An un-usually exciting day.....

Last Monday I left for my first time training away from our home base of Sentani....two nights in Wamena (our future home) flying with Alan, one of our instructor pilots up there, learning a few of the ropes of our future base and the airstrips around it.

So it wasn't just an exciting day for me.  Heather had a filling fall out just before I left (along with a few other things happening that made it seem like the wheels were coming off the wagon!)  So she drove by herself for the first time ever here in Papua to get it fixed (proud of you honey!) (We've been practicing!).  Driving here is a whole different ball game.  But the big learning curve for her is also learning the stick shift.  So Shes' put in a lot of work and finally feels comfortable doing it by herself!

There she is a few months back when she first started practicing.  Ian routinely exclaims "Go Mommy!" from his car seat in the back while she's driving.  Parking lots like the one in the background are rare here....since most people drive motorcycles.  So we had to go to a local governmental complex to find this one to practice in.  Fortunately MAF has a few cars here that we share with the other MAF families that live here.

Anyhow the same day I left for Wamena, she drove up to have her filling replaced by herself.  The dentist is a local pilot who does dentistry too. Yep that's right. The options are pretty slim here!  Apparently he's got a great reputation though and apparently he did a good job.  My wife has become very brave!

So on my flight to Wamena, we had some very special cargo on board.  It was my first time ever carrying bibles printed in a native Papuan language!  I was very excited to find that out.  They were destined for an interior Bible school.  In this picture there's a couple of sixty pound packs of Bibles in the cargo bay below the pilot door.  They were surely the fruit of the labor of decades of work, probably by missionaries and locals who worked together to translate the Bible into that language (I dont even know what language they were in).

Of course we had a lot of other stuff on board besides that but I had to share that one!

So in the village of Aphalaphsli (say that three times fast!) on the way to Wamena, the weather started rapidly deteriorating.  We actually got passengers ready who were going with us to Wamena and took off and evaluated the weather from the air.  Here's some pictures as we circled the airstrip/village of Aphalaphsli evaluating the weather situation

My instructor pilot Alan flew and evaluated while I watched and grabbed some pics and video...and here's some of that video....

So it became evident that our paths out of the Aphalaphsli area were blocked with weather.  So we landed, and spent the night!  After waiting on the ground until about four thirty PM we "gave it up" knowing that we would have to be on the ground in Wamena at five PM.  We are not permitted to fly after sunset here for very good reasons...it's way too mountainous.

Fortunately the locals were excited that we were going to stay the night.  They were friendly and helpful.  I personally was super excited about this.  I had a suitcase with me since I was supposed to overnight in Wamena anyways (at the MAF guest house)...so I was well prepared.  My instructor Alan, however, felt differently since it was his wife's birthday.  Big bummer!  But a great example to me of a pilot making a safe decision despite a very strong desire to make it home.

And that shot is looking down the airstrip towards the "grumpy" weather that soon overtook us.

Amazingly, this village had a little cabin set up for situations like this!  They were very hospitable to us.  The guy in the picture above and a few others sat in the living room of the cabin with us and chatted in Indonesian.  They brought us coffee and went to work making us food.  We had baked ubi (some sort of root) and mie (ramen) and baked potatoes.  I realized how nice this was when the local folks themselves passed around un-cooked potatoes to eat!  

So this is the bed room we stayed in.

Pretty great that they had beds ready to go for us!  It was at 3000 foot elevation so the temperature was ideal...not too hot not too cold.  The sound of the hard rain on the tin roof would have been a great sleeping aide...but we both had a pretty bad night of sleep because of that coffee they gave us!  Well it was a good thing I found out LATER that this village was infamous for cannibalism several decades ago (of course not any more).  That brought to life a few of the jokes Alan shared back and forth with the locals the night before as we ate and chatted.  

So the next morning was beautiful, and we got an early start and carried the same passengers from the day before out to Wamena.  We had a good flight training day afterwards, going from Wamena to another interior village and back, but we kept it short because we were both tired from the poor night of sleep in Aphalaphsli.