Independent travel in the highlands and the north coast of PNG

I'm just back from nearly three weeks in PNG and thought others might benefit from some on-the-ground observations about independent travel there.
The tl;dr version is this:
* PNG is awesome! It has its problems but the dystopian Mad Max reputation I'd heard so much about is overblown and the people are among the loveliest and most friendly I've met. If you travel like the locals, they know the rules and will look after you.
* I didn't see another independent traveller in the entire time I was there and in nearly every place I went, I was the first non-missionary westerner to visit for a month or more.
* Affordable independent travel is definitely feasible, including in the Sepik. I think I averaged around AU$100/day, including two days of scuba diving but excluding flights. It would certainly be possible to do it cheaper.
* Don't miss Mt Wilhelm (much cheaper than described in the LP guidebook) or Yuo Island near Wewak.

Here's the fuller version. I'll do it by geographic section, which covers my journey from flying into Mt Hagen and then out of Wewak.
Mt Hagen: I timed my trip for the Tumbuna Festival, as advertised on the PNG government tourism website, but it turns out it's a private festival organised by Trans Niugini Tours as an off-season way to fill their luxury lodges. Independent travellers are neither invited nor welcome. Unless you're a birder, there didn't really seem to be any other reason to visit Mt Hagen. I stayed at the Mt Hagen Missionary House (dorms are K150, but thanks to the paucity of other backpackers, I had a three-bed room to myself) which was OK without being noteworthy other than it's peak-zombie-apocalypse architectural style.
Mt Wilhelm: The LP guidebook talks about K150/day for a guide but Josephine and Arnold/Rambo at East Kegsugl guesthouse say the actual price is K150 for two days and K200 for three. Josephine and Arnold are lovely, kind and honest people who will ensure you get the right deal. To give an example, they have their own preferred mountain guides but a guy called Noah from down the valley who has done the mountain 30-odd times saw me heading past on the 4x4 PMV and jumped on in the hope of being my guide. I didn't care who my guide was so long as they knew their stuff. Arnold didn't know Noah but ascertained that he knew the mountain and didn't want to interfere in my choice and offer his own guides in Noah's place, although his people have more experience and have first aid training vs being a chancing grifter. Arnold was present as Noah and I negotiated exactly what was and wasn't included in the deal (IE I paid for my nights at Base Camp but not his, which are free, and I paid for the food we bought). Apart from a meagre shop with enough food for the ascent, there's not really anything else in Kegsugl such as sleeping bags, torches/flashlights etc so you need to bring these from home.
A three-day schedule makes it a much more enjoyable trip in terms of adjusting to the altitude and if your guide is like Noah, they'll be pretty happy about the prospect of being paid to spend a day fishing for rainbow trout in the two lakes near the huts at base camp. And pescavores will be pretty happy to eat fresh trout instead of yet more ramen noodles with tinned corn beef. Departure time for the summit is usually around 1-2am to beat the tropical clouds that supposedly come in soon after dawn but in the four days I was in the area, the clouds didn't come before lunchtime. You'd definitely want to be off the mountain before the afternoon rains come in, though. It was about 10degC in the base camp hut and I think a few degrees below freezing near the summit -- there was a small amount of flow ice on the trail -- and the wind chill exacerbated that. Even with an acclimatisation day, I was puffing like a steam engine near the summit. It's probably feasible to do this without a guide, although the route can be a little counterintuitive near the top in the dark and it means a lot to the local economy to hire one. I thought it was definitely beneficial. Noah was an OK guide but if I was going back again I'd arrange guides through Arnold and Josephine. They have a lovely home (K80/night, with K20 extra for breakfast and dinner -- Josephine is a great cook!) They can also arrange from the PMV driver to collect you from their home in the morning, which means you get business class (the front seat, instead on the tray out the back) and that you pay the right price: K30. The Chinese are rebuilding the road to Kegsugl as part of a plan to build a hydro dam there but it'll be 4x4 only for a long time to come.
PMV to Madang: The road directly from Kegsugl towards Madang has been closed for months because of rockfall. There didn't seem to be any great urgency to reopen it, so getting to Madang means going back to Kundiawa and then Goroka. LP guidebook talks about five hours for the Coaster bus from Goroka to Madang but that's fiction. The roads in PNG are the worst main highways I've seen in 100+ countries -- more decrepit than Somalia, Iraq and Tajikistan, with unavoidable 20cm-deep potholes, which might explain why I didn't see anything other than serious 4x4ers and trucks on the road. We left Goroka around midday and reached Usino (at the base of the last bit of hills before Madang) at dusk, at which point the driver said the danger of raskols was too high so he waited to drive over in convoy and, failing that, driving over on our own at 3am. After an hour, the amount of traffic coming the other way suggested the road was OK so we set off. We got to the outskirts of Madang and stopped again around 11pm. I can't verify the accuracy of what follows and possibly it's got better with the telling but I was told a teacher in Madang had been beheaded(!) by a cult a couple of months earlier, after which the teacher's highlands tribesfolk came down for retribution and four more people died. All overland transport was halted for a month or so but had resumed about six weeks earlier. However there were reports of fighting in town that night (whether rumour or truth, it's hard to say) so we stopped at a village just before. This seems to be sufficiently frequent an event that there was a kind of hotel there, where I got a room for K30 (they tried to hit me up for K100, which was a rare example of waitpela pricing). My PMV continued its journey just before dawn but I was then within range of local PMV so I slept in until 8am and took a PMV (K3) at a more civilised hour. As an aside, I learned during one of our stops that the driver had set off from Madang at 3am that same morning and does the return journey in one day, so by the time we stopped, he'd been driving for 20 hours straight! Might be best to take a morning bus rather than being on the wrong side of that sleep deficit...
Madang: This is described as one of the most picturesque towns in the Pacific and possibly because of the very low bar set by other PNG towns, this is probably true. Madang Lodge is the perfect antidote to bus travel from Goroka and the fan rooms (K130) are a bargain (admittedly, again by PNG standards). I went diving few times with Niugini Diver Adventures operating out of Madang Resort. They don't seem to check your dive cert but I notice the dive instructor let me set up my own rig, presumbly as a test to see if I knew what I was doing. I went to Magic Passage and Barracuda Point on the first two dives and they're good but nothing particularly special. Unlike the rampant coral bleaching blighting much of the world's reefs, the coral was in pretty good condition. If I was doing this again, most of the interesting stuff is in the top 5-10m so I'd snorkel rather than dive next time. The exception to this is the WW2 diving. I dove on the B25 Mitchell bomber off Wongat Island and it's one of my favourite dives. And it's about 15-23m, so feasible to most divers. (The back story to the plane crew is pretty harrowing: all but one survived the ditching but when captured by the Japanese, the captain was taken to Japan for interrogation and survived the war but the rest of the crew were bayoneted to death)

Continued:
Madang to the Sepik: There's no road to Wewak so overland travel involves going to Bogia bay or nearby and then catching a small boat with an outboard to Angoram, in the lower Sepik. But an important bridge on the way from Madang to Bogia apparently didn't survive the last wet season, making this more complicated and less feasible. Combined with fresh memories of the Goroka bus epic, flying became more appealing so I took the PNGAir flight to Wewak. This town was the only place where I felt unsafe in daylight, partly because the locals, who are overwhelmingly friendly and honest, were also concerned for my safety. Elsewhere, the constant refrain was "it's safe here but [next town/region] is very dangerous", but here I was being told that Wewak was dangerous and, in keeping with the generous and friendly nature of the average PNGer, complete strangers kept an eye on me and my welfare. I stayed in CBC guesthouse (K110 for a room), which was OK but nothing special. It varied from almost empty to just about full (with missionary folk) so it'd pay to book ahead. There didn't seem to be many other good options.
The Sepik: The LP guidebook talked about PMVs to Maprik/Pagwi not leaving until 1pm and mostly going overnight to bring the Sepik people to market in either Maprik or Wewak. This seemed odd to me so I asked the manager at CBC guesthouse and she confirmed it (or, alternatively, was the source of the LP guidebook writer's information!) The next day, I went down to the market to find Maprik PMVs had been going from dawn, as one would expect. It was just like every other PNG town in terms of transport between these two locations, with lots of buses around dawn and then tapering off into the afternoon. I took a PMV to Maprik and then another to Pagwi. I stayed at Sangra guest house, which is built in traditional style but tends to be hot and airless. So they kick in the generator at dusk to run the fan, which would be great if the generator wasn't directly below the floor and outweighing the marginal benefits of the fan!
I asked around for the equivalent of PMV boats on the river to have a look around but a few people separately said the boats are all privately owned and run. Ben Giu, who sort-of runs Sangra guest house on behalf of some kind of relative who owns the greater complex of stores/fuel etc, was able to fix me up with a boat, driver and guide. The prices I'd been hearing beforehand ran to about K1000/day for boat and guide but after a bit of horse trading, I arranged to pay K1000 for two days to go to Aibom on Chambri lakes. This was probably too much -- a 44 gallon drum of fuel now sells for K800, I was told, and I was told the journey would take ten gallons of fuel there and ten gallons back but the truth was we only used a fraction of that, which is probably where their profit margin kicks in. But it was still reasonable and Ben rustled up some friends from the village across the river, which is where he hails from, to act as boatman and guide. Paul and Josiah were guys in that in-between age spanning adolescence and settling down to marriage. They proved to be good company, partly because they were just ordinary guys rather than regular tourist guides so that it felt more like I was being shown around by friends-of-friends rather than a commercial guiding operation. I was told we'd be in a dugout but we ended up being in a fibreglass dinghy, which is more comfortable but less fuel efficient. Even so, we still didn't use anything like 20 gallons of fuel.
As Majordom has noted elsewhere on the PNG thread on Thorn Tree, Chambri lakes is a good choice for destination, especially soon after the wet season when the river levels are high. The first minute on the main Sepik river is pretty much the same as every minute thereafter but after about 10 mins on the main river, we turned up a side channel near Kandagai to an oxbow lake where the river has cut through an ancient meander. Because it was calmer water, there were more people fishing and getting wood, which made the main river seem more akin to a highway. Another channel, in this case nearly choked with driftwood from the wet season, took us through to Chambri lake, the biggest in PNG. We crossed this to get to a village on the far side. I couldn't get a consistent answer on the name -- Chambri, Aibom or Wombun -- but it's the one with a huge Catholic church and school directly below the big hill right on the lake. It has a series of spirit houses, including one big and newish one which has a guest house (K30) run by a local guy called Robert. The local teacher, who grew up here, came by to answer any questions we might have. It was also a nice place to simply wander around, talking to people and watching the kids play. The next day we reversed the journey, stopping at Kandagai, where there's a haus tambaran right next to a boy's house, where many village boys live between adolescence and marriage. This is where Ben and countless others get their crocodile markings in the form of ritual scarring as an initiation into manhood. In every case, people were chill about visiting spirit houses and nobody seemed concerned about photographing spirit chairs (I asked beforehand) and we were invited in to take a photo of the "spirit man" -- a totem which is kept in a house separate from the actual spirit house, alongside shell currency and human skulls of ancestors -- in Kandagai.
This being PNG, of course, nothing went as planned. The outboard broke down continuously on the way to the village on Chambri Lake and then finally and irretrievably on the way back. But also being PNG, everyone else helps someone in trouble and because everyone is kind of related to everyone else in this part of the world, soon distant familial relations saw us with a borrowed outboard and then we swapped again in Kandagai to a dugout for the run back up to Pagwi. This is all part of the adventure of travelling in PNG and should be embraced -- after all, there isn't much choice! Paul noted that occasionally westerners he took would get upset at things going wrong, which must be a bewildering reaction to anyone born and raised in PNG. I'd assumed that wet season would be a bad time in the Sepik but Paul and Josiah said travel across to Chambri lakes is not just feasible but easier then. Getting a PMV to Pagwi then would be a different issue, of course.
Yuo Island: The answer to where to stay in Wewak is best answered by not staying in Wewak and instead going to Yuo Island, 25km away. Robert and his lovely family run a low-key lodge on the island, which is small, coral fringed with white sandy beaches and home to only five families. After a few days in the Sepik, this is the perfect antidote! Note that the phone number in the LP guidebook is wrong! The correct number is 7276 1483. (The LP guidebook had a 7 instead of the 1). It's K115/day for all meals and the 40-minute journey to and from Wewak costs K100 each way. The family is lovely, the lodge is basic but beautiful and the whole place has a vibe that made me want to stay on much longer than I did. There's one dodgy dive mask but you're better off bringing your own from home. This was one of my favourite places ever.
So, that's it. Don't let the fearmongering about PNG put you off. Go and have an awesome time.

Thanks . Pretty much what we are planning to do too. How long did it take to get from the Mt Wilhelm guesthouse to Madang? Was it easy to book the flight (cheapest fare) Madang to Wewak a day or so ahead? Is it feasible to stop in Goroka and see the mudmen?

sounds a great trip thanks for the report

chambri is the island/village with the big white church on chambri lake

pmv from wewak leave in the morning for maprik
thiose direct to pagwi tend to go overnight to arrive pagwi at dawn to then return to wewak with people from the river - that said timetables are always erratic and services have been disrupted by fighting in yangoru on the road

madang has got bad the last few years - generally landowners dont allow squatters to make shanty towns on the edge of cities but apparently a big settlement has grown up outside madang on government land which has not been secured due to lack of funds - as ever the incomers are a source of tension and fighting results

hey tonikaye, it was 17 hours from Mt Wilhelm Guesthouse to the outskirts of Madang (two hours to Kundiawa by 4x4 PMV, two hours to Goroka by Coaster bus, and then 10+ hours to get to the outskirts of Madang, plus the usual faffing between journeys).
I booked the flight two days ahead and it was only about 20% more expensive than booking it a month ahead. Maybe I was lucky. AirPNG was less than half the price Niugini Air quoted.
I didn't stop to see the mudmen in Goroka but the bus goes past their village, so I'm sure it's feasible. Goroka seemed the most tourist-orientated of the highland towns I went to.
Thanks Majordom. Your report of Chambri is why I went there. Definitely a good decision.

Hi shabroon,

thanks for the valueable information on your trip!
It sounds great! Also especially regarding the wrong phone number of Robert.
I will visit the Sepik area myself next month and stay afterwards on Yuo for two days. Do you think I should make a reservation way ahead or would it be fine to call Robert a few days before?
Where there other travelers on Yuo during your stay?

Best,
Alex

Letting Robert know in advance will always be good because they tend to shop at the market when they pick someone up so they can minimise the number of trips to and from the island. I was the only foreigner on the island, which isn't surprising because outside of airports I never saw another waitpela in nearly three weeks in PNG. A great place! Enjoy

Just back from 21 days independent travel in PNG highlands and north coast Sepik and Yuo island with my wife and son aged 17. Amazing trip. If anyone (who has traveled in third world conditions before ) is thinking of going Yes I would strongly encourage it. A great country and lots of very friendly people. (They love Australians especially if you speak a bit of tok pisin). We even traveled in the southern highlands during a "State of emergency" with a " 6pm to 6 am curfew " and felt quiet safe. The secret is to just keep talking to everyone and shaking their hands. Caught a PMV around Port Morseby into town for dinner too without any concerns. Great experience - Wonderful people. Please go - they are desperate for tourists and kept asking us why the tourists had stopped coming. Road from Kegsugal (Mt Wilhelm) to Madang is now open again for private chartered 4WD @ 700 kina - 11 hours. Palimbe on the Sepik has an boys initiation ceremony on on July 26th and also Nov 13th. Tourists are invited to attend for K50 (just turn up) Full report to follow in a few days when I have unpacked.

Also the Museum in Port Moresby is closed for renovations for the next 5 weeks but there are no signs anywhere saying this - even when you get there ! The Nature Park is excellent.

Great to hear you had a similar experience to mine. To anyone wavering: JUST GO! :-)

Have just downloaded our experiences in detail. It is titled Trip Report by Family - 3 weeks in PNG Highlands, Sepik and Wewak

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