Mekim gutpela trip pinis

After much planning to leave at 6AM, we left at a 7:30AM - a matter of much consternation for me since the night before was Oktoberfest party at Andrew's and his home-brews had gone down quite well and I could really have done with that extra hour and half of sleep.

Road trip there was uneventful. It look around 3 and half hours and there were the customary buai breaks and one coconut water break as we got close to Lae.

It was hot. We got there at 12 for a 3PM start and all the stands were full - hell even all the shady spots were full. We sat in the sun with our t-shirts on our heads hoping for some rain, which seemed to have followed us everywhere except on this trip where it was needed. There was no water on sale and a few warm cans of coke and sprite had to do. There were a few spakmen doing their spak antics (I should do a post called the adventures of spakman).

The most memorable event was the buai spray. Think bay 13 except replace beer and urine with bottled buai expectorate. Some guy on top of the hill threw an open coke bottle filled with buai spit. A few people at the bottom of the hill copped it quite bad. One enraged gentleman not knowing who was to blame decided to take it out on the entire hill. He lobbed an open bottle of his own in to the crowd. This seemed like the start of one of these scenes from Asterix which results in the whole village being in an all out fish fight. Luckily another bottle of buai was not readily available and it ended at that.

Great game! Lahani (woot!) won 21-10. We got into it and cheered loud and proud.

The trip back took 6 and half hours as we stopped at the local vegie market, stocking up on watermelon, mangos and coconuts. A dense fog on the mountain slowed us all down to a crawl for about 40 mins which caused further delays. Overall, going was slow due to a large number of cars making their way back to Goroka on a single lane road.