One more trip...

Sandy sat his PNG Air Law exam on Thursday and did really well with a 90% - the other two new pilots also passed, so everyone was very relieved and happy. This week Sandy and the other new pilots had a week of orientation at the hangar and operations. The last of the orientation ground work. Soon the flying begins.

Our new home in Mt Hagen is a lovely big four bedroom house on a compound in town. We live next to two other expatriate families, and three national families. Rachel and Megan have a great big yard to play in, complete with tree house, jungle gym and lots of friends. It is wonderful to be in our own home again.

All our drums of household goods are on their way from Melbourne. It should be here in about 6 week’s time. It comes to Lae by ship, and then trucked up to Mt Hagen from there. In the meanwhile we are using what is called the ‘survival kit’, household things that belong to MAF. As you can see from the pictures, we have just the basics and the house is very empty. We can’t wait until our stuff arrives and we can make it into a real home.

Tomorrow, our family (and the two other new couples) will be flying back to Cairns. On Monday we will FedEx our passports to Brisbane where our PNG visa and work permits will be stamped into them, and then sent back to us. (We can’t just FedEx them from here because we need to enter PNG on our new visas – we are currently on visitors visas.)

So we are looking forward to some serious shopping while in Cairns. It has been really good to see the shops here and see for ourselves what is available and what is not. We can stock up on certain food items and some extra house stuff while we are in Australia.