Travel and Tourism in Papua New Guinea

Highlands Region

The highlands of Papua New Guinea rise dramatically from the northern and southern coastal plains into a series of broad, fertile valleys separated by mountain ranges whose peaks exceed four thousand meters. This is the most populous region of the country, home to perhaps half of Papua New Guinea's total population, and it is also the most culturally spectacular, a landscape where traditional life continues with a vitality and flamboyance that is genuinely astonishing to the outsider.

The gateway to highlands tourism is Goroka, the capital of Eastern Highlands Province, a pleasant town of around twenty thousand people situated at an altitude of approximately 1,600 meters that gives it a temperate climate welcome after the coastal heat. Goroka is best known internationally as the home of the Goroka Show, one of the world's great cultural festivals and the event that has put Papua New Guinea on the international tourism map more than any other single attraction.

The Goroka Show is held annually in September, typically around the national Independence Day celebrations, and it brings together more than a hundred cultural groups from across Papua New Guinea for three days of ceremonial gathering, traditional performance, and competitive display. The spectacle it provides is genuinely overwhelming to first-time visitors. Imagine several thousand people dressed in some of the most elaborate ceremonial costumes in the world, gathered on a single field, each group displaying the specific traditional dress of their community through hours of rhythmic, coordinated dancing and singing.

The costumes are extraordinary. Highland groups wear towering headdresses constructed from the feathers of birds of paradise and other species, decorated with shells, seeds, fur, and bark cloth. Their faces and bodies are painted in geometric designs using ochre, charcoal, and other natural pigments applied with extraordinary precision and artistic skill. The designs are not merely decorative but carry specific cultural meaning: identifying the wearer's clan, status, and ceremonial role. Some participants wear full-body mud and clay decorations that transform them into apparitions from the spirit world. Others carry ancestral shields or traditional weapons. Pigs, the primary measure of wealth and social prestige in highland communities, appear in many ceremonial contexts.

The singsing, the communal singing and dancing that is the core activity of the Goroka Show and similar festivals, is an art form of remarkable sophistication. Performances are coordinated, with groups moving through precisely choreographed sequences of steps, call-and-response vocals, and percussion from kundu drums and other instruments, but the overall effect is less of a rehearsed performance than of a living expression of cultural identity that has been embedded in community practice for generations. Watching a singsing group of fifty men moving in synchronized rhythm, their headdresses swaying and their voices rising and falling together, is an experience that reaches beyond the aesthetic into something more fundamental.

The Goroka Show is not merely a performance for outside observers, though it welcomes outside observers and derives economic value from their presence. It is primarily a cultural event for the participants, an occasion on which communities from across the country gather to display their traditions, to compete for the informal prestige of being recognized as the most spectacular group present, and to maintain the connections between communities that festivals have always served. It is one of the relatively rare examples of a traditional cultural practice that has become, if anything, more elaborate and more widely attended in the post-independence era than it was before.

The Hagen Show, held in Western Highlands Province in August, follows a similar format and is equally spectacular, with particularly strong representation from the Melpa and other Western Highlands groups whose traditional dress is among the most elaborate in the highlands.

Perhaps the most photographed people in all of Papua New Guinea are the Huli Wigmen of Tari in the Hela Province, and their fame is entirely deserved. The Huli are one of the largest cultural groups in the highlands, with a population of perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand people, and they maintain a tradition of masculine ceremonial dress that is among the most remarkable in the world. Huli men grow their hair long and then, upon reaching the appropriate stage of social development, enter what is known as the wigmen school or bachelor school, a period of years during which they live separately from women and devote themselves to growing and shaping their hair into the distinctive circular wigs for which the Huli are famous.

These wigs are not merely hairpieces. They are cultivated over years with extraordinary care, grown over wickerwork frames into large circular structures, and then adorned with the feathers of birds of paradise, everlasting daisies, and other flowers and decorative materials. The completed wig is a significant ceremonial object representing years of effort and considerable social prestige. Huli men wear these wigs in combination with painted faces, often using yellow pigment with red and black geometric designs, and with traditional dress that incorporates bark cloth, cordyline leaves, and other materials. The effect is breathtaking, a figure that looks simultaneously warrior-like and flamboyantly theatrical.

The Huli community life is deeply traditional, organized around strong gender separation, polygynous marriage arrangements, and the central importance of pigs as a measure of wealth and a medium of social exchange. Bride price, the payment of wealth in pigs, shells, and cash to the family of a prospective bride, is a fundamental institution of Huli social life and of highland culture generally, and the size and quality of the bride price payment reflects on both the family of the groom and the social worth attributed to the bride. The Huli cosmology involves a complex world of spirits, both benevolent and dangerous, and the ceremonial life of the community is oriented toward maintaining the proper relationships between the human and spirit worlds.

The Tari area itself offers spectacular highland scenery: rolling hills covered in a distinctive mix of alpine grassland and cloud forest, with the dramatic peaks of the Southern Highlands visible in clear weather. The road conditions in this part of the highlands can be challenging, and security in parts of the Southern Highlands and Hela Province has historically been affected by resource conflicts and occasional tribal fighting, making it essential to travel with a reputable operator who has current knowledge of local conditions.

Mount Wilhelm, at 4,509 meters, is the highest peak in Papua New Guinea and is often cited as the highest peak in Oceania excluding New Zealand, though this designation is technically complicated by competing geographic definitions of Oceania. It is accessible from Kundiawa in Chimbu Province, and the standard ascent is a two-day climb that gains significant altitude through alpine grassland and then rocky terrain to the summit. On a clear day from the top, conditions that require both weather luck and an early start, it is reputedly possible to see both the Pacific Ocean to the south and the Bismarck Sea to the north, a view that encompasses both coasts of this remarkable island. The climb requires a reasonable level of fitness and some acclimatization to altitude but does not require technical mountaineering skills for the standard route.

The Wahgi Valley between Goroka and Mount Hagen is the agricultural heartland of the highlands, famous for its flower cultivation and for the Baiyer Bird Sanctuary near Hagen, which provides one of the more accessible opportunities for wildlife observation in the highlands. The valley floor is intensively cultivated with sweet potato gardens, coffee plantations, and the tulip trees and flower gardens that have become a significant commercial enterprise for highland communities. The bird sanctuary maintains birds of paradise and other highland species in large enclosures that, while not a substitute for wildlife observation in the wild, provide reliable close observation opportunities.

Coffee is one of Papua New Guinea's most important export crops, and highlands coffee is the foundation of that industry. Grown by small farmers at altitudes between 1,200 and 2,000 meters, usually in gardens that integrate coffee plants with food crops in a form of agroforestry that has significant environmental advantages, PNG highlands coffee is recognized in international specialty coffee markets as a distinctive product of excellent quality. The combination of volcanic soils, high altitude, and careful hand-picking produces a coffee with characteristic flavor profiles, often described as having a fruity, earthy complexity reminiscent of Ethiopian coffees but with its own distinctive qualities. For coffee enthusiasts, visiting a highlands coffee cooperative and seeing the processing operations is a rewarding addition to a highlands itinerary.