You can see the village we had arrived in yesterday; that faint line in the green field slightly to the right of the buildings is the airstrip. Looking at this now, I notice how very high we already were; but there was a lot further to go, so after photos we kept on moving.

The ferns soon disappeared and the major climbing was done. The land flattened out into a plain; we walked along the edge of it. At the next rest point, I heard voices coming from behind – and was rather surprised when a group of 10 or so people chugged up to us. The day before we’d met a German tourist who was planning on coming up with his wife, but I hadn’t heard anything about a big tour group. And I confess I was somewhat horrified – and amused: you should have seen the hiking gear they had! They had been shopping: ankle-to-knee braces, plastic walking sticks (one for each hand), huge backpacks (though they were only staying, like us, for a few hours of one night; some had hired local women to carry the backpacks up, j has a classic shot of a woman bearing the weight of a backpack in a bilum over here**), one woman was wearing lycra hotpants which frankly just covered her buns, several had those specialised drinking-contraptions-with-hose (that, what, professional bike riders use?!), and I think it was lycra-shorts who had a gps and only paused to shout out how high we were before power-walking onwards.

They said hi but didn’t pause, and so we began walking at the end of their line. J was itching to overtake them, and soon enough we did, reaching the huts before them. The huts were at one end of a large lake. The tour group were staying in the a-frame hut (yes it was an a-frame and on its side, in case you couldn’t analyse that visual information, was written ‘a-fram’), and we were staying in the second hut, which was a couple of hundred metres away from the a.