PAPUA NEW GUINEA
GREGOR RANKIN – PUBLISHER
Papua New Guinea has always felt like the last true wilderness on Earth – a place that time forgot – where few people travel to and ancient tribes lie hidden deep in thick tropical rainforest. There are said to be something in the region of 800 different languages spoken, which only seems to highlight how even the locals have managed to keep away from each other. As well as having the Pacific attributes of the coral and tropical fish rich balmy waters lapping the whitest of sandy shores, it has mangroves, wetlands, rainforests, volcanoes and highlands – all populated with the weird and wonderful of the animal world where the birds-of-paradise couldn’t decide which colour to be, so chose all of them.
As one half of one of the largest islands on Earth – the other half being the Indonesian Western New Guinea – Papua New Guinea has near impenetrable forests, amid which tribal living is still dominant with only 18 percent of the country’s eight million people living in urban areas. That the modern world is alien to so many, and that there’s thought to be undiscovered tribes still out there, make it the ultimate off the beaten track destination. Even finding the track in the first place seems enough of a challenge.
While exploring those jungles and discovering what tribal life entails is the main draw for me, the other is the scuba diving with 52,000 sq km of reef systems said to rival Australia’s Great Barrier but with the added intrigue of Second World War wrecks – the result of allied bombing of the Japanese military base that occupied the country. It’s just always felt like a place full of a thousand stories, and nearly all of them still to be told.