After just 5 days of jungle living it already felt like we were living off a very restricted diet, so when Adam suggested we visit the yacht club, the only decent ex-pat food serving establishment, we jumped at the chance. The "lot" burger then became the topic of many conversations for the next 2 months and was, in fact, what dreams were made of! After this brief taste of familiarity and an epic and slightly desperate sweep of the supermarket, we loaded all our stuff, wheelbarrow, cement and all into 3 banana/long boats and set off for the picturesque village of Salamaua. The boat trip was amazing, and the scenery dramatically different to the jungly environment of the last 5 days. I got my first glimpse of the amazing cloud formations I came to recognise as one of the most beautiful things about this country, not to mention the crazy flying fish all around us! The village marks the start of the Black Cat track and would be the portal for any trips to Lae and the location for our mid project "spring" break. It lies on a spit of land with the guest house being located on one side and a beautiful paradise of a beach on the other. We stayed at the guesthouse for 2 nights, enjoying our last taste of alcohol and sausages for some time while we were there.... We also spent a lot of time playing in the sea, something else we would not get to do once we reached the project site! We got to know Mittie, the manageress of the guest house, who over time, became very much a "mum" figure to us and looked after us well.

On the Friday we moved all our stuff up to Kamiatum village. It was our first proper trek with our packs which seemed ridiculously heavy, but then we'd all found it hard to limit what we packed, given it had to contain our lives for the next 6 weeks! Unfortunately we had to do the trek on a stupidly hot day and by the time we'd loaded everything up and set off at about 9am we were already dripping with sweat. The trek itself is not hard, there aren't any hills and it theoretically only takes 2 hours - the locals do it in less and bare foot! - but we were not trekkers, and by the time we'd negotiated 5 river crossings and had several cooling off swims, we'd already been going for over 4 hours. We finally turned off the main river and up the dried river bed to the village. We gradually came across more and more people, who welcomed us - and stared lots - as we past. We then reached the "camp", which in its current state was merely an overgrown vanilla and cocoa plantation. At this stage we all flaked so we sat down for a much needed tuna and beef cracker lunch, before attempting to set up camp. We were fairly happy with ourselves, but my respect goes to the guys who lugged up the 40kg bags of cement - and managed to keep them dry! After lunch we got our first taste of how overly helpful the locals would become. Every time you'd start a task, macheteing the undergrowth for your basha for example, you would make a few feeble hacks at some stalks, turn round and the whole area would be cleared out! At the time I found it quite frustrating, but in hindsight it would have taken us about a year to achieve what they helped us achieve in a couple of hours! As we hung hammocks, put in stakes for bashas and generally organised our lives we became aware of more and more people entering the camp until there were hoards of locals just watching us. The kids were really cute, this is when we first met Absalon, who was 5 and was Steve the Councillors son, who became a good friend over the trip. On the first day the camp was quite makeshift, but over the next 2 days we gradually made it more comfortable - with a lot of help from the locals! My main task was the building of the hut type thing over the long drop toilet with the help of Justine first and then Angus. Some of the local girls, Any, Yarro and Stella came to teach us how to weave sago palms into walls which was really fun, apart from the splinters! They also arranged the delivery of lots of sago - which had been our main problem as we didn't know where to find it, or if it was free for the taking! When the boys also tried to come and help they were shouted away amidst a lot of giggling from our helpers - apparently this was girls work! I was constantly finding all my big ideas for stuff we could build (all ideas I got during jungle training) were being thwarted by not having enough of the materials I needed - it was lots less jungly here!

On the Sunday we paid a visit to the church after the service so Adam could introduce us and we could be welcomed into the village. This is where I met Mark, a 5 month old baby, who became "my" baby throughout the trip, he was so cute and chubby, he was my favourite! We were presented with loads of food including a guinea fowl egg, which we treasured and the use of which was discussed at great length! We asked the locals to give us some privacy as until now they had been walking into our camp whenever they felt like it and it it was quite stressful being stared at 24/7. I'm not sure how they took this, especially as it was translated by Steve into ewal so we have no idea what he said. My fear of alienating the whole village was then compounded as Tim - who seemed to have appointed himself as our personal helper - then stood up after Steve and appeared to have another go at them! uncomfortable.....!

After a weekend of settling in, we started work on the project - the toilet. None of us were too keen on this being our project, it seemed kind of irrelevant and not exactly life changing, but once we'd had the concept explained it seemed a bit more worthwhile. It was part of a plan by the TPA - tourism promotion authority - to boost the number of trekkers on the Black Cat, which would lead to more money coming into the local village communities. The track is a lot less trekked than the Kokoda trail from Port Moresby yet it has equal if not greater historical significance. So last years group built a guest house up near the other end of the track but our village already had the guest house, just no toilet facility, so that was deemed the next most useful thing to build. The design we were using was for a ventilated improved pit latrine - or VIP latrine! It had been used a lot in Africa but this was to be the first of its kind in the South Pacific and thus a model for toilets everywhere!!

We decided on the location for the toilet, then Angus, Paul and I set about digging the hole. The aim was 3m which with projected trekking figures was supposed to be deep enough to last for between 5 and 10 years. The digging was the best bit, the others were sent off to start rock collection so we could build a rock wall around the edge of the hole, not dissimilar to a boundary wall in Yorkshire! we started off digging all together but as the hole got deeper it became a 1 man job, and as it got deeper still it became a bucket job with each person filling 5 buckets before climbing out using a ladder. By this time the rest of the group had joined in the digging and with everyone doing 5 (Angus and Adam doing 10 to prove their manliness) the job was pretty quick. Digging continued for most of the day, with the ground getting rockier as we got deeper, but it was interrupted early when I hit the water table at about 2 m. It was decided this would have to be deep enough, 3 m was just an ideal, so we stopped there. We got back to find Claire had baked potato cakes or "blobs" using our precious egg which were amazing!

The next stage of the project was quite dull as it included a lot of materials collection - sand, gravel and stones. Luckily all were available from the river bed, but the sand was not very good quality, the gravel was mixed up with a lot of dirt and the stones had to be a particular shape so none of these jobs was quick! On the Wednesday Tom and I had our first admin day which involved looking after the camp - collecting water, cooking/washing up etc. I was already grumpy after a bad nights sleep and the knowledge we really didn't have much fire wood or water from the previous day, but everything went pretty smoothly. The fire lit like a dream, almost I'd say, like a "how to light a fire" demo! There was almost enough water - at least to do porridge, but then I realised we hadn't enough for the guys to fill their bottles so I had to do a quick run to collect some (Tom had wrecked his feet on the walk up from Salamaua so was a cripple). Porridge went to plan, we then moved the fireplace as it had been smoking out the whole camp in its current position, then morning popcorn - again went amazingly smoothly. For lunch we made flat bread which Tom proved himself to be king of, which we dry fried, and we made a kind of pizza topping with tomatoes, pitpit and chilli and did fried plantain for the top. It was pretty good! The afternoon was annoying as the group had no work to do on the site - the cement foundation was drying - so they sat and played monopoly all afternoon while Tom and I slaved over the first batch of pan fried scones and guava jam. Both again amazing! The only place we slipped on the first admin day ended up being dinner, which was supposed to be a veg curry thing but ended up a curried veg soup as the veg cooked too quickly!

The day after admin was horrible. I'd had really bad earache and hadn't really slept all night so I was grumpy again. Adam and Justine left for Lae as she had had a sore back since the trek that needed checking out so we felt like the group was being split up! I was dosed up with drugs and then was just about ok to go to work. The project continued, we were laying the wall round the bottom of the hole, taking it in turns to do a level. The first person in in the morning would generally have to rescue a frog that had fallen into the hole, before starting with the cement! The wall slowly started to take shape, but we were quite relieved when Tim suggested we join in with sports day - on a Friday all the locals go and have a football and volleyball tournament - so we could have a day off! We were already so happy to adjust our weekend and work Sunday - anything to get out of gravel collecting! Unfortunately I'd already volunteered to go to the market at 6am so I didn't get a lie in, instead I trekked the 15 mins down the river bed to find, not as hoped for, a vast array of amazing veg and local handicrafts, but a few tables of potato, greens and pitpit and one plate of interesting fried things. These were a fantastic luxury but lasted about 2 seconds, and were then gone! I used the extra time before breakfast to make some bread alongside the porridge, which we ate with my peanut butter I'd bought in Lae - luxury! Once we got the signal from Tim, we headed off down the river to a place at the bottom of the village where we found a full size football pitch, complete with corner flags, goal posts and linesmen waving banana leaves for flags - surreal! The players were even weirder, some wore football boots, some were bare foot and some wore one boot and had one bare foot! It emerged that we would not be playing as a team, the 6 boys would get 5 locals to join their team and the girls would get some local girls to join us. The day was quite fun, but we spent most if it sitting around not playing, and only got one game each, during which it was so muddy I was constantly falling on the ground and ended up looking like I'd been mud wrestling! We finished the day with a game of volleyball at which we were much better before heading back up to camp. We had decided on Friday being chicken day, so the boys were assigned the task of killing two chickens whilst we went off to bath. Unfortunately when we returned they were still alive and in fact did not prove as easy to kill as the original chickens. Finally the deed was done and we ate roasted chicken with potato and pumpkin mash, giant beans and the most amazing gravy I've ever made!

My admin day the following week fell again on a day when the others had no work to do - typical. We instead paid a visit to the local primary school, where they would be doing part of their teaching and where all the local kids we'd met attended. It took us nearly 2 hours to walk there and included crossing the main river, something the kids do at 6 every morning! We had a good look round the classrooms, most of which were teacher-less and the kids just had set exercises to do on the blackboard, we could see the need for volunteers! The kids were all lovely and very excited to have us there. I was amazed to find the older ones studying things like photosynthesis - all in English as well! After looking round we were all given a coconut to drink/eat and some watermelon before trekking back to camp.

The project continued all week, more wall building, more gravel collecting, more post work volleyball with the kids (they were better than us), by the weekend we were grateful for a break. Saturday, however, turned out to be a bad day for me, where it seemed the World was conspiring against me. The morning was pretty uneventful, we did our washing in the stream as normal and left it out on the rocks to dry, chilled out, sat in the baking heat - 49 degrees in the Sun! - and basically relaxed. In the afternoon Claire and I decided to make scones, which involved going up to "Crazy" Steve's house to buy some dry coconuts and guavas, not a problem as he sent Any and Brian to nip up the trees like monkeys to pick some for us! Once we had these I set about my first attempt at coconut prep unaided. It took about an hour, I blame my blunt machete! The husk did not want to come off, but finally we opened it, scraped it (lacerating my hands on the scraper in the process), squeezed the pulp in water and strained the milk. Then we made scones, and whilst cooking I managed to burn both my legs on the pan - ouch. To make matters worse, I was then hit on the head by a baby coconut falling from the tree, whilst helping to skin a chicken for dinner. I was pretty lucky ,it just hurt lots, rather than kill me, but it fell from a pretty tall tree so I still had a nasty headache for the rest of the day! The disastrous day ended with a tree falling down between mine and Callum's hammocks at 3 in the morning! If it had fallen in my direction, I would have been convinced the world was against me, but it fell in his, and luckily got caught on the way and ended up hovering about a foot over his basha! There then followed an hour during which Adam and Alex removed the tree and helped Callum relocate his basha, whilst Claire and Alicia sat under my hammock - prime viewing spot! - to watch the action.

The Sunday was much better. Us girls all went with Paul "the medicine man" and his wife Esther to help in their garden. We weeded for a while, before harvesting some peanuts and cooking bananas and going back to their house to cook lunch. This was briefly interrupted by Claire gashing her hand on a knife and having to run home for some first aid from Andre. It was a very PNG day! In the afternoon the local women helped us make grass skirts out of sago for Adam's birthday party the following week and then made us put them on and dance PNG style to their drum. I felt a bit like a performing animal, as by the time we were dancing, there were at least 50 locals watching and laughing hysterically!

There were just 3 days of work this week before we were to head back to Salamaua for our mid-project break. Monday saw the pouring of the concrete which was quite a fun day and we all got involved in mixing and shovelling. It was the most physical work we'd had in weeks. I got a bit carried away with the cement mixer imitation when Angus and I got into a really got mixing rhythm, but ended up feeling my wrist go and had to stop which was disappointing. More and more I'm realising my masochistic tendencies...! I was starting to struggle a bit emotionally today too so in the evening I headed down to the phone signal with Adam to contact home. Quite an adventure in the dark, walking 20mins or so down the river bed, through streams, over logs and ending up walking along the stream before a sharp climb up a muddy hill with a steep drop to one side and arriving at a house, where you can stand in an approx 2m square and point your phone across the valley to get one bar of signal. It was great to hear from family though and that cheered me up no end. Unfortunately the wet walk did my leg burns no good and they were all opened up and disgusting for days!

On Wednesday we went and finished our outfits for the party. All the women got involved and made various herby smelling necklaces and bracelets for us and gave us bilums to wear as tops. The boys had not yet sorted their costumes, so ended up getting the women to help them too. once we were all dressed they made us do a mini sing sing and dance around the volleyball court. Priscilla had brought Mark up to watch and he was also dressed up in a really cute PNG outfit with grass skirt (no nappy of course!) and dog tooth head band - adorable!

Thursday saw an early start - 5am - for our trek back to Salamaua. Not that it mattered, the heavy rain all night had meant I hadn't really slept anyway, worrying that everything would be soaked and I'd be lugging a double-weight soggy backpack down the river! The rain brings out the flying ants too, which can squeeze through the mossie net holes, so I normally played the "how many can you squash in your book?" game when they congregated round my head torch - all very well when its your own book, but you have to remember not to play the game when reading borrowed books!

It wasn't the most fun walk, I had a bit of "the trench" going on with my feet and open burns on my ankles which really hurt, and 4 hours in sodden socks and boots really doesn't help feet recover! So I headed out on a very grumpy and painful trudge down to Salamaua, kept going only by the thought of no jungle boots for 3 whole days when we got there and the party the following night!!