From the Air

I love to fly, especially in little planes, like the Cessna 206 I flew on from Port Moresby, the capital of PNG, to Ukarumpa last Friday. You fly much lower than a jet, and as a result get great views and a better chance at photos too.

During take-off: the Port Moresby International Airport. The international terminal is on the left and the domestic on the right.

After taking off from Moresby, you get a nice view of PNG's parliment building. It's styled after a kind of traditional spirit house (haus tamburan) from the Sepik area. Our linguistics library in Ukarumpa is also modeled after a haus tamburan with the sloping, pointed roof although not on the same grand scale. :-)

Continuing away from the airport, you get a view back toward downtown Port Moresby. It's in the distance, on the side of the little peninsula, sticking out into the ocean.

The land we passed over flying north following the coast is a flat plain, filled with rivers and other soggy spots.

I love to look at rivers when I'm flying and I thought this spot (a close up from the previous picture) was particularly interesting. The two (differently colored) rivers almost meet, but not quite!

As we continued to fly northwest, the land changed from floodplains to rolling hills and then steep mountains and back to hills. This is a Highlands village we flew over, fairly close to Ukarumpa. A lot of the sleeping houses are round or at least have rounded corners, while most near the coast are rectangular.

And now, we're almost home. I just barely missed my house in this close up of Ukarumpa. See the house just above the road that goes out of the picture on the bottom right hand side? That's my neighbors' house.