Trip Report: Papua New Guinea, July/Aug 2023
PNG was an incredible place to visit, but quite difficult to find information for! I figure I'd pay it forward a little: while not an easy place to travel, this country and its people deserve a better reputation than they've got. I also want to thank this since-deleted user's reply for kickstarting my planning years ago, even if I didn't end up going to the Highlands like I thought I would!
Me: I'm 34M from Canada and chose to travel solo. There aren't many tourists to PNG, but at the festivals, I did run into quite a few independent travelers, generally of an older and surprisingly majority-francophone crowd. I ended up traveling together on-and-off with one person I met.
Trip Length: I planned my trip around festivals: the National Mask Festival in East New Britain, the Shark Calling Festival in New Ireland (which I didn't end up going to, more later on that), and the Sepik River Crocodile Festival in the Sepik. I improvised plans in between. To give myself a small buffer around the festivals, I made the trip a smidge over one month long.
Budget: PNG isn't cheap, and so I didn't come with a budget restriction at all other than "nothing unreasonable." I flew from Canada via Australia using points plus a few hundred in fees/taxes. Internal flights in PNG cost me about US$1000. Over the month, I spent about US$2700. Granted, I was pickpocketed twice (stupid I know) and lost $80 cash and an old phone, which I replaced with a $160 burner (they're all expensive since everything's imported). At least I had kept a spare debit card separate from my wallet in the first place, or the trip would have been over. (My attempts at Western Union-ing myself kept getting flagged!)
Taking away mishap-related spending but including the domestic flights, that's about $3400, which technically averages to roughly $100/day. Daily expenses varied wildly, since there were three Couchsurfing days of zero expenses, four scuba dives totalling $280, and another $850 ($1700 split two ways) spent on just six days in the Sepik! There were few to no restaurants to spend on outside of Port Moresby, kai bar food is plain sad but cheap, and food at accommodations was often free out of goodwill and/or good luck.
Accommodation: Port Moresby is the only place I found active Couchsurfing hosts. In New Ireland, I was also invited to stay at a PMV driver's home. Otherwise, affordable paid accommodation ran from K100 ($27) to K220 ($60) — not as bad as I was expecting. That's a private room with a fan and usually shared bathroom. Water is usually from rainwater storage tanks, and electricity usually for a few hours per night (if at all) by generator. Everything is arranged through WhatsApp if in advance.
On the Sepik, accommodation was sleeping bags and mosquito nets on the floors of homes (K50), with piddly springs a long walk away to wash up, and long-drop latrines.
Transport: Flights are necessary to get around most of the country as inter-regional roads practically don't exist and ships too infrequent. All six of my flights were delayed by at least two hours each, with no announcements. Air Niugini is currently a mess, and PNG Air is only a bit better. Don't pull a tight layover. Worse, one of my flights, supposed to run daily at 6 am each morning, was cancelled for one week straight, causing me to lose three days. (On one of those days, a national fuel shortage ground all domestic flights in the country. After that was quickly resolved, no reason was provided for my flight's constant additional cancellations.) Opting after that to book ongoing flights only after landing in the departing city gave me security, but cost me both time (as I decided to have at least one day between flights) and far more money.
I tried to take a boat between East New Britain and New Ireland. I lost three more days due to weather. (So yeah, tally that up and I lost about a week!)
Otherwise, it's PMVs (public motor vehicle) everywhere, and those take the form of vans, buses, flatbed trucks with benches, and boats.
Security: Honestly, it's not nearly as bad as people say, though there are concerns. Follow local advice, avoid areas with active tribal conflict, avoid going out after dark, and you're good. Keep tabs on your belongings: I got so comfortable I let my guard down twice getting pickpocketed, only noticing a few seconds later. You'd think I'd learn after the first incident! (I also don't blame PNG for this — I can't count how many times I've heard friends get pickpocketed on their Europe trips.)
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With all of that out of the way, you'd think I had a terrible time. I've never had so much go wrong before: I had some terrible luck and incredibly low moments! I even thought about giving up and heading back to Australia early at one point, but with no flights out of Kavieng and no estimated resolution date, I couldn't get out even if I wanted to. But I'm glad I stuck it out, and overall, I had great luck too, as this is one of the most fascinating places I've ever been, and the people are super nice.
East New Britain: The mask festival was simply incredible, a chance to see a bunch of different singsings that would individually be difficult to seek out, in particular the Baining Fire Dance, where masked dancers kicked up clouds of embers by a giant fire in the dark of night. The leafy pom-pom looking tubuan kinavai is the infamous display, as are the very precarious hats of other tribes, but I was genuinely shocked to watch the fire eaters and bottle eaters do literally that.
Having lost a week due to weather and flight shenanigans to/from New Ireland, I only had one day for Rabaul. I squeezed in what I could with seeing the volcano that destroyed the town in 1994, as well as some of the tunnels including a 5-story underground hospital made during the Japanese occupation in WWII. I sadly had no practical time for a scuba dive to a WWII plane wreck.
New Ireland: Having missed the Shark Calling Festival due to the boat situation, I found out about the two-day New Ireland Day celebrations and aimed for that instead, cancelling a proposed stay in Bougainville in the process since the flights there would be too expensive to justify a shortened stay and increase the risk of further cancellations/strandings. The festival was pretty cool, featuring singsings from cultures different to ENB, and oddly had a political bent as the separatist leader of Bougainville was invited to give a speech on national television.
While in Kavieng, I did four scuba dives, all of which were fantastic — one went up and down a bunch of caves and tunnels, one had enormous pelagics like tuna and Spanish mackerel, and the last two were shallower and full of pristine, colourful coral. Lots of reef sharks and even some rays throughout.
I spent a few days going up the Boluminsky Highway, and staying in Dalom village in particular was a natural highlight with that jawdropping turquoise river running right to the ocean. I also got to see some Malagan carvings, Saturday Adventist gatherings, and river eels, and got invited to stay with a family in the mountains. This was also a great time just to go at the pace of local life and talk with people in villages and local transport, and all improvised.
Sepik River: Grouping up with the other tourist and splitting costs was the only way I could afford this. I had been in touch with guides on WhatsApp for months and the price quotes were all quite high due to the cost of petrol on the river and the expensive 4×4 transport to get there in the first place. (We skipped the cheap PMV option from Wewak to Pagwi, after hearing about recent holdups.) I'm very grateful that this part of the trip actually came to pass, because I don't know what I would have done otherwise with a whole week!
I timed my visit for the Crocodile Festival (what a relief that I wasn't stranded in Kavieng for any longer), and rather than have to go far distances up and down the river to see a variety of Sepik cultures, it was great to again have them all in one place. It's the Lower Sepik tribes that cut and scar their skin to look like crocodiles and they were at the festival, but it was the Upper Sepik that I visited before and after the festival, getting to see birds of paradise in the wild, spirit houses further off the "beaten" path, and village life in general far away from the rest of civilization.
Port Moresby: I had to stay here on three separate occasions. It's…not pretty, nor walkable, and choked with traffic, but it's also the only place in the country with creature comforts. There's a jarring wealth gap with lots of foreigners, primarily Australians, present in the gated rich neighbourhoods and malls. I had a wonderful Couchsurfing host who treated me to dinners at home and in restaurants, drove me around to see a few sights, and took me also to the Nature Park, where it's much easier to see birds of paradise up close.
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General: It bears repeating, but people are seriously nice in PNG. People constantly feel the need to be protective of outsiders, especially the rare tourist, and well-meaning strangers escorted me around or at least offered to everywhere I went. (It did get annoying sometimes.) When I lost my wallet in a bus and before I resigned myself to the fact that it was probably snatched, people at the main bus stop helped me search every incoming bus for two whole hours, a transient man offered me bus fare, and I was offered a ride to the radio station to make a PSA!
Unlike other countries, people here also really like having their picture taken. They're also quite chatty! It's the people that really made the trip for me — and the personal connections you make will genuinely open up more options and spontaneous invitations, and get you where you want to go.
Overall: If you're at all curious about a place like PNG, and especially if you've got a keen interest in traditional indigenous cultures, it's a place worth visiting! Seeing how a country of 800 different language groups can coexist, plus how their traditions are truly woven into their modern (or rustic) lives in 2023, made everything worthwhile. You'll need a high tolerance for things going sideways though, in addition to enough time for flexibility and a healthy budget. If you're good with all that, it's a hearty recommend.
Am I hankering to go back? Probably not for a long while, but I'd never rule it out. There's lots of places left in the country that I haven't seen: Bougainville, the Highlands, and the Trobriands stick out. Lots of festivals too: the famous Goroka Show, the Shark Calling Festival.
For anyone seriously considering a visit, I've written a lengthier PNG logistics page on my website that summarizes all of the research I did for this trip, with particulars on transport, accommodation, and Sepik guides. I'm just hoping that I can save anyone some trouble in the future.
Pictures: I can't figure out how to add a gallery to this post like I've seen others do. I'll just link my favourites externally.
Happy to answer any questions!
Submitted October 13, 2023 at 04:12PM by vanivan
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