What a whirlwind of a 24 hours, 4am start to make it to Cairns international for a 7am departure arriving Port Moresby at 8:30am. A mere 1 hour 30min flight.
Picked up our suitcases and strolled down to the domestic airport passing these 3 men strutting their traditional attire.
The domestic terminal is busy and in the coming weeks is only going to get hectic with overcrowding and long lines. Flight cancellations are expected. I hoped they wouldn’t but was somewhat reassured by advice from MNR that the last time they were travelling through from Australia and got offloaded they were put up by Air Niugini in a hotel with meals and hotel airport transfer.
Luckily we got our boarding passes and were on our way – about 1 hour 15mins to Kavieng for a short stop over then a short 20 from Kavieng to Manus.
We arrived to a usually humid Manus through the new airport terminal. KPR was there to pick us up with the old ute for the half hour drive to Lorengau.
The piling on of passengers into an open back public motor vehicle (PMV) in front of us told us we were definitely no longer in Australia.
We arrived in Lorengau at around 6 pm. We settled into our room then spent the evening catching up with some family over dinner then went to try to sleep.
We had brought our ultralight blow-up mattress which we have used a couple of times on overnight hikes to two magical spots in Queensland one called the black hole in the Paluma Ranges and the other is Mt. Dalrymple, the highest peak in central Queensland and also Mt. Halifax. However we may have overestimated their comfort level on settings outside of an overnight hike setting. We were not able to get much sleep that night.