On Wed, 23 Jul 2003 08:29 Tom Bridgeland wrote:


>Interesting comment about New Guinea. Anything to add?

Only that I thought it odd at the time.  I never found that a light meal
woke me up in the small hours.  I have since read (in Paul Shepard's
Coming Home to the Pleistocene) that we older folk (I speak for myself
here, Tom, not for you!) need to get up in the middle of the night for a
pee because older folk, having past their hunting prime, are still good
for domestic chores and that's about the time you need to add a couple of
hefty logs on the fire.

Don't invite me to reminisce on my time in Papua New Guinea; it might
never stop!  In the Highlands, with an altitude for villages of 5,000 -
10,000 feet, it gets cold at night and frosts kill the kau kau
occasionally.  I have a photo of my wife throwing a snowball at me at
about 13,000 feet just three degrees off the equator.  There are permanent
glaciers in the western half of the island, presently colonized by
Indonesia and Freeport McMoRan (infamous for its alleged desecration of
Papuan sacred sites, environmental and human rights abuses).  These
glaciers are receding fast with global climate change.

Keith