Many years ago, when we were growing up in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, we occasionally went on holiday to Madang, an incredibly beautiful coastal resort town in this (at that time) untouched, remote pacific island. It was a long trip on the Highlands Highway, which was a two lane dusty dirt road over steep mountain ranges. Our father would carefully pack up our bus, leaving tiny sitting spaces for each of us amongst the suitcases and boxes (we were quite a big family). We usually took a couple days getting there, stopping overnight in a guest-house with rare Papua New Guinean butterflies and beetles encased in glass on its bamboo walls. Mt Hagen was 6,000 feet above sea level, so despite living a few degrees off of the equator, I always remember how the humidity and heat grew as we finally dropped down out of the extensive mountain ranges and hit the hot muggy plains filled with neat rows of sugar beets or palm plantations. As we got older the road slowly got more and more stretches paved, making the trip much shorter.