Runners

Here's the new singlet for the lihir runners, with a silhouette of the late, great dog rooster on the back.

They've been put to the test on the last few Wednesday and Friday evening runs.

And lasted the distance all the way back to townsite and pikinini park.

Which are above and below if you were wondering what they looked like!

Pizza oven.... complete!

After a few months of weekend pizza oven building, Stu's pizza oven is complete and ready for everyone in the town to use. 

Actually it has already had a couple of test runs and we can safely say it works like a charm. Even hundreds and thousands and banana and brown sugar pizzas taste good coming out of it.

Possibly the pizza oven with the best view in the world. Or at least the South Pacific.

One of the many things that we'll miss when we move on from Lihir this month to start our new life in Mt Isa!

Mumu time

Here's a few photos of our recent mumu that we did out the front of our place, put together by Eli.

Never have sweet potato, taro or bananas tasted so good. 

              

Once the food has been wrapped in banana leaves, it gets put under hot stones for hours (or overnight if you need to cook a pig or a cow).

Really labour intensive. But so worth it for the roasted, caramelised vegies. Thanks Eli, Susan and Evelyn for all your mumu skills.

Goal achieved.........a ride around the island

The one thing I wanted to do before we left the island was to circumnavigate it on two wheels. Not too hard to find your way, because apart from a few little tracks inside the middle, it's just one big loop of a road. Or a wider gravel-ly track that calls itself a road but is a bit gauged out in places with a few creek crossings and plenty of sharp steep hills (not one for the little old subaru). After a recent drive around the island after lots of rain lately, the roads were looking particularly worse for wear, which was playing on my not-completely-bike-fit mind a bit in the preceeding days.

Anyhow, goal achieved a couple of weeks back as a group ride to promote White Ribbon Day and PNG's new Family Violence Law, where domestic violence has actually become illegal (coming in line with the Sorcery Law where you can still be charged for sorcery-like activity). 

Setting off slowly and nervously at the crack of dawn (to try and dodge the heat as much as possible), I was a little nervous about my ability to get up all those bloody big hills. But 70-odd km's, 10 litres of water (and a few sneaky electrolyte and caffeine tablets), 14 very steep gravel-covered hills (having to walk up 4 of them), passing through countless villages where everyone seemed to be gathering before and after church (and for some of the more energetic of the parishoners, running alongside us and slapping us on the bums), and finishing off with a surreal ride through the blazing midday heat of the mine (at which point I felt somewhat delirious and asked a riding companion if she thought the brown sludge being conveyor-belted along the way resembled Willy Wonker's Chocolate Factory), we made it! Goal achieved. And it was great to see the island from a bit of a different perspective than a Landcruiser window at speed.