Advent Delight

This morning was John’s turn to open the advent calendar (as we always share one) and he opened it to find the tiniest nativity I have ever seen- a chocolate nativity…. how cute is that!

Joey

We’ve a new addition to our family. It’s been a while since he joined us but we’ve been busy on the blog trying to get back from our trip to PNG.

Now that we’re back and settled here:

at 77 Field View, Bar Hill, Cambs, CB23 8SY, UK

we’re ready to start telling you what we’ve been up to since we came back from PNG.

Well, the first thing we did, almost literally, was to pick up little Joey. Here he is:

He’s a 1988 Vauxhall Nova. Yes, that’s right, he’s 21 years old.  If you look closely, you can see why we call him Joey. Doesn’t look bad does he. He’s only got 82,000 miles on the clock and a few little bits of rust here and there. But for £300 ($500), you can’t really go wrong. So far, he’s got us to Dorset and back for our anniversary which is a 400 mile round trip. He’s even got a stereo, if  you sing. We sang every Beatles song we knew on the way back.

And watch this space (or at least the one above it) for more about the trip to Dorset…

Bonkers Dubai: The Burj-es

Okay, burj is Arabic for tower people so next time you hear someone say “the burj tower” you can inform them of their redundancy. Try it. It’s a great way to make friends.

Two towers display the bonkersness of Dubai, the Burj Al Arab and the Burj Dubai. Most of you will be familiar with the Burj Al Arab which looks like this

but also comes in a handy pocket size too

This is the hotel which charges you £20 ($32) just to walk in the door (I kid you not) and, if you want to stay, the cheapest room currently available will set you back around £1000 ($1600) per night. You could always club together with 7 other friends for the three-bedroom suite. That will only be £6,631 ($11,000) per night. Oh, and don’t forget the small print. There’s a 10% municipality fee and a 10% service charge to be added to that although that does include breakfast.

Or how about the Ultimate Wedding Package which says it includes

One helicopter arrival or departure airport Tansfer and one Rolls Royce arrival or departure airport transfer for up to two guests In-suite romantic candlelit dinner. In-suite daily breakfast. One 5-Course Moonlit Dinner in Majlis-Al-Bahar, our romantic beach restaurant overlooking Burj Al Arab. Culinary Flight for two, to wrap up your Burj Al Arab experience, taking you on an a gastronomic journey as you move from one restaurant to another for each of the five course meal. A Rolls Royce Phantom for 12 hours at disposal for couple photo shooting In-Suite set up on Wedding night with special linens, flowers, chocolate and gift. Couple Spa treatments including:For the bride: hair style and make up consultation, one Signature Around the World massage, one La Prairie facial, nail care on arrival, hair styling with make-up and nail polish on the day of the wedding; For the groom: one Wellbeing massage, hair cut and styling on the day of the wedding Minimum of Four Nights Stay.

Now, with that “minimum four nights stay” bit tacked on the end, this will set you back £13,552 ($22,215). That’s bonkers.

So, moving on from one definition of bonkers to another.

The Burj Dubai is fairly new. In fact, it’s so new that they haven’t even opened it yet. You may have heard of it but not many have seen it. It’s temporarily the world’s tallest building at 818 m (2,684 ft). Just to put that in perspective, the tallest ‘mountain’ in England is 978 metres (3209 ft) tall and the Burj Dubai totally dwarfs anything that has come before it. In fact, it took me three photos to fit it in which I had to ’stitch’ together later:

If you head over to the website, they’ll try to impress you with their stats. The energy demands of this thing are horridious. Electrical demand, they proudly boast, will be equivalent to 360,000 100-watt bulbs operating at the same time. The air conditioning alone requires 10,000 tons of chilled water per hour.

People, let’s think about that for a minute. This is in a world where one billion of us don’t have access to clean water (that’s one in six), and 1.6 billion have no access to electricity whatsoever. That’s a quarter of us. What the hell are we doing with this planet?

I’ll just have to soothe my emotions with the Burj Fountain which, every 15 mins every evening at the foot of the Burj Dubai, does something like this:

Bonkers Dubai: The Malls

So, there you are, staring at your malachite and gold bath and wondering if it will go with the curtains. But step back a moment. Where are you?

You’re standing in a shopping centre larger than the Vatican. I’m serious. The Dubai Mall (home of the bath) is a fifth larger than the Vatican. In fact, that’s not the only stat where it trumps the Holy See. Pretty much any way you look at this, this place is bigger than the world’s smallest country.

In fact, in one month alone, this place saw over THREE million visitors. Spread over the opening times of 90 hours a week, that’s still a bonkers 9 people a second coming through the doors. The Vatican doesn’t even compare. Despite much more exclusive opening hours (9-4) only about 4 a minute bother to turn up. It’s amazing. In some ways it’s understandable really. The Vatican’s just got some poxy old frescoes by some Italian guy. They don’t have a malachite bath! Wait… they probably do.

There’s a ton more worship going on in the Dubai Mall than the Vatican. Let’s face it, if the Vatican is your local church, you’re in a serious minority. The whole country only contains about 600 citizens. So the vast majority of the visitors are there to take photos, not to get involved in what Michaelangelo built the building for. But at the Dubai Mall, you’re in a serious minority if you aren’t there to pick up some must-have item.

But they thought of everything when they designed these malls and they helpfully provided some relief for those of us who only go to malls at the behest of others who purport to enjoy them. At the Dubai Mall, I was spoiled for choice really. If I’d had my PADI certificate, I could have scuba dived in the three storey aquarium that sits in the centre of the place. It’s immense and has fish that are bigger than I am. Okay, that’s not so impressive I guess.

But if that doesn’t rock your boat, you could always get a taxi over to the Emirates Mall where they’ve got the only ski resort in the Middle East. As we looked through the windows at kids sledging and families flying down the piste, the thermometer showed us that it was -3° C in there and around 45° outside. God and the owners alone know what the electricity bill is for the air conditioning in there. God alone knows the environmental impact.

Perhaps you’re too wowed by the showy baubles of ski slopes and aquaria and prefer something more subtle. The Ibn Battuta is the place for you then. The decor of each section of this mall follows the fantastic journeys of the great traveller Ibn Battuta from his home in Tangier all the way over to China and back and a lot in between. Each area is decked out in design from each locale he visited. He was an amazing man and the mall sets out to let you know that. How did he manage to pull off such an amazing feat? How did the scientists and inventors he met along the way come up with such wonders (all of which are recreated in the mall)? It’s quite simple: they were Muslims.

But aside from the banal and frankly disturbingly naive propaganda, there’s some very eye-catching interior design at the mall as these photos convey:

Malls thrive in Dubai because there’s too much money around for people to know what to do with. It’s a sad indictment of humanity as far as I was concerned. We cry out at the immoralities of injustice and suffering. But the indulgence and greed that has created and sustains the malls of Dubai is no less immoral.

I heard a lot of people who lived in Dubai telling us how bonkers it is, how ostentatious and extravagant. It must be very hard to live there though and not get drawn in by it all and forget what motivates and drives it. I thank God that I don’t face that temptation.

Bonkers Dubai: The Bath

On the way back from PNG, we stopped in Dubai. Now we know what the fuss is all about. We didn’t fuss over it, and very few of the people we met fussed over it either, but at least we know what the fuss is about now.

Dubai is a bit like Calcutta. When you first go there, it’s a total shock. It’s unlike anything else you’ve ever experienced. Everywhere you go, you see people struggling to survive in an urban environment that has a life all of its own. There are very few places on the planet where you can the symptoms of the human condition are so blatantly evident.

Let me illustrate it with some of the clearest indications that people in Dubai are very, very sick. I’ll focus on one in each post. Today it comes from a walk we did through the Dubai Mall where we came across a bath that looked something like this:

Yes, that’s me in the background. I couldn’t resist going in to enquire about this bath. I was so inquisitive, you see, because the bath gives the impression that it’s made out of malachite and has gold feet. The main reason it gives this impression is that, in actual fact it is made out of malachite. Disappointly, perhaps, the feet are gold-plated bronze. Still, you can’t have everything.

This can be yours for as little as AED600,000 according to the Filipino woman selling it who probably won’t make as much as that in all the years she works in that shop. At today’s exchange rate, and unless you can bargain them down somewhat, that will cost you £102,257 and 37 pence. That’s US$163,376and 63c if you were wondering.

I was curious about what that kind of money would buy you down at my local DIY shop and so, with the marvellous help of the Internet, I headed on down to B&Q in Cambridge. There, for the price of this 1 bath in Dubai, I could buy 209 of these:

Alternatively, I could buy 1 of those B&Q baths and then have enough money left over to buy this to put it in:

But just in case you do have money to burn, don’t forget to pick up the matching 10 foot high malachite Corinthian columns and gold towel rail that go with it.

Flying Out

View the pics of our journey above.

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I’ve been flying since I was five, but after leaving Ukarumpa on an Islander, I’m not sure I’d ever flown before.

Aviation for Ukarumpa is based at Aiyura and is a 15 min bumpy ride out of the centre and down some dirt roads to the airstrip. There, we found ourselves at the smallest airport we’d ever seen. There were three planes and two helicopters, all owned by the Summer Institue of Linguistics and operated by their pilots. This, in PNG, is how we get around. I’ll see plenty of action in these when I’m on survey.

Our plane was an 8 seater (10 if you cram them in) Islander. We’d never been in a plane that small. We were in business class. In other words, we were at the back where a missing seat meant we got extra leg room. As the wings are above the cabin, there’s no restricted view except that the wheels stay down the whole way. It’s amazingly noisy. You can’t even hear your mp3 player on full volume.

Take off over Ukarumpa was amazing as this video demonstrates:

It took us nearly 2 hours to get to Port Moresby, the capital and the whole way, the view was wonderful. At times, nothing but rainforest. At times, nothing but swamp. And mountains absolutely everywhere. If there was a problem, there’d be absolutely nowhere to land safely.

All the while, we were buffetted by wind. In a big plane, you hardly feel you’re flying. In a plane this size, you are sometimes worringly aware of every movement. I loved it.

If you can bear it, here’s a 2 min video of our approach and landing at Port Moresby…

Ukarumpa

A morning view from our balcony across to the surrounding hills.

It sounds like something from Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, looks like something from The Land that Time Forgot and feels like something from Little House on the Prairie. Ukarumpa, home to the largest community of linguists on earth.

We spent 2 1/2 weeks there with the aim of finding out whether this base at 5000 feet in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea could viably be a home for us for two years or so from August 2010. It seems so.

The base was created in the 1950s from disputed land. Tribes had fought over the valley land for generations and when the Summer Institute of Linguistics requested land from the then Australian PNG government to set up a base here, they didn’t hesistate to hand it over.

Security is still something of an issue with the Highlands having a reputation, as I’ve said before, as being a little like the Wild West of yore. As a result, a fence was constructed in the ’90s to improve the situation here. It’s not foolproof but it’s a deterrent. On the whole though, life here is very peaceful. People were really friendly to us and it was good to see a mixture of ex-pats and nationals working on the base.

A view of the fence snaking away to the valley and the surrounding fields.

It’s a very large base. There must be several hundred people there and, despite our best efforts, we failed to make it all the way around the perimeter. We did walk many of the unpaved roads, up hills and round corners exploring as much as we could. The settings for many of the houses are idyllic and those who have bought their own places here have often gone to great lengths to make them cosy homes.

We started off in the guesthouse but then had the opportunity to rent a place and self-cater which gave us a much better impression of what it would be like to live here.

We lived in the right hand half of this house.

Feeding ourselves meant that we got a lot of experience of using the great store here which stocks a surprising array of products. You can get a lot of tinned goods and frozen stuff there with most of it coming from Australia and the US.

We also had to head to the market which is three times a week from 6-8 in the morning. It must be the quietest market in the world. Unlike many countries we’ve been to where hassling customers to buy and bargaining loudly are mandatory, in PNG, prices are fixed and the only noise is subdued conversation to pass the time of day before a purchase is made. It’s kind of eerie and will take us a bit of getting used to but it adds to the peaceful early morning atmosphere.

What £5 will buy you at the market.

Everything happens early here. People start school and work way before 9 often and finish around 4. This is because, once the sun sets around 6:30 there’s not a lot to do. People who invited us over to eat usually asked us to come at 5:30 or 6. Meals were finished fast and we often found ourselves back home around 9pm staring at each other and wondering what to do with ourselves for the evening when we thought we’d be out. It’s a good place to read and watch DVDs!

We saw a tremendous variety of people here of all sorts of backgrounds, nationalities and jobs. It was good to see such a range as it adds both to variety and the chance that there’ll be someone somewhere who can relate to how you feel about being there. Everyone’s welcoming though and quite tolerant of cultural and theological differences.

What there is to do is entirely self-made. If you want to do something, you just go out and do it. There’s a pony club, archery, a motorcross track, quilting, crossstitch, cafes in people’s homes, day trips out shopping and more sport than you could possibly manage each week. I played tennis, indoor hockey, football and ultimate frisbee as well as went for a hike up a local hill to get a view back down the valley.

With a teacher from the high school and a local guy to guide us up a nearby hill. No prizes for guessing what that plant is in the foreground!

Getting off the base isn’t too easy if you’re a single woman. But if you can get a group together or, better still know a national who can go with you, there’s plenty of walking to be done and a whole world of villages to explore. To do so safely is simply a matter of building the right relationships. This takes time but is a great investment for all those who’ve done so who we spoke to.

Being in such an isolated location can give people a bit of cabin fever but, as we heard many say, life there is really what you make of it. We had two weeks and we made the most of that. I’m sure that if we had two years, we’d not do too badly at all.

For more photos than you know what to do with, check out our Smugmug Ukarumpa gallery.

PMVing to the Highlands

After four days in Madang, it was time to move on. We had to make it up to the base at Ukarumpa in the Highlands because John’s future boss was due to fly out shortly and he didn’t want to come all this way and miss out on meeting with her. So, the only way we could get from the coast up to the Highlands was by PMV.

PMV stands for Public Motorised Vehicle and basically means public transport. Usually, they’re minibuses but they can be motorboats too down at the coast. We’d had mixed advice when we’d asked about the logistics of getting one for this trip. They ranged from there being absolutely no problem with them through to them being about as life-threatening as swimming in liquid steel.

The threats were numerous and worth considering. Firstly there’s the simple physical state of the vehicle. They can lack brakes, windows, seats, lights or tread. If only mechanics in these countries were as dedicated in their maintenance of these as they are with horns and radios which never fail to work.

Then there’s the physical state of the driver. Apart from many being national chain-smoking champions, they’re also likely to spend most of the trip chewing buai, a mildly stimulating drupe that is addictive and gives the chewer heightened awareness which, for PMV drivers, equates in a belief in their own immortality.

A fellow passenger exemplifies the buai school of dental hygeine

Finally, there’s the physical state of the roads. While there are many paved roads in the country, you can bet yourself that they won’t go where you want to go, at least not the whole way. Often natural disasters such as landslides, flooding or massive Chinese construction projects cause large sections to be virtually impassable. And if you do find your way cleared of these phenomena, there’s always the outside chance that you could be held up by raskols, bandits who’ll take everything you possess off you including, from time to time, your own life.

So, it wasn’t without some prayer that we headed down to the morning market in Madang in order to track down a spinning PMV. Spinning is what drivers do to collect passengers and consists of circling around town and accosting anyone who happens not to be in a vehicle and shouting their destination at them. When the PMV is full, they’ll set off. This can take anything from 10 minutes to a period of time that feels like the life-expectancy of a Japanese fisherman’s wife.

Thanks to our friend Don’s experience of living here since time began, we were on a PMV that left pretty much as soon as we got in. It had tread on the tires, brakes that worked, a driver who not only spoke English but was to literally go the extra mile for us later on. Apart from the fact that the windscreen was held together with Catholic icon stickers and what looked like large chunks of pre-masticated chewing gum, it was roadworthy.

There were about 8 other passengers. These were squeezed in between what was obviously more precious: 25 sacks of buai for sale in Goroka. Clearly, our driver wouldn’t be lacking stimulus and, just so we could see how stimulated he was, we were given seats of honour next to him in the front where Sheena made use of the only seatbelt. “God is my seatbelt” I yelled above a screaming gearbox to the driver. How he laughed at that.

The road out of Madang lasted about an hour before degenerating in the Finisterre mountains into pitted gravel. We bounced along one of the world’s longest pipelines which carries waste from a massive nickel mine to be deposited off the coast of Madang. This has controversially been built by Chinese who can’t speak English. This is important.

In PNG, you cannot be granted a work permit unless you can demonstrate particular ability in conversational English. As resident anthropologist Nancy Sullivan explains on her blog, officials were encouraged to ignore this particular law in this particular case. Ahem. Given the recent rioting over the economic dominance of Chinese immigrants in PNG, this kind of beauracratic fudging quite understandably incenses people here. Recent history of PNG seems full of stories like this and it does not bode well for its future governance.

Eventually, we found ourselves in the Ramu valley. This is absolutely massive and is dominated by the huge agribusinesses of Ramu Agriculture including immense palm oil and sugar plantations and beef ranches.

At the end of this is the Kassam Pass and here’s where the Highlands really begin. The view from the top back down the valley was remarkable.

The Highlands are temperate in climate but not in personality. Many lowlands people still fear going up here. Highlands people have a reputation for being much more aggressive than their lowlands counterparts and this is reflected in historically there being many more examples of inter-tribal conflict.

Because of this, the whole area has a kind of wild west feel about it. When we reached Kainantu, where our PMV driver should have dropped us off, he turned off the main road and headed a considerably distance out of his way towards the Ukarumpa base. When we protested that this really wasn’t necessary, he said, “Dis ples planti kauboi.” I think you can get the gist of that!

Well, he valiantly followed a road up into more hills. We hadn’t the faintest idea where he was going so felt helpless. In the back, the buai sellers were all complaining that they hadn’t paid to go to Ukarumpa and wanted to get to market in Goroka. We understood how they felt but were in our driver’s hands. Eventually, within 1km of the entrance (although we had no idea of that at the time) he gave in to pressure from his passengers and headed back into Kainantu and dropped us off in the centre of town.

We weren’t helpless. Don had given us a mobile phone and we used this to call Bonnie, the survey team leader John will be working with next year. It turned out that a couple of families from the base were having lunch in town and a quick call to them had them show up in their red pickup. We all piled in the back and minutes later we somewhat bizarrely found ourselves eating steak in the grounds of a hotel with tree kangaroos in a nearby cage.

After lunch, as we rolled across the bridge and through the gates of the Ukarumpa base, we had quite a strange feeling. Here was a place we’d heard so much about over the last two years and now here we were, here.

Nobnob

On a hill overlooking the town of Madang is the village of Nobnob. When the Germans settled this area in the late 19th century, the Lutherans set up a mission station here. The site was good, away from the heat and higher humidity down by the coast which meant less chance of malaria and more chance of rain and cooler clouds.

The view down to the coast from Nobnob

The mission station has been gone for many years. Now, the Summer Institute of Linguistics leases the site from the Lutheran Church and uses it to run the Pacific Orientation Course (POC). Usually this is run twice a year in January and August. The full course lasts 14 weeks although you can do a shorter version of 6 weeks. We were a special case and managed to leave after 4 days.

Sunrise

Sunset

The course is designed to integrate you into life in Papua New Guinea. It also aims to help you come to terms with living and working in multi-cultural teams. Apart from PNG nationals, there were people from Australia, the US, Canada and the UK there. Often there are many more nationalities than this.

The dining room one lunchtime

The course consists of language study (Tok Pisin), cultural lectures, anthropology and physical training (hiking and swmming) and preparation for a 5-week experience of living in a PNG village. It’s quite demanding and at some and often many points, participants feel so far from their comfort zones they can’t even remember what they felt like.

The room where we have all our lectures

As we were sitting in on just the first four days of the course, the pressure was off us. We knew that, if we return next year, our time would come. But, for now, we could relax and take it easy, doing only what we felt like. Thankfully, we felt like doing most things.

We had heard that swimming a mile in the sea was one of the physical challenges of the course. Every Wednesday, there are trips down to the nearby coast where a 100m rope is strung between two buoys out from the shore.

The cove where we go swimming seen from Nobnob

16 lengths of this will, roughly, see you hit the target. Not only did we manage this but we also were part of a brave few who walked down to the beach beforehand. It felt good to know that we were up to it all physically.

Sheena shows the best way to cope with the mud on the walk down to swimming

Everyone in the truck after swimming

Culturally though, I think things may be more of a challenge. The idea of living 5 weeks in a PNG village where we may not have any electricity, we’ll probably have to fetch our water and will be cooking all our own food on an open fire is something that may well be a challenge. More of a concern though is how we’ll get on for the other 9 weeks of the course living with ex-pats from a wide variety of backgrounds who are all going through differing amounts of culture-shock. That’s the real challenge!

We got to have our first Tok Pisin lesson a few days in. After smashing our heads against a wall of Japanese for six years, Tok Pisin is remarkably easy for us English speakers. 70% of the vocabulary is borrowed from English and sitting through our first sermon in the language we picked up about 50% of what we heard. That would have been a good Sunday near the end of our time in Japan.

John strains to hear some Tok Pisin

We also had a chance to see the area around Nobnob on a community hike that we took. This was our first experience of hiking in PNG. How can we describe it? Well, imagine that horizontal doesn’t exist. Everything is either uphill or downhill. And every slope you walk on is orange mud through the lush rainforest. Falling over is pretty much mandatory at some point.

Everyone we met on the hike was welcoming. The course participants probably provide so much entertainment for people on the hillside that they can’t wait to see us.

Sheena crossing a bridge that the POC staff made for a nearby village

The hike took us through forest with all sorts of plant-life and fruit trees. At one point, when I asked a village elder what a particular fruit was he promptly whipped out his foot-long bush knife, hacked a pod off the tree and then spent a hair-raising few minutes hacking the pod open with the same knife only millimetres away from his fingers with each swipe. It was worth it though – coconutty seeds that were nice and cruncy. Forgotten the name now…

We left on the fifth day of the course having seen enough to get an idea of what we’re in for next year. We couldn’t stay longer though as we had to meet someone up in the highlands. This meant we had to brave a PMV trip. More about that next!

PNG at last

As we left Australia we got our first views of the Great Barrier Reef stretching off into the limitless blue of the Pacific. We were aboard a small Airlines PNG prop plane and, just in case we had any questions about our destination, the safety card in front of us reminded us that chewing buai was prohibited.

It seemed fairly surreal to see the outlying reefs and grassy hills of PNG come into view out the window of our little Dash 8 aircraft flying in from Cairns. We’ve been preparing to come here for so long that actually arriving was hard to take in.

But immigration were sympathetic with our need to take things slowly and absorb the moment to its fullest extent. It took just over an hour for us to get to the front of the immigration queue.

We’d just arrived on Airlines PNG, local rival to the flag carrier Air Niugini which we were scheduled to fly out from Port Moresby, the capital, to Madang later that afternoon.

Unbeknown to all of us as we waited in that queue was an Airlines PNG flight taking off from the runway we’d just landed on which would never make it to it’s destination. Coming down into a forested hillside just minutes away from Kokoda, its destination, the 11 passengers and 2 crew, including a rare female pilot, would make up Airlines PNG’s first fatalities and the worst PNG aviation disaster for nearly 30 years.

We were blissfully unaware of this as we came out of the International terminal with our luggage looking for Malum Nalu, a blogger that I’ve been following for the last year or so. He’s an ex-journalist and said he’d try to meet up with us for the five or so hours we had to kill before our next flight. Moresby isn’t the kind of city you just wander off in if you’ve got white skin. In fact, many nationals avoid large areas of it too. So, we wanted Malum to chaperone us a bit.

After nearly half an hour of searching for him though, we realised he probably wasn’t able to make it. Instead, we took up the offer of a free shuttle bus to the Airways Hotel in the hope of a swim and something to eat or at least a place to relax.

We’d come to the wrong place.

It was K50 each to swim. PNG currency is the Kina. 100 toea make up 1 Kina. There are about K4.6 to the pound or about K3 to the US dollar. Arriving from Australia, we were totally confused with the money for quite a while. Nevertheless, we knew enough not to pay nearly $20 to swim each. The lunch buffet was K59. A main course meal was around K30. We were trapped.

We found some picnic benches alongside the pool area to crash on. Sheena slept a bit. I did some blogging. But we had hours to kill in this place and nothing to do.

We weren’t the only ones. There was another couple who’d just arrived from Switzerland. At least we didn’t have jetlag to cope with and were used to the steamy climate.

Actually, it wasn’t as hot as we’d expected. Humid yes but not horrendously so. Hot, yes but only in the sun and there was a nice breeze. A dip in the pool would have been lovely though.

Sheena is a star when it comes to hunting for bargains. What I’d totally failed to see was a delicatessen indoors the other side of the pool. Here you could buy individual bread rolls and other such delicacies. We treated ourselves to what was apparently foccacia bread and some cheese roll thing. Sheena had a coffee and we still had money left over. Then she had a free shower in the swimming pool changing rooms and we were on our way back to the airport for our flight north to Madang.