On Wednesday, June 25, we ate breakfast (Cindy, Jeff, and I had two breakfasts) and then loaded up to head out of Jais Aben. After we paid the bill (they took Visa!) we had to go into Madang to the SIL guest house so Charlie could return some paperwork. In typical Charlie-Amie fashion, we had turned the van around and had gone about 50 feet when someone realized Kate wasn’t with us. Amie retrieved her from the bathroom in the office/restaurant building, and we were on our way to Madang.
We stopped at a market along the road to Madang, and Amie, Krista, and Cindy went in to buy some <a coconuts at Rose’s request (Rose is their haus-meri and friend.) During the stop, a couple of girls came by and gave suckers to the remaining Brown children, and chatted with us for a few minutes. The younger girl, who seemed really thrilled to be engaged with us, was from Kainantu, which is the district capital about seven miles from Ukarumpa. She didn’t seem to speak English when she first came by, and had come back with an older friend (or relative) who did speak English. This friend, who was probably 13 or 14 years old, spoke English, and asked where we were from. Jeff responded from “The United States,” and then “Ukarumpa – SIL.” The younger girl lit up and repeated “SIL!” The older girl told us that she was from Madang; her father from “the islands” and her mother from Madang. We continued to chat for a few minutes, and then the girls bade us farewell and disappeared into the market crowd.When Amie and crew came out of the market, we moved on to the SIL guest house. The SIL guest house is on the ocean near downtown Madang. SIL has guest houses in many of the major cities in Papua New Guinea for the use of their members. To recoup some of the operational cost of the facilities, in order to reduce the expense for the missionaries, they also rent out rooms to other people. After Charlie dropped off the paperwork, we left there and then made the left turn on the road back toward Lae and the Highlands.
As we left Jais Aben, we had stopped along the dirt road leading to the resort. Charlie asked one of his children, Chase, to pray a real “faith prayer” for our trip back across the mountains. It had rained significantly each of the nights we had been at Jais Aben, including a loud storm the last night. The road across the mountain, as reported earlier, had some real steep, slippery, rutted sections, one where a number of PMV’s and other vehicles had stopped at the bottom to try to get over. Since we did not have four-wheel drive, we knew a wet road would be a problem. The Lord prepared the way for us, and as we traveled past the end of the pavement, it became clear (well, in the dust, not so clear at times) that it hadn’t rained here in the rain forest for a couple of days, and with a few exceptions, the road was dry.
The ruts were deep from the prior rains, but with Charlie’s excellent driving, aided by following a PMV van which showed us where to go to avoid the worst ruts, we made good time. There were a couple of places where we had to stop for one-lane sections which were under repair and/or reconstruction, including an upgrade which was “a gift of the Australian government.” In spite of what I thought was a very fast pace, we were actually passed by two or three 4WD, high ground clearance vehicles. We made a stop for a “bathroom break” at one point, and one of these vehicles stopped to warn us that we were parked in a bad spot if some fast-moving vehicle came around the bend. Interestingly, there were a couple of decent stretches of paved road along that mountain stretch. We couldn’t figure out a pattern of why they were there – if at one time the entire road had been paved, or if they just picked a couple of stretches to pave. While there were three cell towers along the route, and a power line also followed the route (or did the route follow the power line?) the pavement didn’t seem to be associated with them.
We finally came over a hill and could see the big Markham Valley ahead. A short time later we got back to permanent pavement, and as we entered the valley, at the intersection of the road to Osino (one of the few notable intersections on the highway to Madang) we saw a market with watermelons, so we stopped to see if they were worth the purchase. Amie checked them out and she thought they were too expensive, so we moved on. We made good time up this beautiful valley, waving at the nationals as many waved back, and groups of 
children whooped cheerfully at us. I really enjoyed that stuff. We made one more bathroom break along this stretch of highway, where Charlie found a pepper bush. He picked about a dozen of the small, very hot peppers for the salsa he makes. We eventually made it through the very smelly developed area near Gusap, where the headquarters of Ramu Agriculture Company is located, and moved on toward the Highlands Highway.
There were several fires along the valley. Many of these are intentional fires set to clear areas for crops/gardens. There was one along the highway that seemed to be an unintentional fire. It was very interesting that the kites (hawk-like predatory birds) were working the edge of the fire looking for the small animals that the fire flushed out. There was another large fire up at the base of the mountain which looked like it had burned several hundred acres. This smoke put a haze along the bottom of the mountain for miles.
We made the right turn at the Highlands Highway at Watarais and started up toward the steep climb up the mountain. Just before the start of the climb, we spotted the ‘village’ I had seen on Google Earth. It was distinctive due to the semi-circular layout of the buildings in a big curve in the road. It turns out this wasn’t a village, but seemed to be some sort of commercial center.
The drive up the mountain matches any of the steep, curvy climbs in the Smokies, with one major exception – no guardrails. Here we are climbing toward a very sharp curve, and I’d look off the road to the left. It was obvious that running off the pavement in many places would mean a very steep, tumbling fall down hundreds of yards. There were also two or three stretches where “landslips” had destroyed the pavement, where there would be a 50-yard or so stretch of gravel. We stopped at a pulloff near the top to make some photographs, and then headed on up another few kilometers (see – I didn’t put it in miles) to Kassam Pass.
After Kassam Pass, we started a relatively gentle descent into Yonki valley, the home of the Yonki dam and lake, a major supplier of electricity not only for the Eastern Highlands area, but also for Lae. In the Highlands, more of the homes are round rather than the rectangular homes we saw in the valley and over to Madang. For some reason, the people also seemed less friendly to us as we passed by, but that was probably more that whiteskin travelers are more frequently encountered along the Highlands Highway than along the road to Madang, and so we weren’t so much of an oddity. We stopped in Kainantu for diesel in the van, and then at a market so Charlie could pick up some peanuts for the kids. Kainantu was very crowded and seemed more chaotic to me, perhaps simply because it was so crowded. I was also advised that while we were parked in the market to keep my camera out of sight so as not to provide a temptation. There were some men who seemed more hostile than we had experienced in Madang, and fewer that were ready to smile in response to my nods and smiles.
As we left Kainantu, we crossed the bridge which had been closed previously since all but a few feet of the pavement approaching the bridge had been washed out in a heavy rain several months ago. The washout had been refilled with gravel (crusher run we call it in the US) and well packed, making it secure. We climbed out of Kainantu and headed down into the Aiyura Valley toward Ukarumpa, the village including the SIL headquarters. We passed through the coffee fields which provide coffee to Starbucks, and saw the Aiyura (JAARS) airfield, before crossing the bridge and passing the guarded gates into the SIL facility in Ukarumpa, and making our way through the quite western-looking town to Dorelo, the hostel where the Browns are stationed.