Papua New Guinea.

Images in books and magazines and television footage of cities with all the technologies were all a mystery to me. Sitting with friends under the shade of a traditional kunai thatched house surrounded by thick tropical rainforest and listening to the sounds of birds chirping, someone breaking firewood and the old gossiping about the young, my friends and I would pass around old magazines looking at the pictures of things that were beyond our understanding. We asked ourselves if we were there what would we have done.

Three months on and since moving to Samoa to work as an intern for the International Year of Biodiversity with SPREP, these images in the magazine of trains, the buildings, cars, the people and their lifestyle have come into reality and for a first time, it’s very daunting and scary.

This trip will also be an opportunity for me to learn about CBD COP10.

Coming from a country that’s very rich in biodiversity yet is threatened to a point of extinction by human carelessness, this opportunity will equip me with knowledge and the notion that the world is serious about protecting the world’s biodiversity.

The event is being held at the Nagoya conference centre and would go on for two weeks. In this two weeks over 6, 000 people will converge into the side events and CEPA fairs and where governments around the world would discuss better ways of sustainable use of the biodiversity.

Deep amongst them all will be a rookie traveler keen to learn as much as he can and to see and experience the uniqueness of Japan."