Madang

 From the Sepik River area and Karawari we flew on August 12 by small plane to the town of Madang, an intermediate stop on our way to the Mount Hagen Cultural Show. From Wikipedia: "Madang is a province of Papua New Guinea. The province is on the northern coast of mainland Papua New Guinea and has many of the country's highest peaks, active volcanoes and its biggest mix of languages. The capital is the town of Madang."

After checking in to our rooms at the Madang Resort Hotel, we took a brief tour of its attractive grounds, noting especially its flock of Victoria Crested Pigeons and a group of tribal craftspeople, working on and selling their art under a big tree.

Two photos from the next morning:

As we were setting out on our next day's exploration of Madang, a young cassowary wandered over to our bus, perhaps to make friends with E.T. Cassowaries are common pets in Papua New Guinea, and this youngster is cute, but older ones can be very dangerous because of their large, sharp claws.

Approximately 820 languages are spoken in Papua New Guinea, around 200 in Madang Province alone. English is widely used among the educated, but Tok Pisin (pidgin English) is the more broadly used lingua franca. I took a photo of this sign in our hotel room, to show an example of Tok Pisin and its English equivalent. With a little concentration, one can make out some similarities.