School holidays were upon us, and I thought I’d look for a holiday for me and the Not-So-Small-Child to go and spend 7 nights at a beach somewhere – preferably with decent snorkelling to be had. So I started looking at options like Airlie Beach, Magnetic Island, Lady Elliot, Tangalooma and was appalled by the prices… even for shoulder season. $200 a night, not including transport, transfers, or food? Meh. So I did what I usually do and went looking at cruises to see if there was anything good going to the South Pacific Islands – figured a short loop around Vanuatu and New Caledonia or Fiji might be nice, but instead found ourselves looking at 10 days to Papua New Guinea. Friends of ours were already booked to go and I found a great last minute price, so we decided, ‘Why not?’ Papua New Guinea it is.
I had no idea what to expect and for a change, the various cruise forums that I lurk on and help administer were a little vague on the details. P&O seem to have been going to PNG for a while now, but it’s a relatively new itinerary for Princess and there seemed to be scant little info available. I have some friends who went last year (with P&O) but they honestly weren’t much help… said, ‘there’s not much to do, we just went to the beach’. So I guess they weren’t really interested in any of the WWII history or cultural and anthropological experiences that these islands have to offer. I mean, culturally, this area is where the trail blazing anthropologist, Malinovski found his famous (and somewhat scandalous), free loving, Trobriand Islanders. This Milne Bay Province is where the Japanese suffered their first defeat at the hands of Australian ‘chocco’ soldiers in WWII as they engulfed the Pacific, like a plague of locusts. So, I was pretty confident we would find plenty things to do – as well as going to the beach to do some snorkelling!
There were a few things different about cruising to PNG compared to the other island that I guess would be useful to anyone who was considering doing this trip – the first being that a photocopy of you passport is required on boarding along with a PNG entry visa form, and these have to be stapled together before checking in. The reason I mentioned this, is we were being checked before entering the port terminal to make sure we had all these documents (this caused a line up), then being given our usual health questionnaires (which also causes a line up), and then being stopped by yet another port/terminal employee who was stapling our passport photocopy page onto the PNG entry visa form page (causing yet another line up)… If we had been instructed to staple the two documents together (passport page on front of visa entry page), perhaps we wouldn’t have had to line up so many times and it would only have been checked and stapled at one point. They created about three bottleneck points by not telling us what they needed in advance. So much for priority boarding huh?!
What’s the point having priority boarding when everyone has priority boarding? 😉