Papua New Guinea Travel Guide

In the cool mountain valleys of the Highlands, the yearly shows of Mount Hagen and Goroka bring groups from across the region into one arena to dance and sing in plumes, shells, paint and wigs. In the forest above the valleys, a local guide leads early risers to the trees where male birds-of-paradise display, on the mornings they come.

The Kokoda Track crosses the Owen Stanley Range on foot, 96 kilometres of steep ridges, creeks and mud between Owers' Corner, a drive from Port Moresby, and the village of Kokoda on the northern side. Most groups take seven to ten days, camping at the villages along the way, and the track is walked only with the guides and porters of an established trekking company.

Papua New Guinea lies in the Coral Triangle, and its main dive regions each have a character of their own: seamounts in Kimbe Bay off New Britain, small life on the sand slopes of Milne Bay, sheltered fjords at Tufi and tidal passes at Kavieng. Divers base themselves at a dive resort with its own day boats or join a liveaboard that moves between reefs.

The Sepik River winds through the lowlands of the north, and motor canoes carry visitors between its villages, where tall spirit houses, the haus tambaran, rise above the houses on stilts. Carvers lay out masks, ancestor figures and story boards when a canoe lands, many of them worked with the crocodile that runs through the river's art.

At the north-eastern tip of New Britain, Rabaul lies on a harbour formed by a flooded volcanic caldera, within sight of the active cone of Tavurvur, with much of the old town still buried by the ash of the 1994 eruption. Visitors stay in nearby Kokopo, the provincial capital, where the National Mask Festival is usually held in July.

The Trobriand Islands are low coral islands in the Solomon Sea, where villages stack the yam harvest in raised log houses, carvers work in ebony and the shell valuables of the kula exchange still pass from island to island. Visitors fly to the airstrip on Kiriwina and stay in a simple guesthouse or in a village, arranged before the flight.

Port Moresby, where nearly every trip begins and ends, has Parliament House with its spirit-house front and the National Museum and Art Gallery side by side in Waigani, Ela Beach on the old town's seafront, and craft markets selling bilums, the looped string bags carried across the country. Inland, the road to the Sogeri plateau passes Bomana War Cemetery on the way to the rainforest trails of Varirata National Park.