Letter from New Guinea

When I was in eighth grade, my cousin Alex and I visited our missionary grandparents in Papua New Guinea. We spent six weeks there visiting, exploring, and experiencing new things. Along the way, we wrote emails home to tell our families about what we were doing. Last weekend when I saw my grandparents, they printed out a copy of one of the emails I sent. It described a trip we took to the coastal city of Madang, and I've included a copy of it below.

Dear Mom, Dad, and Jaron-

Yet another message from New Guinea! I'm writing this when you guys are at Ft. Flagler with the Backmans. I look forward to when you get home so we can talk on the air again. It's too bad we had a bad signal last time, there were lots of people cutting in and the static noise got worse as time progressed. I believe I got the main jist of what you said though.

We flew in on the twin yesterday, after dodging some major cloud cover (we had to climb to 14,000 and almost double our flight time). I got to ride copilot and wear the headgear, listen to the weather guy and other planes talk, watch all of the instruments and see all of the buttons and levers, and have a flight stick in front of me (just in case I had to take over the plane). Jaron, you would've had a ball! I think this is a better deal than Alex got because the twin has many more knobs and whistles than the 206. I was really excited and pleased to get your email, Dad, and am looking forward to more, also ones from Mom and Jaron. I'll try to write when I can and/or remember. I'm very disappointed to report that I won't be bringing home any puk puk heads home in my luggage, as the market was closed on the day we went in (the resort is 15km from downtown Madang) because of some Provincial Government holiday. It was called "Americans in Town!" day, aka "Let's Take a Day Off" day. The thing is, only the market and supermarket were closed, so it wasn't to [sic] bad. It still put a damper on the fun I had been having, but I've almost recovered. Alex says they probably don't have them anymore, but I think that's just a way for him to hide his disappointment. To make up for the loss, we both bought statues of men in ceremonial dress. They're pretty neat looking and a good deal, too- K10 for a 14 inch wood carving. This was a lot cheaper than buying a real ceremonial mask (K80). Maybe I'll get that later. I'm keeping an eye our for something like that, perhaps a storyboard and also other cool stuff.

Snorkeling was totally an amazing experience for Alex and I. We really should've brought an underwater camera to document all of the awesome types of fish and coral. My favorite kind was the Angel Fish. I don't know if you have ever seen one, but that's okay because I drew a picture of it and all of the other commonly seen fish there. We all spent multiple hours in the water, too many to count, seeing brain coral, black sea urchins, and all sorts of tropical fish that you might see in an aquarium at the zoo. This was way better than the zoo, though, because you get to be in the water, feeling the sun on your back, looking around, and interacting with all of the different forms of life. Some of the interaction I could've very well done without, the kind where you scrape all of the parts of your body against the coral and emerge from the water all bloody and hurting. Luckily, all of the pain and scrapes were over with y the second day, except two of my scrapes were infected when some flies landed on them right when I was climbing out of the water. The infections were feeling pretty bad by the time we went to town on Monday (the one on my leg made it hard to walk) but we bought some iodine and Hydrogen Peroxide and it is pretty much all healed now.

One interesting incident was when Alex and I (we only had two pairs of snorkels, Grandma and Grandpa's, because the "fully equipped" dive shop was out of rentals) encountered a real live reef monster. No kidding, either. It was the biggest thing we saw while we were there, with an amazing gill or mouth, we're not sure which, on top of it's body toward its head. It was a good cubic foot, with large flapping fins that looked like pieces of bone webbed with skin. We asked the grandfolks what it was, but they had no idea what it could've been. We think we woke it up when we were digging through the sand (it's white; I'm bringing some home) for shells. It had a layer of sand covering it, which made it look like a swimming rock at first, so I think it was sleeping under the sand until we bothered it. That was a pretty amazing time and we followed it around until it hid under a bunch of coral.

Another great outing to the water was when Alex and I went out after dark. This was kind of scary, but Grandma and Grandpa let us take out an underwater flashlight with us so we could see the water immediately around us. The light beam actually bounced off the top of the water and back down (interesting to me, maybe nothing new to you) and we saw great things even with the limited visibility. The little fish seemed just like Dad to me- they went to sleep wherever they got tired and had no trouble getting to sleep in such uncomfortable positions. We almost ran into a few that were deeply asleep. It was fun to wake them up and see them scurry away with surprise. I even saw a whole school of fish that fell asleep with each other. We saw a new kind of fish (apparently nocturnal) and two big crabs (also apparently nocturnal), which made it all the more worth while.

Madang is a realy great place. There was so much left that we didn't get to see that I want to go back again. You all would've loved it there, maybe we should take a vacation here sometime (Alex says "That would be some vacation!!").

Now for some responses to your email. First, I can't wait to taste the jam on some fresh baked bread! I've been telling Alex about all of my bread philosophies and rating and anylizing [sic] the bread we eat. Some of it has been pretty good (like Grandma's) but still doesn't measure up to the stuff back home (neither does the powdered milk- a few days ago I drank some unmixed-in chunks when I was finishing it off). Jaron- you play too much on the computer! Don't you have anything to do while I'm gone? (like, writing coded messages, perhaps?) I've been reading lots of books in the past week, (don't worry, Mom, I have my Gameboy and all of the movies for the plane) how about you? More about Cadet Janeway? I haven't talked with Grandpa yet about EPC, but I'll get all of the dirt when I get a chance. Sounds like everything's fine and normal there, with Jaron still stinkering away...

Well, goodbye for now. I'll write soon and talk to you on the air.