How to get there . . .

Right now I'm working on planning a survey on the island of New Britain for the end of October. One of the trickiest parts of survey planning is figuring out how to get there, and the trickiness becomes even trickier when you're trying to get to an island (other than the one you live on, that is). Unfortunately, you can't just go to www.flightstoremotevillagesonsmallislands.com, type in your date of departure and pay with Visa or Mastercard. Sometimes I feel a little bit like a detective, hunting down remote airstrips, questioning people who have traveled in the area before, making "optimal travel hypotheses" and then scrapping them when a new piece of evidence shows that they will be suboptimal, if not impossible. For example, first I planned for us to fly into one area, hike around and survey it, then fly to a second area and survey that. But then I discovered that we could take a boat from the first area to the second area, which would save us several days of hiking because we wouldn't have to hike back to the first airstrip. What a brilliant plan! Yeah, I thought so until I discovered that the first airstrip was closed down and there was a house built on it. Oh well. Maybe we'll helicopter into the first airstrip. Or maybe we'll fly into a third airstrip, take a boat to the area around the first airstrip, then take another boat to the area around the second airstrip, and have a plane pick us up there. Confused yet? Yeah, me too. But it's all part of the adventure! We always get there in the end, somehow or other.