It all started with a “Does anyone want to go to the Mt Hagen Festival in August?”. Like many of my trips to far-flung destinations, I decided to go to Papua New Guinea simply because I had other people to travel with and I was a bit too intimidated by its bad reputation to go by myself. I was quickly put into a What’sapp group with a handful of other excited travelers who would also be visiting PNG for the first time. I soon learned that other Facebook friends were heading to PNG for the festival so decided to extend my stay a bit and explore more of the country. 

But…..how exactly do you do that in a place that is made up of islands, has very little tourist info about it, and is known for being very dangerous in some areas? Well, I took the easy way out and copied the itinerary of one of my friends who was travelling there. In order to make it fit into my schedule, I had to swap things around a bit. But luckily, this meant I could also travel for a few days with my “experienced” friend who had already learned the ropes of traveling PNG just a few days earlier. 

With a very rough idea of where I wanted to go, I began looking at the different flight options and was horrified at how expensive everything was. Since I had limited time in each place and a limited budget, I decided to cut down on my wishlist destinations and settled on Mt Hagen (of course!), Port Moresby, and Rabaul. When my outbound flight was cancelled, I decided to delay my departure for three days which allowed me to squeeze in Goroka and Lae (well, at least the drive to Lae. Turns out, the airport is located an hour away from the city center AND it is a pretty dodgy spot so I decided to stay at a motel near the airport which was conveniently located on the road between Goroka and Lae. 

I managed to book my flights while there was actually availability (they sell out quickly!) and found budget-friendly accommodation in each of the destinations I would be visiting. Travel tip: most properties aren’t bookable online and if you do a search on Booking.com, you’ll only see the high-end hotels. Luckily, the budget properties seem to have a pretty good business mindset as many of them include their Whatsapp number on their Google Business profile. This makes it super easy to contact them and they are almost always quick at responding.  I have included the names of the hotels that I stayed at below as well as the link to their Google profile so you can contact them easily!

Mt Hagen Festival

I flew from Manila to Port Moresby and then immediately boarded a domestic flight to Mt. Hagen. Located in the Western Highlands about an hour’s flight from Port Moresby, this rough-and-tumble town has only a handful of streets but hosts the 2nd biggest cultural festival in PNG (after Goroka!).  Every year, thousands of tribal members and tourists come together to witness a parade of sing-sing groups as they perform traditional dances and sing while wearing traditional ceremonial clothing. I normally try and steer clear of “cultural activities” such as this because it either always feels like it’s fake and that it is only put on for tourists. Even if it doesn’t feel like that, I normally tend to feel a little voyeuristic when I go to them.

However, the Mt. Hagen Festival felt very, very different from anything I have ever been to before. In fact, I found it to be one of the best things to do in Papua New Guinea. Overall, it resembled something more like a 4th of July parade where different clubs or businesses have floats or groups all dressed up. It had a strong community feel to it and was the exact opposite of some of the other cultural things I have been to where all the performers look bored and like they wanted to be anywhere but there. The people looked like they were actually having fun and really enjoyed showing off their history and culture. They were also a little cheeky, winking at visitors as they walked by or giving their dance routine a little sass as they gliding by. 

One of my favorite parts about the festival was how informal it was. After all of the groups paraded into a big central field, they formed small circles and kept dancing and singing. When they were tired, they would all sit down and take a break. If they were hungry, they would eat snacks they brought with them or run over to the grocery store across the street (and let me tell ya, it was very, very funny seeing people in full tribal gear walking around a modern grocery store).  On the second day of the festival, I decided to get my face painted by one of the tribe members. Unbeknownst to me, he painted the PNG flag on my face which I got lots and lots of compliments on from locals during the rest of the festival. 

Both nights that I was in Mt Hagen, I also visited the Mt Hagen Club. The first night, I went with two other travelers from my guest house who were meeting friends from a Young Pioneer Tours group there. Rather than hanging out with them, I got caught up chatting with some of the local expats. These guys were real salt of the earth Aussie guys that gave me a fascinating history lesson about the colonization of the highlands. One of the men was mixed race with an Aussie dad and a PNG mom who claimed to be one of the biggest coffee producers in the highlands. I randomly met his Australian cousin a few days later in Rabaul and it turns out that he wasn’t exaggerating!

The following night, I went back with two other travelers for what was supposed to be just a few drinks and then a very early night in bed. This soon turned into many, many beers thanks to a Fijian couple who seemed to have confused us with some other white people that had come into the restaurant that they owned. They sent over a round of drinks for us as a thank you for coming to their restaurant multiple times. By the time we told them they had us confused with other people, the drinks were flowing and we soon found ourselves dancing to ABBA on the club’s tiny, and very empty, dance floor. Needless to say, it was a very fun night!

Goroka

After the Mt Hagen show, I joined up with a few other travelers to get a private car to Goroka. The drive was pretty although the cloudy weather prevented us from getting a good view of the rugged hills surrounding us in all directions.  We arrived in Goroka in the evening, just in time for a quick dinner and a good night sleep.

The next day, we had a lazy day exploring Goroka town, which mainly consisted of walking through the markets and eating dinner at the “legendary” Birds of Paradise Hotel. Known as being the nicest hotel in Goroka, this place kind of resembled a run-down Holiday Inn but it did have decent food and it gave us a chance to sit down for a bit. 

The entire day, we were shadowed by a local man that I suspected was mentally impaired.  He had the mentality of a boy even though he was probably in his 30s. He prided himself on being our bodyguard for the day and the only thing that he wanted in return was my broken-down sandals with a hole in the bottom which I gave to him when we finally got back to the guest house at the end of the day. I went upstairs to get my other shoes and by the time I came back down, he had his tennis shoes off and was very excited to put my sandals on. It was a really heartwarming moment and I was really glad that I hadn’t ditched those sandals earlier in the trip. Those babies had taken me through countless countries and now they get a new lease on life with a very loving owner.

The next morning, we rented a driver and a guide to take us to two of the tribes that lived just a short 20-minute drive away from Goroka. The first place we visited was a tiny village with a handful of houses and a school full of very boisterous kids who were ecstatic to see a group of tall foreigners show up. We had fine chatting with their teachers and observing their class while we waited for the village performers to get ready for the show.

A few minutes later, we walked into a garden area and watched a group of women perform traditional dances. Afterward, they all introduced themselves and we did the same. We then got a chance to take photos with them. I always feel weird doing that so I just took a few and then hung off to the side. This is where the real fun started as villagers kept coming over wanting to chat with me. It was a surprisingly lovely experience and I felt like I really did get a chance to connect with them, even if it was only for a few minutes. 

After that, we headed over to the Moka Moka tribe. Apparently, these guys are famous and tons of tourists want to see them. Rather than being colourfully painted like many of the other tribes, they were covered in black and white paint with faces drawn across their chests. They performed a dance that I originally thought was a battle cry or a war dance. It turns out that it was actually a “sexy dance” that they would perform when they got back to their village after a battle to try and entice women to sleep with them so that they could produce more warriors that would go on and fight in the future. It was basically the equivalent of a striptease that they would do to turn off the ladies.  After I learned that, it was difficult to look at their hip thrusts and penis-shaped gourds the same way!

After we watched the show, we hiked up a nearby mountain where we got amazing views of the highlands. The hike took about 30 minutes and was welcome after barely being able to walk anywhere outside of the festival for the past few days. 

After that, we headed back to Goroka where I started making my way to Lae. 

Goroka to Lae Airport on the Highlands Highway 

From Goroka, I caught a PMV (ie local bus) towards Lae, one of the biggest cities in PNG. I wasn’t going all the way there though, instead, I was stopping at the airport on the way which is about an hour north of Lae.  The drive from Goroka to Nadzab, where the Lae Airport is located, was absolutely stunning. The drive takes you through the highlands and down to the coastal area. In the first half, the mountains looked like they were covered in emerald velvet and every time we rounded a corner, the landscape became more dramatic.  Suddenly, everything became a bit drier and as we continued to descend towards the coast, the thick forest was replaced with palm trees.  

As we were leaving Goroka, we made an annoyingly large amount of stops, including a gas station and a stop for everyone to get food (which baffled me because we started at a market roughly 15 minutes earlier that had plenty of food options). However, we eventually got on our way and made it to Nadzab about five hours later. I checked in to my hotel and got prepared for some overnight conference calls I had scheduled and tried to take a power nap.

I worked a lot through the night and after having around 3 hours of sleep, I got up for my morning flight. I decided to check the Air Niugini website once more to make sure everything was on time only to see that they had delayed my flight to Rabaul by 3 DAY. Since I only had 4 days there in total and had spent $400 on flights to go there, this was very bad so I headed to the airport to see what my options were. 

After quite a bit of arguing, I was able to be put on a flight to Rabaul the next day. Satisfied that this was only a trip delay instead of an all-out disaster, I decided to spend the rest of the day sleeping and getting caught up on work. 

Rabaul 

I finally made it to Rabaul the following day. Located on the island of New Britain, the province has a very different feel than the highlands. I stayed in the bustling town of Kokopo which lies right in between the Rabaul airport and the town of Rabaul itself which is about 40 minutes away. The original Rabaul airport, along with most of Rabaul town, was destroyed by a volcano in the 1990s and luckily, they had the foresight to build it very, very far away from the actual town. 

I checked into the Taklam Lodge guest house, had lunch, and began to explore the town of Kokopo. I visited the War Museum which inexplicably has a crocodile living in the back yard and walked over to the Kokopo Beach Bungalows Resort which has a lovely restaurant. One great benefit of Taklam is that you have access to all of the facilities of Kokopo Beach Bungalows including the pool and their lovely beach which I took full advantage of!  

KBB (as it is locally referred to) can also help you book various tours and snorkeling trips. I found them to be quite overpriced but was hesitant to attempt much on my own so ended up booking a sunrise volcano hike and a snorkeling tour to Little Pigeon Island with them. I highly recommend both of those tours and will go into more detail below!

Hiking Up Rabaul Volcano

When I was Googling Rabaul, 90% of the photos that I saw were of the clump of volcanoes located just outside of the city of Rabaul. These volcanoes provide an amazing backdrop but they have also been the city’s downfall as they have destroyed the city multiple times in recent history. The most recent eruption actually happened in the 1990s. The entire city was evacuated so no lives were lost but pretty much, the entire city and all of its beautiful colonial buildings were decimated. 

There have been no eruptions since then and climbing Tavurur, one of its many active volcanoes, has become a big tourist attraction. Of course, I wanted to do it so I signed up for a tour my first morning there. Pick up was meant to be at 4:30 a.m. and when I woke up around 4, it was pouring rain. I was sure that the tour was going to be called off but I decided to get ready anyway just in case. It turns out the other people doing the tour thought the same thing and decided to sleep in for a while.  We ended up getting started around 5:15 a.m. and made the 30-minute drive to the trailhead. It turned out to be a very wet hike up the surprisingly steep slope and I made it to the top just as the rain was getting harder and harder. I managed to get a few good photos when the rain slowed down for a few minutes and made my way back down to the carpark. 

WWII Relics

After finishing the hike, I headed out to explore some of the local WWII sights. The Japanese military occupied Rabaul for four long years and built a series of tunnels and bunkers that you can still explore. As a history buff, this was at the top of my to-do list. I visited Yamamoto’s Bunker, the Underground Hospital, and a barge tunnel and the nearby volcano observatory with the help of a local guide. It was fascinating and very sobering to think about everything that had happened there. The number of innocent lives lost, the number of young men who didn’t want to be there fighting for a government that they couldn’t care less about. 

The Ruins of Rabaul

While we were visiting some of the World War II relics, we also drove through the ruins of Rabaul. As mentioned earlier, the city was basically flattened in 1994 and not much has been rebuilt in the location of the original town. Instead, there are well-maintained streets with nothing on them except for a few foundations of the buildings that once stood there. There is also a rugby stadium that was built on top of the volcanic ash and now stands about 3 feet above the actual road itself. 

The entire town was evacuated before the eruption so the experience didn’t have the creepy energy as to when I visited Armero in Colombia where a volcano eruption wiped out around 20,000 people within a few hours. Instead, it just had a feeling of emptiness that was hard to describe. Once we started driving back into the new town, which was just a few blocks away, the whole mood of the city and it felt energetic and hopeful. 

Snorkeling in the Bismarck Sea

The final activity that I did in Rabaul was a snorkelling trip to Little Pigeon Island and the Zero Plane Wreck. The trip was around $130 and I was hesitant to go at first because of the cost but the two Australians that I did the volcano climb with promised me that it was better than the Great Barrier Reef. It turns out that that is definitely NOT the case but it was a nice day out on the water and it gave me a chance to get a very different perspective of the giant caldera that I had been spending the past few days in.  

It was also very interesting in snorkel above a World War II plane wreck but I couldn’t shake the feeling that something felt a little bit creepy about it. I later learned that most of the planes that got shot down overland in the Solomon Islands had no survivors and I am fairly certain that Rabaul would have been the same. It also had an overwhelming sense of sadness to it thinking that there were hundreds if not thousands more planes and ships on the ocean floor. 

As we made our way back to the beach that we had started from, we stopped to see a pod of dolphins. Apparently, they get super excited whenever they hear the boat engines and love to come up to the surface to say hello.  We drove in circles as they jumped out of the water all around us and swam just a few feet in front of us. It was a magical moment and is certainly one of my favourite memories of Rabaul!

Port Moresby 

From Rabaul, I flew back to Port Moresby. My original flight ended up getting canceled so I had one extra night in Rabaul which I spent having beers in my hotel with a congenial doctor named Vernon who had also gotten stranded there.  The next morning, we went back to the airport and boarded our flight to POM as the locals call it. I arrived in Port Moresby in the late morning and hired a taxi who would drive me around for the day. As it turns out, there really is very little to see in Port Moresby except for a marina and a beach. After spending a few hours exploring, I was more than happy to get back to my hotel for a very early night’s sleep. 

The next morning, I was up bright and early to head to my next destination – Vanuatu!