Holiday Planning

One of the things I love to do, is plan a holiday. And up here in the Land of the Unexpected it becomes almost a big a challenge as going on the holiday.

My mother is coming to visit for less than 3 weeks in September and I am going to show her around some of this amazing country. Luckily my mother is a cool sort of character, which makes it easy to take her places a lot of unadventurous people would bypass.

When thinking about the trip I wanted to make sure she gets a real feel for the type of place this is, in the short amount of time that she will be here. A slight problem caused by my organisation AVI is that they have decided to have the in-country meeting for all the volunteers in the first week that she will be here. They did time it correctly though to coincide with the Goroka show, which is one of the reason Mum booked her tickets for that time of year. But it will still cut a bit of the time we have to do stuff together down.

Straight after the show I have booked us in to fly with MAF to the Crator Mountain Wilderness Management Area, a place that I remembered Monica (Volunteer friend in Goroka) telling me about, as she went and visited there in February or March. There are a number of villages that you can visit in the area, but because mum is keen on her hiking I chose Maimafu which is a great spot for hiking. Coincidently I have just found out it has a fantastic runway landing strip that is one of the steepest in the country at 14°. I was surfing yesterday and found a couple of pics (approach pic and coming in to land) of the runway to get me excited. I sent these onto mum and the response I got was "exciiiiting yea" and "I am soooo looking forward to this", that's encouraging I thought.

After 5 days there at Maimafu, hiking, climbing Crater mtn and chilling with the locals, we are flying back to Goroka to catch a PMV down to Madang. Madang we will probably visit a few local islands - I have some contacts that I can stay with while there - and go out to Kar Kar island, and perhaps even climb the volcano. Once that has been done, we will fly back to Lae to save time and she can chill out at my place, and celebrate my birthday before she fly's back to Oz.