Crossing the swollen Mumeng River on the way to Hidden Valley

September 27, 2008 · → No Comments - Make Comment

Here’s the story about crossing the Mumeng River in Papua New Guinea.

: Watching the morning river crossing is a major spectator sport for the villagers

During my September trip to PNG and on one of our travel days – we were on the road at 7:30am to travel the 3-4 hours of mountain roads up to one of our mine sites – Hidden Valley.

The journey promised to be exciting and the day long – as we planned to visit two sites this day – which required us to cross the swollen Mumeng River about an hour out of town.

It had been raining hard all night and steadily spitting with rain in the morning as we left Lae.

As we crossed over the bridges on the way – we felt that it was a fair expectation that the river would be up and this major crossing where there was no bridge.

Arriving at Mumeng

When we arrived at 9:00am- we joined a queue of 4WDs and trucks on our side of the river – and got out to survey the scene. We watched the trucks and vehicles crossing and decided to give it a go and fang it across the river.

Hairy scarey or WHAT! We crossed – went up to Hidden Valley mine site – and were back on the nose of 2pm – racing the rain clouds in the mountain – to cross back over before the afternoon rains from the mountains made it to this part of the river, making the crossing impossible.