Photos by Dan Segal, Emele Ugavule, Ruth Joseph and Ngaire.

It was Dan. I’ll just go ahead and say it. He was the one we had to leave behind After months of my travel agent Shaunagh’s constant reminding to check our passport expiry dates we still missed the information that you needed to have at least 3 months on your passport to expiry date from the day you leave the country. Kill me. My heart sank like a sack of shit. What do we do now? In that moment? Nothing. We left him at the check in counter and had to continue on our journey while he raced to the immigrations center to see if he could get a new passport IMMEDIATELY. The likelihood of that seemed really bloody slim and I was convinced of that all the way to Port Moresby, preparing myself to feel lousy for the first couple days of the trip. But I was wrong. Someone was looking out for us because he managed to steam roll his way through immigrations and was on the next plane out of Sydney within 24 hrs with a shiny new passport.

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We were in Moresby for about 2 or 3 nights awaiting the arrival of both Dan and Emele who had to wait for a Theatre she’d been working on to finish before we headed to our first proper destination - Goroka. We arrived to considerable fanfare. We were received by two sing-sing groups (cultural dance groups). One greeted us at the airport and another at the 6mile community where both groups danced and sang us all the way down to the village. Along with them were a throng of people from nearby villages who were there to observe our arrival as well as the end of mourning ceremony for my Aine.

In the Western world, you don't expect to share your grief with complete strangers but just as my mother, my sister and I were being held by strangers when we arrived at my Aine’s burial site, we were in fact being held in the arms of community as that’s what you do in PNG. No one judges the snot bursting from your nostrils or as Papua New Guinean’s charmingly refer to as ‘number 11’s’. No one judges you for how loud or banshee like your wails might be getting. No one judges you if you want to jump into the burial hole and throw your body on top of the coffin. You’ve just gotta get it out and that moment was like medicine to my grief because I was allowed to do it anyway I wanted and be held unconditionally. As my mum says, they like to call us poor but this is ‘rich’.

Taking someone who has never been in a mourning situation like that for the first time is a lot. I remember at one point I noticed Ben and Emele had disappeared from the crowd and someone told me that they were in the hut taking a breather. When they emerged they were quieter than I’d ever seen them as if they had no choice but to completely surrender to their surroundings. I mean this was the official day 1 of our trip and what a way to drop your friends into the deep end of the craziness that is PNG.

Hey come to my country. It’ll be so great. First we’ll arrive at the airpot and the transport that I thought I had organised won’t show up so we’ll have to stand around like idiots for awhile. Then we’ll finally find a bus who can take us to the village but we won’t have a nice little post flight nap before we resume activities. We’ll have to walk down a mountain and up another one again in our black ‘sorry’ clothes in the hot hot humid tropical sun, arrive to A TONNE of singing and dancing from people in traditional regalia and A TONNE of kids covered in mud pointing their bow and arrows at you and laughing because they can sense you might be a little bit freaked out. And A TONNE of people crying really really loudly and you’ll also see me cry really really loudly and that’ll freak you out. And we’ll slaughter a whole pig and cook it in the ground with a whole bunch of sweet potatoes and we’ll all eat from it sitting on the ground. Like ALL of us. Yeah the throngs of people and the sing sing groups and us. And there’ll be still sooooooo many people looking at you like your’e in a fishbowl till you go to sleep.

I got it 100%. It was a complete assault on the senses - mayhem even. Dan was also running around like a crazy sweaty person trying to film as much as he could without overstepping any cultural boundaries. People sang and chanted for the longest time, kids running everywhere, chatter upon chatter of different languages and dialects. But it was ALIVE. ALIVE I tell ya. We don’t live like that in the modern world and I crave it constantly. We all do, though most of us don't know what that looks like until we go to places like PNG.

We stayed in Lisimokuka for a few days and the whole time I could feel my Aine right next to me like a child that wants to shadow your every move. I found myself talking to her quite vocally and could sense that she was over the moon that we had come to see her and that the whole village had turned out a procession to celebrate her. Little did I know was on the next few legs of our trip her big spirit self would be rollin’ along with us because when you dead, you can pretty much go wherever you damn well please, no time or space can prohibit you as we soon discovered.

DISCOVERY: Part 3 - The Trip (Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province.)