Penda. Lovely again, even though I’ve been coming there a lot of times. Petra got introduced to how PNG people look at white people before we even reached Penda. Sometimes you get the feeling it’s the first time they’ve ever seen a white person. But when you’re taking a picture of them and then show them the miracle of digital photography, which is instant feedback on a screen, you get stormed.

And after this every other photo you try to take is followed and people try to get in.

It was getting dark when we came to Penda, but food was waiting for us. Petra was new to them so she had to explain who she was. After a good nights rest and a serious battle with a rat later we did a walk around the place. Here we took some pictures.

A wonderful day I have to say. I hadn’t been in that direction yet. The other thing we did was painting our faces in traditional pattern and paints. Black is charcoal and white is clay.

The fact that I now have a full beard helps the “bilas” come out better. In the evening the stories continued. Petra and I were doing a game of “flash a PNG person”, until she turned on me.

The next day (after ignoring the rat piss on our sleeping bags) we found a guy with a truck who was going to buy some wood for a house he wanted to build in Tambul. This is on the other side of the WHP. So we drove around all day with them and they set us off at my house.

So we also saw other villages and people who wanted to know whom this white woman was. Here a group of children are singing. Well, if they weren’t that shy they would have.