Where to stay

Airways Hotel Set beside the airport, it’s the top luxury hotel in town. Its restaurant dishes up a renowned buffet overlooking the runway and misty mountain peaks. There’s a deli-bistro and a poolside bar, as well as fine dining in the form of Bacchus, which has some of the most accomplished cooking in Port Moresby. Doubles from £193.

Jackson’s Parade, Port Moresby, 00 675 324 5200, www.airways.com.pg Gateway Hotel Near Jackson’s Airport, this is a friendly hotel with a pet crocodile in the foyer. Poolside breakfasts are good. Doubles from £150. Corner Jackson’s Parade, 7 Mile 111, Port Moresby, 00 675 327 8100, www.coralseahotels.com.pg

Kokopo Beach Bungalow Resort Tucked into the coastline of Blanche Bay with fantastic views of Tavurvur volcano, it’s a great base for snorkelling at the northern tip of East New Britain. Doubles from £100.1 Kurur Street, Kokopo, 00 675 982 8788, www.kbb.com.pg

Rondon Ridge A hideaway resort offering a remote and rural slice of Highland living. Prices are usually arranged via a tour operator and are inclusive. Picnics are a real treat. 00 675 542 1438, www.pngtours.com

Tufi Resort Nestled amid the fjords at the southern end of PNG, this is a diver’s paradise. Not luxurious but comfortable, well managed and helpful. It’s located right next to the airstrip so there’s never a problem with check-ins. Fishing, diving and trekking can all be arranged. Doubles from £75. Port Moresby, 00 675 323 5995, www.tufidive.com

Travel Information

Papua New Guinea is located south of the Equator on the island of New Guinea, which it shares with Indonesia. The time is ten hours ahead of GMT, and the national currency is the kina. Temperatures are consistently hot, with average highs of 31 ̊C and average lows of 22 ̊C in February. Total flying time is about 19 hours.

GETTING THERE

Singapore Airlines has daily direct flights from London Heathrow to Singapore, where you can change onto a local airline. www.singaporeair.com
Air Niugini is the national carrier and its aircraft serve desintations in Australia, Asia and the Pacific. www.airniugini.com.pg Airlines PNG runs internal flights to smaller areas. www.apng.com

RESOURCES
Papua New Guinea Tourism Promotion Authority is an offical organisation that offers help and advice for visiting PNG. Look up tour operators, get travel tips and discover more at www.papuanewguinea.travel

FURTHER READING
Tales from a Wild Island by Howard M Beck (Robert Hale, £15).

CARBON COUNTING
Offset your journey at www.climatecare.org. Cost for this trip is £34.37.

Where to eat

Fishing trips
Admire the beautiful scenery while trying to lure the famous black bass and barramundi found all around the coast.

Kite surfing
Uncrowded, warm waters and assured winds make for some top conditions. Reefs are ideal for wave riders, while pristine lagoons are on hand for those who prefer a flat terrain.

Mount Wilhelm
The ascent is a relatively easy one, with tracks that traverse remote areas, offering unique insights into local life. The view across to the coast from the summit at 4,509m is a just reward. National Museum & Art Gallery A curated exploration of PNG’s diverse culture, gathered from all 19 provinces. Archaeology, natural history and contemporary arts are all represented. www.museumpng.gov.pg

Food Glossary

Banana

This can be confusing because the word covers both sweet bananas and plantains.

Buai

Areka nut, chewed with a mustard-like bean (daka) and lime powder (kambang).

Cuscus

A kind of possum that is sometimes eaten.

Haigir

A local, rather than a pidgin, word for baking food wrapped in banana leaves with hot stones.

Kaikai

Meal or food

Kakaruk

Chicken

Kaukau

Sweet potato (a general word used to encompass different kinds of yams).

Kawawar

Ginger

Kumu

Vegetables

Maket

Market. A ‘maket meri’ is a woman who sells food at the market.

Mumu

Baking using hot stones in a pit.

Muruk

Cassowary captured and reared in captivitity.

Pik

Pig and by extension ‘abus pik’ is pork.

Pis

Fish

Pukpuk

Crocodile (eaten in some parts of the country, especially the ‘salties’ in brackish water).

Sago

Same as in English but it refers to the pith of the sago palm that is then turned into blocks of baked starch.

Taro

An important starchy staple. In parts of PNG, Colocasia esculentaan is called ‘urim’ and the leaves as well as the tubers are an essential part of the diet.

Tok Pisin

The official language of Papua New Guinea, but less than half the population speaks it. Many of the food words it uses are very close to English: for example ‘kokonas’ for coconut; ‘kabis’ for cabbage; ‘karet’ for carrot; ‘kopi’ for coffee and so on.

Food and Travel Review

New Guinea is an island that hovers over Australia’s north- eastern tip like an exotic bird of paradise. Carved in half, colonial-style, one part belongs to Indonesia. The rest, with a feather-dusting of smaller Melanesian islands, forms Papua New Guinea – PNG as the locals across the Pacific call it. Palm-fringed beaches, coral reefs, mangroves, smoking volcanoes, mountain peaks fired by the rising equatorial sun, it can tick all of these boxes. Though larger than Germany, mass tourism has passed it by.

Instead it’s as dense with experiences as the tropical rainforest that still blankets large parts of it. A day that starts with swimming over a Second World War Japanese Mitsubishi Zero fighter plane wrecked on a reef may end at night watching a Baining fire dance. In between there may be a tramp across the still hot clinker of the recently erupted Tavurvur volcano, in the Rabaul caldera.

Hotels are few and far between. Surfaced roads are probably fewer. Those that do exist won’t be repaired. As a crash course in pothole avoidance, the Highlands Highway may be unique. When Airlines PNG claims the country depends on its network of interior flights for transport, it isn’t overstating its case. Runways and landing strips link a nation of different ethnic groups and inward-looking tribes that might otherwise never contact each other.

It’s a rural, unspoilt country. William the ‘bigman’ of a village lost in the fjords of Tufi had a spell living in the capital, Port Moresby. ‘I tried it. I saw what was there and didn’t like it.’ Having returned, he now sees the value of preserving the life that he was brought up with.

This involves a labyrinthine structure of social ties. A member of a tribe belongs to a clan that divides into sub-clans and lastly extended families. Marriage is always outside the clan; it makes Catholic dogma about consanguinity seem primitive by comparison. The physical boundaries of tribe and clan are sacrosanct. Crossing them isn’t just an invasion of space. It’s a challenge that can end up in a hospital visit. Those who gravitate to the city don’t jettison their identity once they step off a plane at Jackson’s Airport.

The capital – sprucing itself up for the 2015 Pacific Games – can’t paper over problems that blight every developing country. An informal network does exist to ensure the destitute won’t starve. Wantok, a pidgin word, derives from the English ‘one talk’. It’s loaded with cultural significance and duties. PNG has more languages than anywhere in the world, over 800. Meet anyone speaking your native language, in other words from the same tribe, and you owe him support – and vice versa.

Wantoks will share their last stash of areca nuts. Chewing the green husks is a habit involving half the population. It starts in childhood and lasts a lifetime. A mild stimulant, buai (as it is sold on the street) has a precise ritual. The recipe has three ingredients: areca nuts, lime powder made from ground shells and mustard seed. When the gnawed fruit forms a pappy wad, chewers dip seeds in lime and add them to it. A chemical reaction takes place in the cud turning the juice red. Spitting this out sends a scarlet jet onto the ground or adjacent walls. Port Moresby’s governor is trying to ban the sale of buai in a vain attempt to clean its notorious mean streets. Elsewhere, nobody notices nor cares. Not that there are many towns with pavements.

Look closely at a 20 kina note (the national currency). It depicts a boar’s head framed by a shell necklace. Symbolism comes as second nature to Papuans. In the social hierarchy, pigs rate higher than children or women. Owning one or more implies wealth and status. A 1930s photograph at Rondon Ridge, a lodge overlooking the Wahgi Valley in the Western Highlands, shows a mother suckling her baby with her left teat and a piglet with her right.

Pigs are tethered at the roadside with price tags that skyrocket to £1,120 for healthy sows. According to Pamela, a Madang chieftain’s daughter, ‘Only the chief can own a boar with tusks. If your pig starts growing them, you have to give it to him. If you don’t you can be killed.’ Slaughtering and baking pigs in a mumu (earthenware oven) only happens on ceremonial occasions such as funerals and weddings. Spatchcocked, the porker, smothered in leaves and packaged with vegetables, lies in a pit of hot stones until it’s done to a turn. Then it’s dished up. Women receive the offal and men have the choicest morsels of meat. The belly is prized because it represents the life force.

Wahgi Valley winds through the Western Highlands where mountains top 4,000m. It’s lush and fertile here, ideal conditions for growing yams. They vie with taro and sago as the most popular staple. Planted between ridges on plots laid out as perfect grid patterns these sweet potatoes (kaukau in Tok Pisin, the official language) come in a bewildering array of shapes, colours and sizes. Some have red skins and orange flesh. Others are mottled white and aubergine-purple, and others buff.

There’s a cult of ‘long’ yams, more like totem poles, that only men grow and then decorate. During the annual kaukau festival In the Trobriand Islands, women are (allegedly) permitted to assault and rape men of another clan. In a village, should anyone fall sick, neighbours will tend his crop. At Mount Hagen’s covered market, stallholders arrange yam pyramids in front of them, from time to time splashing each one with water so it sparkles. With neither scales, nor weights, every transaction is by the pile.

People-eating jokes aside, Papuans live on a vegetable-rich diet. They could teach the West lessons about freshness and taste, as anyone will attest on a visit to a local market. Traders bind fresh strawberries to twigs. They wind twine around bunches of garlic. Some stallholders sprinkle slices of coarse salt over thick slivers of ridge cucumber and top them with thin slices of fresh baby ginger. Street food may be a handful of boiled haricots verts in a package made out of the beans’ leaves.

Along the coast, cooking revolves around coconut milk. At Tanaka, near Rabaul, granny is showing her four granddaughters how to prepare haigir. Munching areca nut, she squats on a stool with a rasp fitted to it. At lightning speed she grates coconuts on it, tossing the shells onto the fire pit where the girls are heating stones. She prepares a banana leaf bed several layers deep. On it she spreads a layer of wild greens and a sprinkling of mushrooms picked from a dead mango tree.

While the girls wrap hot stones in more leaves, she adds a little water to the coconut so she can extract the milk. She squeezes this over the vegetables. Finally, a quartered chicken, seasoning and then the hot stones go on top. The parcel is ready for sealing. Half an hour later the haigir is removed and served alongside whole plantains that have been charred in their skins.

In William’s village they make sago. ‘It was our food reserve,’ he says, ‘when other tribes came, raided our village and stole vegetables.’ A glutinous starch made from a palm, it’s double-baked in embers, the outer crust peeled off before storing. Then it was a subsistence food. ‘Nowadays, it makes great banana bread.’

The closest most Papuans come to a restaurant is the kaibar. Takeaways with a limited menu, they sell chicken or pork and chips that would be cheaper in European inner cities. They are greasy because fat is, historically speaking, a new experience in PNG. When Australasia started exporting ‘lamb flaps’, aka mutton briskets, they became the meat of choice. Protein doesn’t have a chance to lay down fat in PNG, especially not the hunted kind. In the villages, men build hides to trap birds. They catch and feed up cassowaries in cages. Flying foxes, deer and wallabies often end up in the clay cooking pot. Not even the cuddly cuscus is safe. Pythons that are trailed around the bonfire during a fire dance by the Baining tribe don’t earn reprieves for their roles in the ritual. The following day they’re lunch.

It takes the dancers a month to prepare for a performance. They spend time in a ‘Secret Place’, the Spirit House. Every tribe and clan has one. It’s a hideout where boys pass into manhood. Most initiation involves pain. Men cook for themselves. They eschew all contact with the other sex. So much as mentioning a woman’s name brings bad luck. Animists, they believe they are strengthening the power of good spirits while warding off the bad.

Nicholas Wama, a Catholic pastor in Kaip has four sons. One wants to be a lawyer, two engineers and the other one a pilot. He wants them to experience the bonding that is part of the Spirit House. ‘We have to keep our traditions alive, because there is a danger that they will die out,’ he says.

William is sanguine about tourists visiting his village. They bring a little extra income and the numbers are few and intermittent. When the octogenarian Kaia Chief Terima in full regalia poses with his wrinkled wives the moment seems sad. Then he brandishes a spear-tipped human tibia and any sense of pathos vanishes.

Off the beach near Kokopo, a woman paddles her canoe along the edge of the reef. In the bottom of the boat are a few glistening silver mullet. A few miles offshore, a rusting Korean factory ship anchors, ready to process a yellowfin tuna catch. In a nutshell that sums up fishing in PNG.

At Tufi, where outriggers bob on an azure sea, not one trawler hovers on the horizon. Villagers here have a catch and a ready demand for it. The rock lobsters they deliver to the Australian-owned diving resort there would fetch a fortune anywhere else along the Pacific Rim. Its chef tosses raw tails on the griddle as tough they were burgers and he can afford to bin the carapace and shells.

Sit a bunch of hard-nosed ex-pat Aussies on the Tufi Resort veranda with a few stubbies of SP Export or Niugini Ice and they’ll offer a hatful of reasons why the jetset won’t travel to PNG. They’ve been living in Port Moresby, allegedly the most dangerous capital on Earth, for 14 years without so much as a mugging to cry over. Then somebody chips in that it’s safe to drive around the city by night so long as it’s in a convoy of two or more cars. Someone else remembers the pilot shot outside an ATM.

It’s then that the penny drops. They love the notoriety. It gives them a permanent frisson. They like the fact that the edges are rough, that the pleasure comes at a cost. They are right too. The smiles, the waves and the ‘Hello’ that Papuans share with strangers long went out of fashion in Tonga, Fiji or Tahiti. So what if it is a bit scary and there are no seafood restaurants?