On the dive boat in Kimbe Bay

• I feel bad about how I approached going to PNG. There is so much bad press given to the country that I think it influenced my plans for visiting. The Top 10 Hells on Earth list that came out is, in hindsight, pretty absurd. Anything which puts Oklahoma City as worse than Baghdad or Chernobyl should be rejected at face. Port Moresby is a dump, there is no doubt about that. But Port Moresby isn’t a reflection of PNG anymore than Detroit is a reflection of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I spoke with several ex-pats who have been living in PNG for decades about the bad press which Port Moresby has gotten and some of the things I’ve read. They all thought it was silly. You should be alert when visiting Port Moresby, but you don’t have to be under armed guard at all times. Everyone I met was very nice, even when they had to cancel a flight I had leaving Kimbe.


Sign in Pidgin

• Hotel rooms in Port Moresby are expensive. Very expensive for what you get. You can expect to pay over $200 a night for a simple hotel room. Rooms in the city are booked full almost every night. The high commodity prices right now have spurred a boom in commodity prices. My flights in and out were packed mostly with Australian and Chinese businessmen.
• PNG is poor. Of that there is no doubt, however no one seems to be going hungry. PNG is mostly a rural country. Outside of Port Moresby, there are no really big cities in the country (and Port Moresby isn’t really that big). Unlike many of the Pacific countries I’ve visited, PNG is self sufficient in food. This is due to having plenty of arable land unlike most Pacific countries, and the fact that agriculture has been practiced in PNG for thousands of years. (When Europeans arrived in PNG they found the locals growing sweet potatos, which are native to South America. They have no idea how they got there.)


The island where we had lunch while diving

• I’ve noticed a big difference between poor countries. Many of the places in the Pacific I’ve see you see lots of idle people. People sitting around doing nothing. I saw lots of idleness in PNG. In places like the Philippines or Indonesia, you can see poverty, but you don’t see as much idleness. People are doing stuff, hustling and trying to get by. Mostly this happens when people move from the country to the city and there is nothing for them to do. There are no jobs and there is no land to farm. This is the reason behind so many of the problems in Port Moresby. Idle hands really are the devils playground.
• I have been to many places in the Pacific where WWII battles took place: Guadalcanal, Guam, Saipan. However, the history was probably more palpable in New Britain than it was anywhere else. I saw a sunken Japanese Zero while I was diving. Pretty much every airport and landing strip in the country was originally built during the war. I’ve been told it isn’t too hard to find planes and other artifacts out in the forest. The Papua New Guinea campaign looms much larger in Australian history than in US history, even though most of the heavy lifting was done by American troops. I learned quite a bit by listening to some locals tell stories during dinner.
• The water in Kimbe Bay, where I went diving, was very warm. Not only is the bay naturally warm, but it is in the middle of an El Nino. When I dove, my dive computer showed the water temperature around 30C (about 85F). The only evidence of coral bleaching I’ve seen on my trip was in Kimbe Bay. There wasn’t a lot, but there was some.
• One of the most spectacular things I’ve seen on my trip so far was a tree on a palm oil plantation on New Britain. The tree was filled with lightening bugs, and all the lightening bugs were blinking in unison. There were so many bugs in the tree that it looked like the kind of trees you see in mall parking lots during Christmas filled with white lights…. except these were blinking. I’m not sure I could have taken a photo of it that did it justice even if I had my camera with me.


View from my room, 20 min from Port Moresby

• Just a week after I left New Britian, the volcano near Rabaul erupted. Rabaul was covered with several feet of ash in 1994. The entire city had to be moved. All of Kimbe Bay was ringed with cinder cones. I’ve never seen a place with so many. If you were out on the bay and looked around, you could see a dozen small volcanoes.
• There are over 800 active, living languages in PNG. This is not an exaggeration. I asked the locals I met what languages they spoke, and they all spoke their village language, pidgin, and English. Pidgin is more widespread than English and some remote villages have very few pidgin speakers. Literally, villages just a few miles apart can speak languages intelligible to each other. I met some Americans at the airport who have lived in PNG for 10 years with an organization trying to translate the bible into every language in PNG. Personally, I’d just translate it into pidgin and teach everyone pidgin. Seems a lot simpler. I’ve encountered people who work, worked, or had parents who worked for such organization who try to translate the bible into ever smaller languages. I guess they are trying to complete the set.
• I very much want to go back to PNG. Almost every place I’ve been I have a list of things I’d go see if I ever returned. I think the list for PNG is the biggest one I have. I very much would like to go back to see the highlands, which is a culture which seems very different from what I saw on New Britain. If anyone in the future who is thinking of visiting PNG should read this article, don’t be afraid. Avoid Port Moresby, but there isn’t anything to see or do there anyhow.

Oddly enough, I met a lot of Americans in PNG. I almost never meet Americans while traveling and I hadn’t expected to meet any in PNG of all places.

I probably had more conversations with people in PNG than I did my entire time in Australia. You don’t get the average 18-22 year old gap year European who is out to get drunk in Papua New Guinea.

So far, my PNG experience has been amazing. The Port Moresby airport is far, far from the worst airport in the world. (which I saw it was on one list).

I’m on Kimbe Bay on New Britian Island. The people here are great. The food is great. The diving is great. The other guests I’ve met are great. I did 3 dives today and got massively sunburned. Skin cancer is probably the biggest danger here. This is one of the better places I’ve stayed on my trip. So far, it has been 100% positive.

Kimbe Bay is totally ringed with small volcanoes, most of which are in some stage of activity. I guess plane flights for the few days before I arrived were canceled because of volcanic ash in the air.

The universal consensus is that Port Moresby sucks, but there is no reason to ever go there. There is nothing to see. Port Moresby is not PNG. That is like saying Iowa is dangerous because Detroit is.

There are parts of PNG which are for all practical purposes no different than they were 1,000 years ago. This places it in a different category from any place I’ve been to date. PNG is one of the most rural countries in the world with 85% of the population living outside of cities. Most of that 15% is in Port Moresby.

In researching what to do and where to go online, I’ve found a real dearth of information compared to what I’m used to, especially for the highland areas. There are plenty of resorts around the coastal areas, but most of the highland information I’ve found consists of “hire a guide” and the prices are really expensive. In fact, getting prices for a single night in the Port Moresby area seems more expensive than Sydney or Tokyo.

I’ve often found the best advice comes from people on the ground who have been to the places you’re going. Once you get in a region, you discover more information about a place. The universal message I’ve gotten from everyone I have spoken to, including people from PNG, is to be very very careful, especially in Port Moresby and other towns. My “travelers sense” tells me that PNG might be the most dangerous place I’ve visited so far.

The danger is mostly just street crime. I have yet to read anything about political violence or widespread violent movement beyond some inter village skirmishes. As I understand it, there are roving bands of young men who have no compulsion to prey on outsiders. The most common adjective I’ve seen for hotels in the Port Moresby area was “secure”. The advice I was given was to get to your hotel, then stay put.

It is hard to make decisions about a place before you get there. Most of the rumors and stories you hear usually aren’t true. Then again, some places just are dangerous. While I am willing to take reasonable risks, there are some risks which are just stupid. I am often asked if I plan on visiting Iraq or Afghanistan. The answer is “no, not anytime soon”. I would be happy to visit Iran, North Korea or Cuba, but would not want to visit out of control places like Somalia.

The closest thing I have to compare to PNG has been the Solomon Islands. One woman I spoke to said that Honiara was 5x safer than Port Moresby, and while I never felt in any danger in the Solomons, Honiara is a far cry from Tokyo and was the location of a lot of violence several years ago.

So we’ll see how it goes. I’m sure I’ll get comments from people who have been to PNG who will say “it’s fine” and others who will say “be careful”. I’ll err on the side of caution. My current plans are pared down a bit from my original ones, but I hope it will still be a pretty good experience.

PNG is only about 500 miles away from Cairns. Walking around Cairns I can find brocures for attractions in Sydney, Tasmania, Perth, Darwin, Fiji, New Zealand and Vanuatu. I can’t find a thing about PNG even though it is much close than any of those places. I had to go to the office for Airlines PNG to get any information.

I’ve been in Australia quite a while now and I’m getting antsy to go someplace that isn’t so…..Australia. I think PNG will deliver that in spades.

My current plan is to spend two weeks in PNG. I’ll go diving on New Britian and then fly to Papua and go hiking up in the highlands.

I’ve been many places where I really no no preconceived idea of what to expect because they are so small and unknown that they don’t have real impact in the media (Marshall Islands anyone?) PNG is sort of like that. I know a bit of the history of the country and structure of the country, but the basically the only real image I have of the place in my mind is that of a “primitive” country. Most of the people still live in villages and live like they did for hundreds of years.

I have no idea if that is actually true, but that is the image I have from what little I’ve heard of the country. What little exposure I’ve had to the country since I’ve started my trip has surprised me:

• One thing you should always check is where a can or bottle of Coke is bottled. Usually is it whatever the nearby major metropolitan area is. In the Pacific, I saw Auckland, Suva, Singapore and Port Moresby as cities where they had bottling plants. The Port Moresby one I didn’t expect.
• I was talking to the owners of the resort I stayed at in Kosrea in Micronesia. I told them of where I was planning on going in the future and one of the places was PNG. She mentioned that they had gone to a tourism in the Pacific conference and the group which was the most organized and professional was the group from PNG.

I’m not sure what I’ll find.

I also have no clue if I’ll have internet while I’m in PNG (out of Port Moresby at least). I’m working under the assumption that I wont, so be prepared for a whole lot of daily photos for the time I’m away.

If you are a traveler and would like to do a guest post while I’m up in the highlands, send me an email. (I’m only interested in stories about places you’ve been or things you’ve done. Photos and video are big pluses).