Trip to Kaiam

Well, it took about three days, fifteen hours of travel time, forty
miles, and dozens of pushes of the canoe to travel from Munduku to
Kaiam. Anton and I left Mambis on Monday morning at five, drove to Mt.
Hagen and got onto an MAF flight to Munduku. It was only about an hour
flight between the two, but we traveled about a hundred miles in that
time. We weren't on the ground more than ten minutes before Anton had
his hands greased up in the tractor there that was misbehaving. It
looked like when they had changed engine and transmission oil, they only
put 6L into the engine, and 6L into the transmission. Not only was that
not enough oil to keep the transmission from making an awful racket, but
it also wasn't enough to be able to use the hydraulics on the machine to
lift the 3-point in the back... We told them they needed more like 40L
for that tractor.

We then started to load the motor canoe full of our gear and then looked
at a powered lawnmower that wouldn't walk by itself, or spin the
blade... The belts had become loose, so we tightened them and it was
back up and running. A little while later we had to get fuel for that
motor, so we stopped at THE fuel drum to get a few liters for our trip
up river. They had a hand pump in order to transfer fuel from the drum
to our containers, but they had to measure how much they were taking
out, so it went into another container, then was hand pumped from that
container into ours... Another guy though he had a faster way, so he
took a few 5L jugs and a hose and tried to do a gravity siphon. He put
one side in the barrel, and started sucking on the other side, but it
apparently wasn't working to his satisfaction, so he takes out the other
side, puts the side he had in his mouth into the barrel, and proceeds to
get the siphon working by sucking on the now fuel covered end.

There's a saying that came up at some point... "It's a wonder they made
it into the stone age"... Not very nice, but given the tenancy to do
not so bright things, it does make you think... and it's truly a wonder
that we made it to Kaiam (safely) at all...

The GPS data for the flight, and trip up the river will follow in
another post, but I figured I should post something sooner rather than
later. And one last thing: If I thought that Mambis was hot at close to
6000' elevation, Kaiam at around 800' is sweltering... Even in the
shade I'm sweating and everything ... EVERYTHING is wet... and not just
damp, but ring out water wet. It's no wonder the airstrip has taken ten
years to get to the point it's at now. With all that water and clay
mixing it's going to be a lot of hard work to complete.