Blogs from Papua New Guinea, Oceania - page 8

Geo: -3.56519, 143.62We had met a couple from Germany while attending the festival who were trying to put together a few days on the Sepik river so we arranged to join them if we could find transport to Wewak. This proved difficult as the only way to reach Wewak was via air and the exodus after the festival had chewed up all of the available seats. We did contact MAF, the airline run by missionaries in PNG, and while they did not fly according to any schedule, they were "thinking" about flying to Wewak on the Monday as we required but the plane was being "repaired" over the weekend??Apparently they were able to glue the wing back on, because when we showed up first thing Monday morning they were pretty certain they'd be flying at some ... read more

Geo: -5.8674, 144.207Today our flights would take us from Brisbane to Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea and then on to Mt Hagan. I don't know if Brisbane is a contender for the safest city in the world, but Port Moresby is regularly cited as a worthy contender for the worlds most dangerous city. Confirming that will have to wait as all we did was run the customs gauntlet and head unscathed to the domestic terminal to catch our flight to Mt Hagan.The Hotel Poreman arranged to pick us up and our ride to the hotel was a pretty good indication that we weren't in Kansas anymore. There wasn't a single pane of glass that wasn't covered by bars and/or wire mesh or simply boarded up, razor wire decorated virtually every building, and security guards and ... read more

Blog Two...Diving The FeBrina Fantabulous!!! Where to begin - above or below water? We've done 26 dives and as the days progressed we asked ourselves..."how can this get any better?" And it kept surpassing the previous day's wonderment. First of all, The FeBrina is the only boat out in the PNG waters here. The serenity and solitude contributes to this magical experience. Rimmed in the distance is a trio of volcanoes that enhances the sunrises. In the evenings the lightning brightens the horizon. Mesmerized by the sunlight on the water, the deep blue abuts the turquoise-green pateches of coral reef. On the boat, we are two of only twelve divers - a group of six from Sacramento, a professional underwater photographer from the Cannary islands (some of the attached pictures are his-bet you can tell which ... read more

We talked about visiting Papua New Guinea for a long time. We finally got there September 2010. It's a land of diverse cultures, remote tribes, over 800 separate languages, 600 islands and some of the best diving spots anywhere in the world. We headed for Kimbe Bay, New Britain, for a 7 day liveaboard trip on the Febrina. We dived with about 9 other divers and Josie our dive master. Underwater, we saw some stunning corals and lots of pygmy seahorses, some found nowhere else. The second stop in our journey was at Tufi Dive Resort for some macro diving. Tufi was our favourite spot overall; we saw incredible creatures for the first time ever such as the Spanish Dancer, dwarf cuttlefish, pipefish, frogfish and so many nudibranchs. Steve and I are definitely hooked on macro ... read more

A car full of young men screeched to a halt beside our bus and started shouting at all the people who had got off for a short break. Everyone quickly ran to the bus and pushing and shoving, started to clamber on. I turned to Howard and he shouted “Tribal fight!” and urged me to get back on the bus. With everyone looking on edge and all of the windows tightly shut we continued on a few hundred meters to the next village. There was a big group of sullen looking men waiting by the side of the road, all holding machetes and with black paint smeared on their faces. Thankfully they paid very little attention to us and we crept past and continued on our way a little more mindful of where we would take ... read more