pre-travel madness

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I arranged my stay in PNG almost a year ago. 6 months ago I started to gather information, changed my health insurance company to pay for vaccines and Malarone (plasmodium falciparum prophylaxis is about 420 € for this trip!!). In the last weeks I bought a new camera (Canon PowerShot SX230 with underwater casing) for better quality of underwater-photography (if only half of what I read about northern PNG reefs is true I will need it).

Fortunately I already bought some equipment for tropical regions last spring for the Philippines and this spring for Central America so I can spare my money on this.

Unfortunately I couldn´t book the flight(s) earlier because of the unknown dates of my universities exams. For that reason even the cheapest flight I could book was around 1800 € (way+back). Still not that much if you imagine that I fly FFM-Singapore-Brisbane-Moresby-Lae (~15.000 km) in around 32 hours.

In the next days I´ll have to change my return flight from Port Moresby to Brisbane. My contact person in PNG told me, that I will not be able to aquire a visa on arrival if my stay exceeds 60 days. Even if I make it through immigration, I was told that visa extension is a burocratic nightmare and very expensive. So I gonna stay some time in Australia before heading back to Germany.

My luggage is limited to 16 kg and 5 kg of hand luggage thanks to the strict policy of Air Niugini, the local flight carrier, and the lack of alternatives to cover medium distances in time....

Since I really love photography I exaggerated this time. My camera equipment will consist of:

Canon Eos 500D with standard lens

+ Canons USM IS 70-300mm (large lens)

Canon Powershot D10 (when it´s getting dirty/wet/sandy)

Canon Powershot SX230

+ Underwater casing

Larger tripod

altogether 9 batteries, >90 GB of SDHC Class 10 memory

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As far as I know there are only to guide books for PNG. Both LP, but the one from 2008 (the latest, which I have) is what I heard from the very very few other travellers that went to PNG, very inaccurate and poorly researched (mainly through telefone calls).

The older one from 1998 should be the better option, so I try to get one...

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