Snorkeling with Christians and hello Wewak. 7 July

Today we snorkel with the Christian missionaries we met (Tim and Wendy Freeze) from Ukarumpa, see a stonefish at the Madang Lodge, later find out that PNG Prime Minister Michael Somare is meeting with someone today at the Madang Resort (probably to sell of rights to the forests and oceans and wreak further havoc on the environment) have lunch at the Lighthouse restaurant.  Snorkel with the Tim, Wendy and their kids again at an island off of Madang (name?) then come back to the mainland for a light lunch at Krangket Harbor.   Wonderful!   Everything fried in oil (probably palm oil) of course, but I guess that's probably a good way to kill all the nasties that are almost certainly infesting the food.   Fried bananas (2 or 3 different types, some sweet, some not) taro, and yellowfin tuna.   Rachel and I shared everything... it was absolutely delicious, and the whole thing cost around $3 for the 2 of us.

We get a boat to the island, and I pay for the lot of us to go, around 30 kina (there's just one price for the whole boat, doesn't matter how many people we have) so the Freeze family comes along for free.   We learn later that there's a 5 Kina per person charge to use the island, so Rachel and I pay our share.   The island has a nice little bay which deepens at the end, and then we make a right turn to go around the side of the island.   Here the coral reef is the best we see of anywhere we snorkel in PNG... absolutely stunning.  

Later we meet 2 young (20 years old or so) French Canadian girls, whose names are Marianne and Bernadette, I think.    They were some of the very few tourists we ran into, and Rachel and I are both somewhat alarmed to hear they are traveling around PNG alone, after a stint of teaching English-as-a-second-language in Japan.  I'm hearing sirens and warning bells in my head when they announce they want to go to freakin' Lae for four days.   Yikes!  Are they both completely mad?   Then from there they plan to catch some dice-y boat to one of the islands.   We've heard that Lae is nearly as dangerous as Port Moresby.   I had read in my Lonely Planet guide that Lae was the one place that has a good zoo in PNG, called the Rainforest Habitat.   These girls also read the same book, and are planning to go there.   In fact that's the main reason they want to go to Lae.   Sadly, I find out from Jim Thomas a few days later that the Rainforest Habitat is now defunct, and all the animals have either died or been shipped elsewhere.   I feel terrible for these girls, and I hope they made it around PNG and home ok.  (When I returned back to California, I emailed Wendy and inquired after the two girls, and found that they had a grand time in PNG, and did not, mercifully, encounter any problems.)