Pinging from Papua to PNG and back

Jayapura - Vanamo,
Indonesia & Papua New Guinea
6th January

With our Indonesian visas about to expire and attempts to extend them thwarted by pain-in-the-ass immigration office staff in Manado and Sorong, we realised we had to make a trip into Papua New Guinea or fly out of the country at great cost (we had almost got as far down as Australia now!). But getting to PNG involved a stressful application at the nation's consulate near Jayapura.

In a lucky bit of web research, I had previously discovered that the consulate will make you pay much more for 'business' visas if they think you are only entering the country to get a new Indonesian visa. With four of us, it's around £66 just for the normal tourist visas, and they would have bumped it up to over £400 if they could! That was money we couldn't afford to lose.

At the consulate, we met a nice guy called Tom McElroy from the US, whom we travelled with for a few days. He hadn't known about the scam and told them he was doing the visa run. He got stung for the full whack, and that after having had his credit card stolen and being on very low funds. He was naturally gutted when we told him. Perhaps we should have kept schtum =0

Forearmed with the vital knowledge, I created a fake tourist itinerary to 'prove' we were real tourists wanting to dive a famous WW2 wreck down the coast. They accepted that, though gave us limited visa as we didn't have plane tickets for onwards travel. Still we were in on the cheap. Next stop Vanado, PNG.

To cut a boring story short, we got a taxi up to the border and a minibus down the other side. Vanado was pretty, had seriously great surf, and the betel-nut-chewing locals seemed very chilled out. But PNG was shockingly expensive - with first world prices for hotels. So we stayed one pleasant night in the cheap local church mission guest house and scooted back over the border the next day, once we had our new Indonesian visas.

What a great feeling to have our next 60 days of travel safely stamped in our passports. Now we were free to head back top Papua and the Baliem Valley - a land that time almost forgot.