Papua New Guinea has intrigued me since I can remember. It is a wild and rugged place with over 700 languages spoken and the second largest island in the world. Many of the people are still living in small villages and growing their own foods in carefully tended gardens. Many of the bird species are endemic to this land and are found no where else on the planet. Most unique of these families of birds are the Birds of Paradise. Sir David Attenborough has famously called them the most romantic and glamorous birds in the world. Many clips of his adventures in PNG can be found on YouTube and here is just one of them (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK8qQvc4GsY&t=312s). I found a seven day birding tour that was run by an Australian company, Sicklebill Safaris, with long experience in PNG. They only run small groups that max out at six people. I reached out to my community and Ken Purdy, pictured above, answered the call. As it turned out this tour was going to be a private tour of just the two of us. I headed down from Maroochydore to Brisbane just after 9:45 in the morning and took a 45 minute bus ride followed by two trains lasting and hour and a half total. I was in the hotel room by 2PM and Ken joined me soon afterwards. He had landed at 6 AM and was touring the town while I was traveling south. I promised Ken a tasty sushi dinner and a green ant appetizer. We headed into town a bit later and took the train. We were immediately rebuffed at the sushi place, they had to close due to equipment failure. Then we headed to the "Death and Taxes" bar that has a wide variety of gins to get the green ant gin but they were out. They recommended we try Dr Gimlet, a bar that also has lots of gins. So we left and walked over only to be rebuffed again, no green ant gin. So at this point, I am feeling like my previous knowledge of Brisbane is not helping us at all. Leslie did some sleuthing on the old blog posts and found the place where we first had the green ant gin so off we went again. This time to Froggy's Hollow Saloon where they had a brand new bottle of Seven Seasons Green Ant Gin. We enjoyed a tipple and the bartender eventually fished out some ants for us to munch on. Next we went next door for some tasty dumplings. This capped off our night and we walked down to the river to catch a ferry. The ferries were on the Sunday schedule and since we had early flight we skipped the ferry and took an Uber back to the hotel.
I got the coveted front seat on the bus of leg #1
Sippy gets down indeed
Made it to the train station for leg #2
My train for the next 70 minutes
Mostly empty, but nice seats
The glass mountains passed by on the right
These mountains are volcanic cores that have not eroded due to the denser material
Leg #3 awaits
Another nearly empty train
The Lamington is a tasty snack with cake and coconut.
Australian Ibis
As seen by a hallucinating artist
You have to love self check in
Less than $100 a night and right next to the airport
Into Brisbane we go
Our favorite conveyor belt sushi place was closed, equipment malfunction
Dr Gimlet had green ant gin the previous night but not now
A very large selection but now what we want
Green and hard as stone
At the saloon they climb on the bar to reach the bottles at the top
Yum actual green ants from our gin for us to eat
Here it is Seven Seasons Green Ant Gin
Candles have been burning here since antient times
We made it down to the water but the ferries are running on Sunday hours and we decide to uber back
It has been 3 years and 37 days since we began our Migration
