Port Moresby

Port Moresby is the front gate of the most extraordinary country most travellers have never seen: Papua New Guinea speaks more than eight hundred living languages — one in every ten on Earth — across highlands, islands and rivers where entire valleys keep cultures the outside world met only last century. The capital curls around a harbour where Hanuabada, the Motu 'great village,' still stands on stilts over the water as it did when the first sails arrived.

The traveller starts at the National Museum's spirit poles and bird-of-paradise plumes — the finest possible syllabus for everything beyond —; visits Parliament's haus tambaran facade; takes the lookout at Varirata National Park, where the Kokoda Track's ridges begin their climb into WWII memory; and, if September allows, catches a sing-sing, when feathered and painted clans gather by the hundred and the whole country's diversity dances in one field.

The Guide's honesty, gently: Moresby asks real street wisdom — arranged transfers, guides for the markets, no wandering after dark, and counsel from your hotel taken seriously —; this is the price of a gate, not the character of a nation, and beyond it waits the warmest, wildest travel left on the map: the Sepik's carved river villages, the highlands' festivals, the reefs of Milne Bay. The Guide holds this page as the first step of a great journey, and steps carefully, with love.