I’m writing this on Independence Day for release tomorrow, because I want to have a day off. It’s the time machine thing again. It’s only a small cheat. I still have to do the work. I just get to do it a day early.

I’ll toss out a few more images from my recent visit to Ukarumpa near Kainantu in the highlands. I wish I could name all of these plants. Botany was one of my favourite subjects at university, but it strains my brain just to remember a few hundred fish names, let alone try to remember plant names. There’s only so much room in my skull and it feels like it’s shrinking.

Anyway, I like the way this pretty little yellow flower seems to be growing out of a very messy bird’s nest:

I showed this white one a couple of days ago. Here is what it looks like as it’s ageing:

It gives me hope that it’s still interesting. It’s colours are faded, it’s missing a few petals, it looks a little tired, but a bug still comes to visit. It’s not proud and glistening as is its younger mate, but it’s got a lot of character.

Here is another juicy spider for you: (click to enlarge and do a Save Image As – it makes a great desktop background)

I think these are a fairly common flower in gardens. Here, in this light, they seem to glow:

Ukarumpa, being a high-altitude tropical place is, of course, a fern lover’s paradise. Here is a typical hillside:

I particularly enjoy the colours of this one:

Here is another shot of the same hillside:

It’s ten in the morning on a holiday and I’ve been here since seven. I’m going home now to get ready to go up to Blueblood for party time.

Whooo-haaaah!

I’m running out of time today, so I’m going to throw a bunch of images at you with little comment. These are from my recent trip to The Papua New Guinea highlands near Madang. The base at Ukarumpa (SIL) was familiar to me when my son was attending high school. We made the 466 kilometre round-trip every three weeks.

Here are some lilies in someone’s yard:

Ukarumpa looks a lot like a little Kentucky town plopped down in PNG. Though it contains a variety of nationalities, it feels very American to me – no problem, if you like it. I prefer my surroundings a little less familiar and a little more exotic.

When I saw this little bush, I thought the leaves were pinkish. When I looked closer, I noticed that there were tiny red flowers between the bases of the leaves. On the flowers are tinier black bugs crawling around:

The entire image above is only about three centimetres.

Here is a nice yellow flower without much special appeal, except, if you look at the small white dot to the upper left of the centre you will see a scale insect: (click to enlarge)

These captured my attention for their intense colour. There was no sun when I took this shot. The colours were so bright that they overload the capacity of the camera. They nearly overload the capacity of my eyes also. Like the old Jerry Seinfeld joke, “You don’t stare at it, you get a sense of it and look away”.

Here is a nice, big, juicy yellow spider for you:

It was about the size of a golf ball, nowhere near as big as I’ve seen elsewhere. A hand-sized spider would not be unusual in the lowland rainforest.

What is interesting about this spider image is that you can see that it is ‘listening’ to its web:

It holds a special web filament that is connected just so to the rest of the web. This filament transmits any vibrations of prey landing on the net to the spider’s ‘ear’ leg.

I threw a hapless ant into the web. You can guess the outcome.

I know. I should grow up.

Well, it’s not difficult to see that I’m having trouble thinking this morning. I won’t get into the business about it not being Monday here – it’s Tuesday. I’m still catching up. However, on the way to work this morning (actually tomorrow morning, but . . .) I caught the sun sneaking up over the machinegun at Machinegun Point:

Here’s another interpretation of the same scene:

You know, I don’t really think that it’s a machinegun. I’ve had a fair amount of experience with military toys, so I’m not fooled by the colloquialism. It looks to me more like a small bore artillery piece such as are used for light shore defence. Anyway, it doesn’t make a bit of difference. It is a well-known landmark in Madang. You can see other images of Machinegun Point here, here and here.

NEWS FLASH! I just felt the whole building trembling and, having been here a long time, thought to myself, “Hmmm . . . earthquake.” That’s about as excited as we get when the ground turns to jelly. However, I was mistaken. Hearing the sounds of heavy machinery undoubtedly being operated by burly men chewing buai  (betelnut), I decided to go outside to make sure that nobody crashes into our building.

To my amazement, I saw that they are working on Lake Madang:

You can review the history of Lake Madang here, here and here. Of course, this work is not going to matter a bit if they don’t seal the surface and fix the drain to the sea. Whatever the outcome, I’m sure that it will be amusing.

While I’m in the random mode, I’ll throw in a shot of the morning market at Ukarumpa. We bought bags and bags of veggies and got about five kilos of highlands strawberries for K32. The strawberries from the highlands are incredibly sweet and flavourful. I’ve never tasted better anywhere in the world. If you are used to eating strawberries from a supermarket, it is shocking to bite into one of these little red devils:

The only things from the highlands that are less than perfect are the pineapples and the bananas. They both seem weak and tasteless compared to our coastal varieties. I had the camera tilted in the image above. That’s why it looks the way it does. Hey, it was early and cold.

I got a hundred or so images of flowers and bugs while walking around in the cold, so I’ll start to feed them to you a few at a time. (I can sense the anticipation.)

Here is a little white flower about the size of a small button. It’s easy to overlook the small things, but I walk slowly in the high altitude, so my eyes have plenty of time to find the tiny treasures:

It’s not quite as pretty when it turns to seed:

It just struck me that people are the same. When they go to seed, they may not be as pretty, but they are usually more interesting.

I only say that because I’m getting old. (Still searching for a heart of gold . . .)

Last Thursday, I did something that I’ve not done for several years. I drove a truck from Madang to Ukarumpa, near Kainantu, in the highlands near Madang. Old time PNG travellers will scoff at the mention of such a journey. “Samting nating!”, they will say (it’s nothing!). Well, I don’t enjoy the driving, but the scenery is exquisite. Here is an early morning shot coming up into the first mountains outside of Madang:

As you can see, the road above is paved. Only about fifty or sixty kilometres of the road is unpaved, though some of the paved parts are falling to pieces already. Here is part of the unpaved road:

You can see that it is rugged territory. I believe that the large pipe, stretching for many kilometres, is the tailings pipe for the Ramu Nickel mine. If I’m wrong about that, somebody let me know. I can tell you that there were many Chinese hanging around the work crews. UPDATE: This is not  the tailings pipe. This is the pipe that carries only the ore slurry to the processing plant. As I unerstand it, it the material is like liguid mud with the metal ore in it. If anybody was misled my my error, I apologise.

Here is an all too common sight along the road:

We stopped to see if anyone was injured. The people said no, so we got out of there quickly. Hanging around a fresh wreck is a good way to get caught up in a fight.

Sugar was king in the Ramu Valley, but land being put into production now is rapidly being grabbed by oil palms. There were many kilometres of road surrounded by newly planted oil palms. I remember when this was all kunai  grass. If fact, when we first started transiting the Ramu Valley in 1981 even Ramu Sugar was a fairly small operation:

When our son began to attend school at Ukarumpa, we travelled this road three times a month. It’s a 466 kilometre round trip. During the first couple of years there were twenty one rivers that had to be forded, because there were no bridges. Sometimes we had to wait half a day for water to recede enough to cross. I once lost a Suzuki jeep in a river. I got it back out and got it going, but the seats never did dry out completely.

Up at Ukarumpa, you are in the beautiful rolling ground of the mid highlands:

At the time we lived on the base there we had few security problems. Now the place looks like Fort Knox:

We once walked right from the house into the beautiful hills. This fence didn’t exist. It’s sad but true that PNG has changed so much.

However, there are happier things to come in the next couple of days:

Stay tuned for some highland colour.