Church!!

Immediately after my onslaught of improperly oriented blog posts we jumped on a PMV from Kokopo to the Submarine Base we had visited a couple weeks prior. The old man that runs the place, George, had told us we could camp there the last time we visited him. We headed there and by mid afternoon the tents were set up just above the seashore and we were out snorkeling the pristine reef on the edge of a three hundred meter drop off to the depths below, only twenty meters from the shore. It was the best snorkeling I've ever done, with tons of marine life that ranged from anemones to sea cucumbers to tropical fish of all sorts of dazzling and radiant colours. The most amazing part of it all was the next day when I was out snorkeling around again and had the privelidge of being passed by a school of dolphins. They were too far away for me to see, but simply hearing the clicks and whistles of their sonar was awe-inspiring enough.

Now we are in Madang after a quick flight yesterday. The first impression of this place was positive; it seems like a nice seaside town, and actually has the only gardens I've seen in any PNG city so far. We wandered around for a couple hours looking for accommodation with the help of a couple friendly locals, but soon realized that we were going to have to pay handsomely for the beauty of this town. The cheapest one was sixty Kina each person (roughly twenty five dollars), and when the owner informed us the kitchen had been shut down by health officials due to a Cholera scare, we declined to stay there and opted for the ninety-five Kina guest house run by the Lutheran Church. I hope accommodation prices aren't going to be like this throughout the mainland, because my wallet hurts. We just booked a boat ticket for Tuesday to the town of Wewak, gateway to the Sepik river, where we'll hopefully be canoeing down in a week or so. Now the battle is to figure out if we can hit up the Crocodile Festival on the 9th and the Mt. Hagen Cultural Show on the 12th...