Black Cat Track & Mt. Wilhelm Treking Report

Just got back from PNG and did both of these treks. They were fun, mostly, but the guides (and guides on the Sepik, another post) were very disappointing. A caveat about my reviews that follow: I generally travel fast and alone. I generally do NOT take guides on treks. If you LIKE taking (crappy) guides on treks, you'll probably be fine. However, I would not go back to PNG again mainly due to these issues. Do note that I've trekked in Thailand, Laos, Borneo, Pakistan, Himalayan India, Kyrgyzstan, Morocco, Nepal, Slovenia, and other places so I do have some basis upon which to judge this place. I would say this was my least favorite country for trekking and I wouldn't do it again.

Black Cat Track
----------------------

The popularity of this trek has fundamentally changed this trek:
A. You are REQUIRED to take a guide. They tried to make me (one person) take TWO. I told them I didn't want two, so they said "well, two will go with you and they'll split the fees," knowing darn well that at the end of it I'm not going to make them split the money. Guide was 60K/day.

B. There is a 100K fee for hiking the track that you have to pay at the start.
C. As soon as you leave, they radio the villages on the track that you've started. This is so they can "get ready." Which is a disaster as far as I'm concerned. For instance, by the time I get to the first river crossing, there's some guy dressed up in "traditional" gear with a bow, who made like he was going to shoot me and demanded 10K to be allowed to cross the river. The first village saw me coming, the children ran, changed into "traditional" clothes, and then a guy comes running at me with a spear. There was nothing natural about it; it was like going to Epcot Center or Knotts' Berry Farm. Very, very contrived.
D. Each village wants you to "trade out" your current guide for one of theirs. I didn't, but that meant every village we passed through was a tense with the guides discussing with the villagers. Nothing too heated, but we had to rush through some villages.

E. My "guide" got lost and we went the wrong way up a river for 1.5 hours.
F. The "guides" did not bring a water bottle or ANY way to purify water on the trail. Note that as of mid Oct 2009, there is a cholera outbreak in the area. Luckily, I brought both extra water bottles (which they needed) and a SteriPen UV water sterilizer. If I hadn't had that, we would have had to drink unsterilized stream water in a cholera area.
G. The prices on the trail are ridiculous. I brought a tent, and the first village area that I stayed in charged me 20K just to pitch a tent. If I'd stayed in an open air hut with no bed or mosquito protection, their price was 50K. FYI, that's ridiculous.

We finished the trek in a mildly grueling 2.5 days; probably would have finished in two if we hadn't wasted 3 hours going up and then back the river bed in the wrong direction. It was fun, but the contrived nature of the beginning, and the tense interactions later took a lot of the fun out of it. I was a walking ATM apparently.

Mt Wilhelm Trek
-----------------------

Like the Black Cat Track, you are most likely required to take a guide, but you MIGHT be able to get away with not taking one. I logged the route on my Garmin GPS, so email me if you want the log file. If I were you, I'd do it alone. This is why:

A. Picking a guide: I chose one that two people said was good. Very nice guy, but he sucked.
B. We started hiking at 3pm the first day up to the huts. Turns out he hadn't eaten either breakfast or lunch, so he kept dropping behind. I carried all the food of course. The "guide" had no water bottle (I lent him my Nalgene) or any way to purify water, and the week after I was there they had several people die in the highlands from dyssentary. Really. Bring your own purifier. Again, I have a SteriPen, and love it.
C. I had a tent with me; they convinced me NOT to bring it but to pay 75K to stay in the huts. They assured me there was a person with a key at the huts. We got there at 5pm. No key. Now we were screwed. We slept in a shed with no beds or anything, basically on straw under corregated metal. My "guide" didn't bring anything to sleep in, so I lent him my goretex bivy sack, and I used the summer bag that I normally put in the sack. We were both cold all night. My "guide" didn't have enough sense to get firewood for a fire, so I had to tell him to do it. Luckily, even though they told us there was a stove in the huts, I brought my camp stove and a pot ANYWAY. This saved us, as otherwise we wouldn't have been able to eat.
D. We started up to the top the next morning, leaving camp at 2am. My "Guide" brought a flashlight, but never checked it. He had no batteries, so he hiked up behind me trying to use my headlamp with me. My "Guide" had no socks, so I lent him my extra pair (which I would have used for gloves), so I now had no gloves. My "Guide" had no rain gear. Basically, my "guide" was a liability, not an asset, but I still had to pay him 50K for each day.

E. We made it to the top from the huts in a little bit under 3 hours and 45 minutes, but that's probably on the fast side of it. We then went all the way out that day.

F. My guide never returned my Nalgene water bottle, and the person who collected the hut money was mysteriously missing the entire next day, so I never got me 75K back.

My recommendations: Do NOT pay for the hut until your return. You can quote my experience. Not paying beforehand is the only way you'll be assured that they'll make sure you get a key... If you have a GPS, email me for the track log and do it solo. Do NOT expect to have a guide who can actually ensure that if something goes wrong you'll be safe. You MAY get a good one, but if mine had needed to save someone, well, I'm not sure they wouldn't be dead at this point. He was that bad. Nice guy, but totally unqualified to be on a mountain in any country.

Edited by: kzemach

I have not travelled to any of the other places you have, and am not a trekker for physical reasons. However, there are cultural reasons in the more remote parts of Melanesia that make it wiser to travel with a local - otherwise you could be in all sorts of trouble entering tabu places.

People demanding that you get a new, local guide at each stage of the way is not uncommon, and I can understand it - why should only people living in the first village along the track get ALL the tourist money?
Dressing up is usually done in touristy places where previous tourists, or their guides, had encouraged it.

For Mount Wilhelm, on both of my 2 visits years apart I found tons of useful comments and recommendations (including for guides) in the comment book kept at the East Kege Guest House, whose owners I also found a reliable source of info.

The other advantage of changing guides is that they would know the next part of the trek, and would be less likely to get you lost. It is quite possible that the guide that did get lost was not familiar with that part of the trek, but a guide who lived closer would have been.

I'm curious as to where you are from Op? You write "The prices on the trail are ridiculous. I brought a tent, and the first village area that I stayed in charged me 20K just to pitch a tent." I went to Xe.com and did a currency conversion. That's $7.65 U.S. /5.17 Euro/ 4.67 GBP.

I am surprised that you expected your guide to have various camping supplies.
I would think that the reason he didn't have a goretex bivy sack, gloves, batteries, a bottle or purifier, etc. is because he was dirt poor. He doesn't make that $19.13 US dollars (50 kina) every day.

This post was largely just odd.
Oddest of all was that OP boasted about having enough experience after he had hiked elsewhere, in places like Slovenia, a highly developed European country where conditions are nothing like in PNG. Most of the Asian countries he lists are also popular hiking destinations, with developed infrastructure for the activity.
PNG has nothing of that sort - as much as as I myself love hiking solo, I would always take a guide there on longer hikes and I don't know how he had imagined doing it without one.
I think the whole island of New Guinea is a terrific trekking destination partly exactly because of its undeveloped nature, but OP should go to the Alps, or Argentina, or New Zealand next time - I certainly won't miss the chance to meet him in New Guinea!

You can't have your cake and eat it too my friend.

The beauty of these routes is that they are truly raw and barely touched by tourism. On the Black Cat, it is very unlikely you will see another trekker at all, the villagers are much as they have been for 10,000 years, and the track is as rough as it gets. Imagine how interesting it could get for a visitor, if even a local takes a wrong turn?

I think it's wonderful to see the villagers endeavouring to support the notion of tourism, develop ways to share their culture, and earn some coins at the same time. You should also note that the K100 (USD37.50) fees have allowed a new HF radio system to be installed along the route for improved safety of guests, and locals alike.

It seems that PNG may just have shown you the difference between trekking and adventuring...

Sorry you had a bit of a bummer OP

I did enjoy reading your report - so thanks for posting

It all sounded familiar - the frustration etc;, but I have to agree with the other comments - the prices you are paying are really just to help the local economies.

The fact that they don't have any kit doesn't surprise me in the least - I've yet to meet a local bird guide in PNG who has bins or a scope - they've all got sodding laser guided eyesight & know where to look, having said that.

And yes you are indeed an ATM on legs.

I tend to take the view that if I'm still thinking about a good day I had with a PNG guide months or years later, then I had value for money.

Learn from the experience, go back & have another crack. Try Kokoda perhaps? There's a challenge.

people allways seem to want to do the biggest and nearly all the time the most well known climbs/treks. I trecked up the second biggest moutain in png MT giluwe further into the high lands (real deal where there are tribal conflicts still).using a bit of intative found a member of a tribal village working in MtHagen enquired about seeing the villages and doing a climb.4 hour drive on the only running transport on one of the most unforgiving roads ive ever traveled, further hour walk to reach the village. As we were driving slowly though villages word was spreading that " white people" were on route and children from villages from miles around came to see us, we were the entertainment as they had never seen "us" before. the chief was so proud that we had came to his village he toured us around so all the other elders could see with a fire lit intiation ceromony exchange of gifts and mine 30 kina for staying . Me and my girlfriend wanted to climb so tried to arrange forone of the villagers to be out guide instead the chief insisted that we have half a dozen for safety and had most of the vilage for firsy few hours. NOT one sales pitch.
i could carry on with this story but this was real trecking experiencing people far from tourism not every thing whent to plan and we defo didn't have the dogs bollocks gear ( tired pair of scate shoes, waterproof jacket and sleeping bag from the philippines). but was an amazing adventure which is what would want from a country as un discovered and un contaminated by western ways

think out side the box

i think the OP's concerns are totally warranted. there's nothing wrong with developing countries trying to squeeze a bit of coin from wealthy tourists, but i suspect the OP may feel the same way as i do in such circumstances - you wish they'd just charge the money up front and leave you alone to get on with your business. instead, they often go through a charade of 'justifying' the charges that only detract further from the experience. ok, so they're not yet expert in the way of capitalism and their clumsy attempts at it are perhaps inevitable, but it's still annoying.

And let's hope they never become 'experts in the way of capitalism' - talk about destruction of culture and custom.