Elad’s blog

I will start from the end: my flight to Papua will be with their national flight company, Air Niugini.
I leave Cairns on 7/7/05 at 12:00, onboard flight PX93. I am to return here at 24/7/05, with Air Niugini flight PX98 - leaving Port Moresby at 18:25 and arriving at Cairns about an hour and a half later. What will happen between these two flights? I have no idea yet, but I have a week to plan.

Getting these flights was very tedious work. I went to several travel agencies - starting with Quantas (who strongly recommended me not to go to PNG, because it’s dengerous) and ending at Air Niugini. In the middle I went through some local agents. All of them wanted to send my passport back to Brisbane (some even to Sydney) to issue my visa. Only at Air Niugini did they know about the nice woman, who serves as a consulate or something, that can issue visas without sending the passport back half the continent; so I went looking for her.

Roselyne is a nice woman. Originally from Rabaul, she now lives with her family in Cairns. She runs a small shop with Papuanian souvenirs, arts and crafts; besides that, she also helps travelers in all sorts of consulate and immigration issues. Her shop is supposed to be open from 9:00, but as her kids are on vacation today she took the time and only arrived there around 11:30 - when I was already pretty nervous, having walked to her place at least three times just to find it closed (with all neighbor shops telling me that “she should come soon” and “she can’t be very far”). By the time she arrived I almost gave up and sent my passport to Brisbane through a travel agency - which would mean I arrive to PNG only after all the nice festivals end. When she did arrive, however, she was extremely nice and polite, kept smiling, and was in general very helpful - she promised to have my passport ready by Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning, and she takes less money than all the travel agents!

Thus, I booked a flight to the first available date with cheap flights, and now I have a week to prepare my homework, and study about PNG. As a first step, I already bought Lonely Planet’s guide to PNG - a brand new print, fresh from May 2005! Now I only need to read it… The first page there explains that Papua means ‘Fuzzy Haired People’, and that this was termed by a portuguese explorer (who heard this word from a Malayan trader). It also says that on the last count they had there 867 different languages - and I probably don’t know any of them. This should really be an amazing adventure.

Now that I know what I will do next week, I can finally go and see what there is in Cairns. My first impression is that there are plenty of malls and shopping centers here; and every second store offers a day-tour for diving in the reef. But I still didn’t have time to feel this city - I was too busy with arranging the visa and the flight. Another thing that I want to do, and will happen here, is that finally I’m going to eat a kangaroo or a crocodile, just to get to know the local animals from a different angle.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 30th, 2005 at 8:03 and is filed under Travels, Australia East Coast, Papua New Guinea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.