The road to Madang from Lae starts on the Highlands Highway. We spent a couple hours on paved roads passing villages and plantations. The road was good. Mountains surround a very wide valley. Coconut, possibly coffee, palm oil, cattle, sugar cane were the main crops. Ramu Agriculture Limited was a large part of it, and after leaving the Highlands Highway on our right turn toward Madang, near Gusap there is a town at Ramu headquarters where we stopped for fuel and ice cream.
Purchasing ice cream, a guy in front of us held out his hand to the lady at the cash register for his change, and some of it slipped off his hand onto the counter, and one coin onto the floor. Obviously I couldn’t understand what was being said, but by the hard stare at the cashier he seemed quite upset. I bent over and picked the coin up off the floor and held it out for him, but he didn’t look at me, he just stared in the direction of the lady that dropped the coins. I set the coin on the counter, and I think I got distracted because I don’t remember the end of the ‘incident.’ I suspect it was embarrassing, and in PNG perhaps the men don’t handle embarassment well.
As we approached one market, I saw a road sign warning of an intersection in a curve, and as we made the curve to the right, the pavement ended. It had started raining earlier, and as the rain continued, their were little rivulets running in the ruts in the road. Miles of this dirt road as we climbed into the mountainous rain forest we needed to cross, with the road (the main road between two major cities) getting progressively worse. We had a few areas which were of concern early, but as we traveled, we gained more confidence that we were not going to run into problems, until we started down this big hill and saw several vehicles stopped near the bottom trying to come up, with a lot of folks – vehicle passengers and folks from the village by the road – standing around. They were quite clearly discussing how to get up the muddy hill past the rut we bounced/slid through on our way down. We had to come back this in a few days, so we wondered if we would be able to get up as well. But for now we were going down hill, and were able to make it, although the next several uphills were questionable, and we tag-teamed with a 4WD truck and a PMV as we traversed the next several miles to where road improvement was being made. The part of the road under construction, while soft and muddy on the sides, was in good shape and solid in the middle. Fortunately for us Charlie is an excellent driver and took all challenges and road obstacles extremely well. It pays to have an experienced, skilled driver.
Not much further on the improved road we started getting stretches of pavement, and it returned for good shortly before our final “road” adventure, a ford of about 75 yards across a river. It was a concrete roadway underwater, and although we did hit a pothole, we made it without a problem past the trucks that were parked off to the side where their operators were washing them in the river after completing the same muddy trek that we had just completed. After several more miles of small villages along the highway, we approached our destination city – Madang.
Hello
I will be going to Madang soon and most probably will rent a car. Do you know what fuel costs there ?
Thanks a lot for your kind answer
Bruno (Switzerland)