My time sorting out administrative tasks in London came to a rapid end, and earlier this month I resumed my travelling life - this time to SE Asia, a part of the world I do not know very well at all.
The title of this post is the name given by the bird-watching company I always use to describe their bird-watching trip to PNG (Papua New Guinea), where one can see up to nineteen different species in the birds-of-paradise family. I booked this trip in September last year as it was a life-long dream to see birds-of-paradise – choosing late July dates so that the trip would tie in with a trip run by a different company to see the cultural side of PNG. However, in February the bird-watching company contacted me to tell me that the PNG trip would not run on the dates I had booked, since they had only two bookings. So I transferred my deposit to a July trip to Eastern Indonesia (Sulawesi, North Moluccas and West Papua), on the basis that this trip also provided the chance to see a few species in this family, and since it is ‘next-door’ to PNG it would be easy and cheap to get there afterwards for my cultural tour.
How wrong could I be?! Turns out that there are no flights between the two countries. So I booked a flight from Jakarta to Singapore, and from there to Port Moresby (PNG’s capital), at some expense. Then the Jakarta-Singapore flight was cancelled, and it took some back-and-forth with the travel agent until I was able to transfer to a different Jakarta-Singapore flight earlier in the day (turns out that this travel agent does not respond to email, and that the phone number they give is an invalid number … the only way to communicate with them is by online chat, and during one such chat I had to wait 50 minutes until I got a response!). Then Air Niugini notified me that they had cancelled the Singapore-Port Moresby flight on the day I was travelling. I asked to be moved to the flight the previous day, but they said this had to be done via the agent I had booked with. & the agent said there were no flights the previous day, nor the day before that … even though they were advertising such flights on their website.
Eventually I booked a completely different route, involving an 18-hour transit in Manila airport, but this time booked directly with Philippines Airlines and so hopefully easier to manage should there be any further changes to flight itineraries. But it will take me 32 hours to get to this country next-door from where I am now, and the other travel agent has only refunded me the cost of the cancelled Singapore-Port Moresby flight, nothing for the Jakarta-Singapore flight since this is still operational!
So logistically it has been a bit of a nightmare. & I am still waiting for my online PNG visa for the cultural trip (applied for as soon as my new passport arrived at the start of July) – but I do have one more week, so fingers crossed for that.
Anyway ... the bird-watching trip lived up to my expectations. We saw the bizarre Twelve-wired Bird-of-Paradise (the top photo), Standardwing, Lesser Bird-of-Paradise, Red Bird-of-Paradise, and Wilson's Bird-of-Paradise. The twelve-wired is the least spectacular of them all, but the only bird that sat still on an exposed perch for long enough for me to capture it in a not-particularly-good photograph. I was envious of those with me on the trip who had really good quality cameras, as these birds were absolutely amazing. & this picture to the right is the best I could get of the Red Bird-of-Paradise, from a group of males who kept displaying for a female, but high up in the canopy, backlit, and only still for seconds at a time.
The displaying Lesser Bird-of-Paradise was amazing too, but the star bird was definitely the Wilson's Bird-of-Paradise, with its iridescent turquoise head and shining red and yellow back - the most stunning bird I have ever seen in my life, leaving all of us open-mouthed!
We saw other beautful birds too, such as the Knobbed and Blyth's Hornbills, and various different parrots, owls and kingfishers.
We did though spend quite a bit of time looking for little brown sub-species, high in the canopy, on the basis that these are quite likely to be confirmed as new species in the near future - even though all you could really see of them amongst the leaves was the odd brown back or tail here and the odd creamy belly there ... I accept that they were indeed the (sub-)species that the guide said, but I didn't get any pleasure from seeing them, and didn't update my life list as I didn't feel I had really 'seen' them. I would much rather have spent another morning back at the Wilson's Bird-of-Paradise lek, for example, for the chance of another view of that stunning bird. These trips are largely marketed on the number of different bird species you can see, so I do understand this approach (and all of the participants had their personal life lists which they wanted to add to), but it did make me question whether this kind of trip is really for me.
Thankfully we did pause from the bird-watching to look at other creatures, as there were also a few mammals to be seen, from the Celebes Black Macaques and the Spectral Tarsier (like a bushbaby) to two species of cuscus (a kind of large, fluffy, sloth-like arboreal creature - Bear Cuscus in the photo to the left). Not to mention the butterflies, dragonflies, spiders, monitor lizards, and two snakes. The forests were spectacular too, the trees not quite as huge as those I walked amongst in the rainforests of the Central African Republic - nor were the smaller trees all covered with spikes as in CAR - but still very impressive to hike through.
Some of the hiking was quite difficult. I don't mind going uphill (although at the 2,000 metre altitude of the Lore Lindu forest in Sulawesi it was quite demanding!) but going uphill - or worse, downhill - on very slippery mud is not much fun. There were a number of falls amongst the group (me included) but thankfully no injuries. In places the local people (or park authorities) had put handrails in place, but half of these had rotted through so putting any weight on them was dangerous.
Overall though a really good trip.
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