Welcome to another day on of my Kokoda journey. Sorry for not posting in a few weeks but I got caught up in exams and SACs (yep, that's the story and I am sticking to it). Today I am going to go through Day 1 of my journey through Kokoda which was my second day in Papua New Guinea. After I finish posting about each day I will post up the parts of my diary that I can post (minus a few things and with changed names). We left the Crowne Plaza (the hotel we were staying in Port Moresby) into four groups which left at two separate times (first group and second group and then the third and fourth groups). I was in the first group which meant that I had to get up earlier than the other groups at around 5am to have our breakfast before we left to catch a small plane to the village of Kokoda where we would be starting our trek. I was really nervous this morning but had to force myself to eat something so I would have energy. I guess this is sort of funny as it was where we first started to have to force ourselves to eat anything since on the track you are so exhausted that you just do not feel hungry but you still need to eat something or you will be in trouble. We left the hotel at around 6:30 in the morning and made our way on the rule-less roads to the TropicAir shed where we were weighed (to work out the balance on the light air-craft) and then had to wait an hour before we were ready to go on the plane and fly to Kokoda. The following photos are of our road-trip to the airport which took about ten to fifteen minutes. We saw some interesting things in that time.
Then we arrived and these were the planes were greeted with. They were really small and so you felt every little jolt but it just made it that much more real as to what we were about to do.
This is me awkwardly entering the plane without realising someone was taking a photo.
Once we were in the air however, we were greeted with some amazing views. We were also given our first sight of what we would be hiking over for the next few days. It did not help my nerves but they were not as much of a problem by now as I had accepted it was going to happen and I was actually starting to feel a mix of excitement and anxiety (about the unknown of course).
This is Adventure Park in Papua New Guinea complete with a ferris wheel and a few other attractions.
The NO SMOKING sign had worn off on most of the windows so we knew that we were not allowed to moke, whatever that was ;)
There was a welcome party ready to greet us as soon as we touched down. Everyone was so welcoming that it took us all aback. No matter where we went, everyone was so friendly. I think that is one of the things that struck me about Papua New Guinea and I actually wrote that down on my Kokoda diary.
These pictures are of trees. Yes, we took pictures of trees but these are special trees. They still have bullet holes from the conflict between the Japanese and Australia during the Kokoda campaign. It was an awe-inspiring moment to see it still standing with remnants of battle around us. After we put our packs down we headed into the Kokoda museum but there are a lot of photos in there but I am not going to post any as it is something special that you can see when you go over there. I am also not sure culturally if they would like photos of something so special to some of them all over the internet.
We took a picture of this Kokoda District Court for our Legal Studies Teacher who we thought would appreciate it.
On this oval which was outside the Kokoda war museum there are memorial statues of the campaign. There are more pictures of these down below.
These are some closer shots of the gun-shots (see what I did there) in the trees.
This is the view from behind the memorial on the oval. It was raised on a hill overlooking the rest of the village and the Kokoda air-strip (the name of the village was Kokoda). Below this photo are some closer shots of the memorials on the oval.
After we spent a good thirty to forty minutes (I am actually not sure how long it was) of looking at the memorial at Kokoda we finally donned our packs and started on our Kokoda trail trek.
These trees were used to collect what we thought might be rubber. I am actually not too sure what it was but it was at the start of our trek.
This is on the road between the museum and the start of the track.
These are the arches that start the track. There are similar arches on the other side of the track too. We got photos under both of them but I am not posting them as I do not think people would want their pictures online.
This was a hut that was in a small village we passed through on our first part of the trek.
This was the view from our lunch-break spot we stopped for lunch. We spent about an hour here having our lunch and forcing it down. It was not so hard on the first lunch break but it got increasingly harder to eat anything as time went on.
We then continued our trek and walked through this amazing section of the track. It was fun to try and see where the track was because it was lost under the bushes but it was a fun game (yeah, we had to find fun anywhere we could to distract ourselves. Distractions were key.) anyway.
This was one of many amazing waterfalls that threaded through the track. Actually, we climbed up a few of these waterfalls during our trek.
This was our view to one side of the track, it was beautiful. The Kokoda Trail is one of the most beautiful places in the world and if you can stand the physical challenge, this is just one of the many rewards. Photos can not do Kokoda justice.
These are photos of some village children from our last break before we hiked our last hour into the camp site. It was a great sight as the sun was slowly setting behind the mountains which actually urged us on so we were walking in the least amount of dark possible.
Walking in the dark was certainly not fun and I fell off the edge at one point (one of my feet slipped off) but luckily I only fell to the ground and there was a porter to stop me from falling down the hill which would surely have ended in severe injury (if not death). I guess I was lucky it was not near some of the parts we would pass in the coming days because they were certainly much more dangerous and if you fell, you were dead.
Here is one of the village dogs that were more than happy to help us when we did not feel like eating. They enjoyed the trekkers I think for their leftovers as they were not really there for the company.
That was it for our first day on the trek. I am sorry it took me so long to post this but I was busy and then I was procrastinating. So sorry. See you soon (until I can write day 3 really)!
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