Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Day 2 of the 3-Day Hike

EYEBROWS. I never knew how important eyebrows were until day 2 of the 3-day hike. The gear hike was nothing. I've never been so gross in my life :) One of the gals said she'd never smelled quite like she did, and that she felt like her clothes were molding on her! It had rained all night the night before We awoke in the morning to a light drizzle. When we left in the morning it was still raining. we slipped our way uphill for about fifteen minutes to where there should have been a beautiful view of Madang...unfortunately it was completely covered in mist--but the mist was pretty in its own way.

Then it was downhill. One look at the steep muddy slope, and myself and one of the other gals just removed our shoes, figuring that we would have better grip without shoes than with. Still precarious, but shoeless and with ealking sticks in hand we made it down the hill. The huge rain the night before made rivers where there were none before and we ended up crossing about 11 rivers; some little trickles, others knee high. We again luched by a river, this one a sandy bank, so we sat on leaves to stay slightly cleaner. When we arrived in our night's stop, we students didn't understand that we had arrived. Thinking that we were just taking a break, we milled around for a good 45 mintues. Then we finally asked one of the ladies, is this Baitabag? Yes, it was. Oops! So, we felt really bad that we hadn't been trying to talk to the lady in the village. We decided that she was a bit busy with her two very cute 6 month old babies, so she didn't really have much time to talk.

The family that we stayed with was really nice. They had been working in their garden, and not in the village, which was why we weren't introduced to them right away. We had some great conversations that we didn't know were possible at our level of Tok Pisin, such as when our was papa asked about segregation in the U.S.!

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