Trip report October - November 2018 (Part 1)

Hi all, this is going to be a report of my trip as an independent traveller from Vanimo to the Sepik and on to the Highlands, done overland and on water without flying at all. I haven’t felt motivated to write a trip report Inver ten years despite having visited many remote and rarely travelled places. However, for PNG I found that there was such a lack of information on the net, that much information was in fact misinformation and that it is such an awesome country that I really wanted to share some of what I experienced. Misinformation about safety and cost issues undoubtedly discourages lots of people from visiting, which is great shame.

General

This country is definitely not for everyone. It is for you if you are looking for the friendliest, most helpful people in the world. It is for you if you are looking for a real adventure in a place where you will most likely see no other tourists. It is for you if you are interested in spectacular scenery, completely unique traditional cultures and meeting friendly locals. It is not for you if you want everything to go as you expected, transport that leaves on time or even on the right day, value for money when paying for transport, accommodation or anything else, primitive tribes in a state of traditional undress or cheap backpacker accommodation where you can meet other tourists.

Please also remember that what I write is based on my own short 3-week experience in PNG. I didn’t go anywhere really remote, and stuck very much to what would be called the tourist trail, if PNG actually had a tourist trail (ie areas accessible by public transport). It may not be representative of the real situation and I may have just been lucky or unlucky at some stages. I await comments, corrections and abuse from people with more experience in PNG than me! Undoubtedly some people have completely different styles of travel and will disagree with some of what I say.

Safety

There definitely are some issues but they are exaggerated and can probably be avoided, or at least my short 3-week experience made me feel that way. The only time I ever felt unsafe was on the stretches of the Highlands Highway between Mount Hagen and Lae and between Mendi and Tari, although nothing bad actually happened there. Undoubtedly things could potentially go wrong on those stretches. I would probably not recommend people to do travel to Tari by PMV (public motor vehicle) at all the moment. There was a period of lawlessness following an earthquake in February and although that has ended, there is still some tribal fighting in remote villages, a few roadblocks on the road and a small risk of armed robbery if traveling at night. If you need to go to Tari, take the MAF flights that locals say still run from Mt Hagen to Tari despite the official closing of Tari airport.

If traveling between Mount Hagen and Lae, I would definitely recommend to break the trip with an overnight stay in Goroka, as otherwise you may end up traveling at night, which is not safe.

In general my impression was that traveling the Highlands Highway by PMV would be safe if you did not go as far as Tari, and on the other sections you got the first PMV early in the morning and made sure you were at your destination by nightfall. This requires doing it in smaller sections, like Mount Hagen to Goroka then Goroka to Lae, rather than all at once like I did.

I felt unsafe on the Mendi - Tari part of the road because there were apparently a few road blocks, but our PMV driver was local and he just phoned ahead to give people the number of our vehicle and we were let through all the road blocks. I’m not even sure they were really road blocks, but there were definitely large crowds of people hanging around by the roadside. At one some guys asked the driver for a small amount of money, he handed it over and with big smiles they wished us a safe onwards journey. The "road blocks" were by locals who were apparently looking for people from another area who their people had been fighting with. Later on I felt much more unsafe as we had to cross the Ambua Gap (immediately before Tari) in the dark, as our vehicle had had some problems that had taken a while to fix and we were arriving later than expected. Even the driver was a bit tense then, saying that this part of the road is very dangerous at night as there are no villages, no mobile phone reception and lots of armed criminals hiding in the bush. We got through without incident, and there were quite a few other vehicles (including heavily loaded lorries) going in both directions, which made me think that the risk of actual holdups must be quite low. Once in Tari the driver said we were completely safe now and that’s exactly how I felt during my whole time there. People in Tari also said that in recent months the road through the Ambua Gap had got much safer, as police were constantly patrolling it and had already killed most of the rascals. However, when I asked about trips to the Ambua Gap to go birding, nobody was willing to take me as of course birding involves going off into the bush away from the road where there may still be rascals hiding out.

On the Highlands Highway between Mount Hagen and Lae I started to late and made the mistake of doing it in one go without a stop in Goroka. This meant that the last few hours were done int he dark. We did experience a real road block, with lots of drunk and drugged up people in the road, pushing our bus, shouting for money and so on. The driver gave money to several of them. None of them paid any attention to me as a foreigner. Eventually we managed to get through and continued on our way. The other passengers told me that these were not rascals, just drunken opportunist youths who had no other way to make money.

On the Highlands Highway between Madang and Mt Hagen people said that it is better to travel by day if you are going by PMV, especially if they are transporting a lot of betel nut. If you are in a private vehicle it is ok to go at night. The reason for this is that robbers go for the PMVs more, as they know for a fact that there will be several hundred dollars of cash on board (the passengers’ fares) or a lot of very valuable betel nut. In a private vehicle that’s not so, and there could even be police inside, so the robbers don’t bother.

I went at night in a private vehicle, as I had managed to catch a lift with a politician going back from Madang to his homeland in the Jimi Valley. There was so much traffic on the road going both ways, again including heavily loaded lorries, that it was difficult for me to imagine there being many holdups.

Everywhere else there seemed to be almost no issue with safety. People would occasionally tell me about the rascals, or just drunken opportunist youths hanging around at the roadside. However, I never saw any rascals and even the drunken youths were just over-friendly guys interested in getting me to drink their home-brew with them.

Every single person I met in PNG would be counted among the nicest, friendliest, most helpful people I have ever met in my life. When traveling by public transport, everyone always made a real effort to talk to me, look after me, find me accommodation at the place I got off, find me transport to my next destination, help me buy a SIM card or whatever else I was trying to do. I think this is mainly what contributed to me feeling completely safe and welcome throughout my entire stay. I never felt uncomfortable with my camera, wallet or iPhone out in public. I would, however, recommend not walking around towns at night. I never walked around at night myself but everywhere people told me not to do it. Whether it really does present a significant risk or is just exaggerated by locals over-protective of a foreigner I cannot say.

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