Fishin Time

I don't know many people here anymore so have been knocking around with the cousy bros a bit. Sunday and Monday was a game fishing competition for the Queens Birthday (Chuck's Mum) weekend. An early start at 6.30am but well worth it with about 50 fish landed in all, mostly yellow fin tuna which helped to pay the petrol bill. Petrol is sitting at 50Baht per litre and with two monster 225hpYamaha outboards on the back of the 30+ foot 'Ocean Dancer' you're looking at a horrendous fuel bill. I was wondering if the guys had enough rods and reels.

Here's what we were catching (my cousin Gary with 8kg of tuna between his legs)
and what the sharks were feasting on.

Got To Be Ready

Not really but my cousin was going to the shooting range so I tagged along to blast some targets. First time I had done pistol shooting and a long time in using a firearm but I was still on the ball hitting targets at 40 meters. Which is a long way for a pistol. Not really surprising considering I was a gun nutter when I lived in New Zealand for over 8 years. A couple of Thai guys from Udon came as well for there first time, both of them not wanting to stop after we ran out of ammo. Unfortunately we didn't have enough ear protection to go around and my ears still have a bit of a deaf zone to them. With the barrel exit being much closer to you than a rifle the nose really is deafening. Actors in the movies must where tiny earplugs because they would be shouting after 3 or 4 shots.

Bits and Pieces For Ross

Have a close look Ross, also saw them loading Tiger Beer on the flight from Singapore. Things are pretty expensive here in general with food quite expensive for locally grown stuff and comparable or cheaper to Thailand with regards to farang stuff. They have reasonable sausages here cheap at about 100B per kilo. Beer is cheap, 8B per handle at happyhour the other day and about 55B normally down the pub, not sure about tiger though. Bring a spare hard-drive (was going to do some movie deals here, but a 500Gig is 9000B and 1TB 17000B WTF sideline business I feel) Probably want to bring any other computer stuff you might find useful. I got a feeling wireless here is about 50,000B for your router no shit. As for the connection I think good though the one I'm on now is known to be shite at 5 KB down, can still access WOW though with a little lag. I'll find out banking stuff soon.

Catching Up

Had to finish off yesterdays 30hrs of travelling with a beer so headed down to the Yacht Club to grab a few handles of the local brew of South Pacific Lager with the old cheese and met some of his mates. Not many places to drink here with the clubs being the scene although the other options of the golf club and aviation club are probably a bit of the old fogie crowd. Wasn't game enough to put ice in the beer in-case I got run out of town.



Well today has just been a day of catching up with the Saking who is our house-mary (house keeper) who's been employed by my parents since before I was born and is basically my second mother. Planned out some of the work I have to do, like roofing and tiling so that my parents can sell up their property for there anticipated final move back to Australia for their retirement. I never lived in the house that they're in as they bought it after I finished working here and went to university in New Zealand. Its a classic 70's style house of around here and is very open (bar all the security screens) and has reasonably big grounds for being downtown, full of fruit trees. Mangos, rumbutans, manoas and loaloas (which we have in Thailand but the name escapes me). And it's quiet, no tuk tuks, mods on their bikes or sirens. Nice.



With the weekend fast approaching I paid a visit to my cousins to check out if they were going fishing, and of course they were like every weekend for the last 30 years so I'll be out chasing yellow fin tuna on Saturday or Sunday and will hopefully have some good pics, While I was down there checked out my cousins monster pickup.


He doesn't like to stop at road blocks.

Another Delay

Another hour delay down at the domestic terminal, but finally we left for the quick 45 min journey to Lae's monstrous Nadzab airport which is quite strangely miles out of town, the huge runway awaiting the arrival of 10's of millions of visitors which have never materialised. It would seriously take another 100 years for the city's outskirts to ever reach it.

Welcome home, this is my ride and a reflection upon the state of security around here? No wonder there are no tourist.

Arrived In Moresby

Well got to Port Moresby uneventfully. Ended up sitting beside a typical Thai chick on the plane from Champon who works for a rice company here. Got a visa on arrival very easily, though half the plane was doing the same. Surprisingly there seemed to be a fair few Chinese and Indians aboard whereas when I grew up here there were only Ozzies, Kiwis and Brits. My brother in-law picked me up from the airport, so I went to his place (Ross's new home next month) for a few hours.

Singapore To Port Moresby

Very few of you will luckily enough never need to use the services of Papua New Guineas (PNG) national airline Air Niugini, notorious for its outrageous prices and delays. Knowing that the trip to my hometown of Lae in PNG was going to be a 30hr journey from Bangkok I was hoping that in the last 15 years since I had travelled with them, that their service had improved and there would be, especially, no delays. Unfortunately not. Two hrs late and we borded their newly leased aircraft, 2 days in service from Icelandic Air (yes I just checked and they actually have an airline. I was visitor number 467). I noticed that one third of one side of the plane had the seats tapped up like a crime scene and was trying to imagine why when the captain came on the speakers. 'Air Niugini wishes to apologise for the short delay due to two technical difficulties, one of which you can see has been fixed'. I waited for the rest of it, nothing more. Seats taped up? What problem did it solve and what was the technical difficulty that wasn't fixed? Well, hopefully I'll be asleep when the wing falls off and we crash on a tropical island full of mystery and hot woman and I'll know the ending of 'The Lost' before everyone else, or we crash on an icy plateau and I have to learn how to play football and eat my team mates. Then I relised that sleep would be compulsory with no inflight entertainment and a overhead light that didn't work.