Plenty Exercise!

(The man on the left is standing next to his vanilla plant. He pollinates the each flower by hand.)

One of the goals of POC is to whip us into better physical shape. We do A LOT of hiking here, some optional morning hikes at 6 am, and others are planned hikes that everyone participates in. Today we did a 2 ½ hour “walk about” around the mountain here at Nobnob (the name of the area where we are). We are had our first tok pisin lesson today, so as we walked along with our guide, we were constantly pointing at things, and asking how to say them in tok pisin. We hiked up to a place where one of the locals is starting a fish pond; he’s raising fish that he’ll eventually sell. It was quite the set-up he had, with trenches that he had dug, right in the middle of the jungle. We also hiked down to a nice spot at the creek, and took a minute to rest and wash our faces, but NOT TO DRINK, cause the creek water is not safe to drink. We are really enjoying the hiking, especially in this beautiful tropical environment. The trick is to drink PLENTY of water, due to the excessive sweating we do due as a result of the high humidity and the heat. Most of the PNG folk hike around the trails in bare feet like it’s nothing, but us “white skins” as they call us, still need a good pair of shoes for the trails around here!