It wasn’t a big plane, so when we hit the tarmac, I felt it in my jaw (and a jolt in my guts that may have had nothing to do with aerodynamics). I tried to catch Lisa’s attention, but she was wrestling with carry on luggage, and the others were too far back in the body of the plane. So I sat, hands between my knees, my belongings at my feet, and stared out past the ugly improvisation of the airport, to thick rows of squatty palm trees and dark swelling hillsides, quietly mouthing a hello. I am in Papua New Guinea.
We had collected each other in airports across Australia – in Sydney, it was Lisa first, white-faced and raw, and me, full of static and chaos and coffee; Tom and Garry who came weary from long goodbyes in Melbourne and Coffs Harbour; Laura, who slept in and joined us in Brisbane; and Dave, obnoxiously energetic after ten hours in transit from Perth - and lost each other again in Duty Free, alcohol being, for the most part, our common language.
It’s daunting to count forward a year of your life, in a place you have never seen and are ill-equipped to imagine – how much more so, when everyone from your mum to the directors of your volunteer program has a litany of certain death to discourage you. We had already lost one of our crew, and invoked his name nervously at Departures: someone heard he was off to the Solomon Islands, or was it Fiji?
I was still giddy with those first day nerves as we navigated the stairs from our small plane – the punch of heat like an oven door – and beetled across the tarmac, up another set of mobile stairs to the gate, where I watched the boys stumble bulky in sweatshirts, jeans and heavy hiking boots. Oh, heat! It was hot.
Hey! Someone up ahead was shouting. Hey! They began to beat on the closed glass door leading towards arrivals. We were locked out. Or in. Either way, it was fifteen minutes of milling in the heat, with baggage and bewildered expressions while various people walked back and forth with no perceptible degree of urgency.
I was secretly glad. It turns out there is more than one way to make an auspicious landing. And this is how it was that I heard, for the first time, that folded faded phrase (there is always one) which marks weary expatriate affection and backhanded local pride.
Two Australians – he broad-bellied and melanoma-laced; she, younger, with a pristine garment bag and sore, crumpled face, stood close to the doors – they must have been among the first off the plane. She said something I didn’t catch, but I heard his reply, thickly voiced as if it might have been meant for me:
“Welcome to PNG, the land of the unexpected."
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