Source : the age
We’re in the season of “must-see” lists, the 10, 25 or 52 places you must visit in 2025. At their best they expose the underrated, the hordes will thunder in, and the adjective “undiscovered” will no longer be appended to their name.
But there’s one place you will never see on those lists. It’s wild, mysterious, haunting and flamboyant. Its terrain is formidable, a spine of unbreachable mountains guttered by vast rivers and impenetrable swamps that have kept the wider world at bay.
PNG: Wild, mysterious, haunting and flamboyant.Credit: iStock
Its coast and islands are fringed by pristine coral reefs, its tribal cultures and primeval splendours attract ethnologists, botanists and photographers, and it remains “undiscovered”. In a year, it gets as many international arrivals as Australia sees in a week.
It’s Papua New Guinea, our closest neighbour. The name alone might send shivers down your spine, for all the wrong reasons. While most Aussies regard it with fear and loathing, among the cognoscenti of world travel PNG is a connoisseur experience.
True, the streets of Port Moresby are no place to linger by night, yet PNG’s unlovely capital is a rough and rude exception, and easily missed from any itinerary. Is it dangerous? Over the course of a dozen visits, I had a camera flash stolen from my backpack while I was walking through a market.
Didn’t even miss it until a market vendor handed it back to me. She saw it happen, chased down the thief and probably gave him a thorough shellacking.
The spectacle that is the annual PNG Highlands Show.Credit: iStock
Highlights include the annual Highlands Show, a romping, stomping display featuring several thousand plumed and painted warriors and one of the world’s greatest displays of body art.
Cradled within its mountains, the Highlands are a lush green realm of rainforests and coffee plantations where birds of paradise call from the forests and rushing streams gash the hillsides.
The north coast and islands are the raw material of tropical paradise, a world of screaming colours, rioting vegetation and some of the best diving on the planet.
Burrowing into the interior, the Sepik River is a powerful, primeval place of crocodiles, oozing swamps and villages of mud and thatch where sorcery still holds sway.
There is no such thing as do-it-yourself travel in PNG, but put yourself in the hands of an expert travel agent and prepare to be awakened.
