This little piggy

I went to Pig Island yesterday for the first time and I wish I hadn't left it so long. It is stunning. Apparently it used to be a leper colony and they shipped a bunch of pigs out there for the lepers to live off. If you have to get exiled somewhere, there would be many worse places in the world.

Interestingly, getting from Madang to any of the surrounding islands is an easier task than getting around in town. We just went down to the wharf near the resort and took a PMV (a public boat) after negotiating a price to take the 6 of us out there (about $10 one way) and for them to come and collect us later.

The engine on our boat only cut out once on the way and once on the way back, but our happy drivers weren't phased in the slightest and we just bobbed pleasantly around for a while till they managed to get it going again.

It is a beautiful feeling to get taken out over clear blue waters to a pristine island and be dropped off with the expectation and hope that your ride home will show up later. We agreed they would come back at 3 pm, and fully expected to be there until maybe 4 pm, so we were actually very disappointed when they showed up bang on time. A rare and in this case unwelcome occurrence!

Still, we had enough time to lie on the beach, explore the island, swim, and have a picnic.

The only excitement came when Liz reported that she has been snorkelling with Bruno but he had disappeared. Sarah, Liz and I went off to see if we could find him and we came across a smouldering fire... leading to all sorts of wild, Lord of the Flies-type speculation about whether we might find his rotting head on a stick....

Thankfully he appeared unscathed, as we all went to great personal trouble searching for him by swimming around in the crystal clear waters, searching for fish (oops, no for Brunos!) Though I did cop a rather nasty coral scratch in the process of the search - good thing I'm not litigious! ;)

This was the rather terrible view I had for my siesta....... I hope you are all feeling suitably sorry for me...