The Highlands and the Sepik
Port Moresby is not joined by road to the rest of Papua New Guinea — its highways run out into Central and Gulf provinces and stop there — so this route is stitched together from three domestic flights and one long stretch of the Highlands Highway: the Wahgi Valley where agriculture was invented independently, the road to the foot of Mount Wilhelm, the descent to the Madang coast, and three days on the Middle Sepik in a motor canoe.
Port Moresby
Arrange the airport pickup before you fly, because this is not a city anyone walks around. The National Museum and Art Gallery at Waigani holds the Sepik and Highlands collections that were not sold abroad, and the Nature Park a few minutes away keeps birds of paradise, tree kangaroos and cassowaries in one place, which is the only realistic way most visitors will see any of them.
Bomana and the Sogeri road
Bomana War Cemetery holds close to four thousand Commonwealth graves from the New Guinea campaign and is the quietest place within reach of the capital. Then up the Sogeri road to Owers' Corner, the southern trailhead of the Kokoda Track — about 96 kilometres over the Owen Stanley Range by the usual reckoning, walked in 1942 by men going the other way. Standing at the trailhead takes ten minutes and explains the campaign better than the museums do.
North to Mount Hagen
The flight is the only way. Port Moresby's roads run out into Central and Gulf provinces and end there; the Highlands Highway network that serves Lae, Madang and everything in this itinerary is a separate system with no link to the capital. Mount Hagen sits at about 1,680 metres in the Wahgi Valley. Michael Leahy and Jim Taylor walked in here in 1933 prospecting for gold and found hundreds of thousands of people whose existence no outsider had recorded — the interior had been assumed to be empty mountain and turned out to be the most densely settled land in New Guinea.
Kuk
Twelve kilometres north-east of town, 116 hectares of swamp hold drainage ditches, mounds and stake holes. The step from gathering plants to farming them was taken here around 7,000 to 6,400 years ago and the wetland has been worked almost continuously since, on ground that may have been in use for ten thousand years in all — banana, taro and yam propagated here rather than carried in from anywhere else. UNESCO listed it in 2008 as one of the few places on earth where the archaeology shows agriculture beginning on its own. It is a field with cut sections and an interpretive shelter, so go with a guide who can point. Market in the afternoon.
East to Kundiawa
The Highlands Highway is the spine of the country and this is the good half of it. Kundiawa sits on a shelf above the Chimbu gorge in Simbu, which is among the most densely populated rural provinces in Papua New Guinea and looks it — gardens run up slopes that would be left alone almost anywhere else. Limestone caves in the valley walls were used for burial and some still hold bones.
Keglsugl
Sixty kilometres up the Chimbu valley on a road that deteriorates the whole way. Keglsugl at about 2,500 metres is the last village, with an airstrip beside it that is one of the highest in the country. Mount Wilhelm stands above it at 4,509 metres — the summit is two hard days away past the lakes at Piunde and Aunde and is a climb, not a walk. Go up to the treeline and the lower lake and come back down.
Goroka
Back down the valley and east. The J.K. McCarthy Museum is named after a patrol officer and holds the photographs the 1930s patrols brought out, which are the record of first contact made by the people who made it and should be read with that in mind. The Goroka Show has run since 1957, begun by the colonial administration on the theory that rival groups competing in a field would not be fighting in one.
The Asaro valley
The mudmen — grey clay over the body, heavy moulded clay masks — are half an hour north-west of Goroka and are performed for visitors, by arrangement, for a fee agreed with the village. The origin story about warriors mistaken for spirits is repeated everywhere and the practice in its present form is no older than the mid-twentieth century. Treat it as what it is: a village earning money from a costume it made famous. On those terms it is worth doing, and the fee is the reason the road is maintained.
Down to the coast
The long day. The highway drops off the Kassam Pass into the Markham Valley, loses the highland cool inside an hour, then turns north as the Ramu Highway and runs to the sea at Madang. Roughly 315 kilometres of it, six to eight hours if nothing has slipped across the road, and something often has.
Madang and Bil Bil
Bil Bil, on the coast road south of town, is where the Bel people made the pots that were traded hundreds of kilometres along this coast in sailing canoes, and where a few families still make them by hand without a wheel. In town, the Coastwatchers Memorial marks the men who stayed behind Japanese lines and radioed out what they saw, and Madang harbour has enough shallow wartime wreckage that snorkelling reaches some of it.
West to Wewak
Wewak was the main Japanese base on the New Guinea mainland. Twelve kilometres west at Cape Wom, on 13 September 1945, General Hatazō Adachi surrendered the Eighteenth Army to Major General Horace Robertson; the site is a memorial park with the flagpole still standing. Mission Hill above town has the view and a Japanese memorial, and the beaches either side of the point are where the supply barges came in.
Into the Sepik
Four or five hours inland by road through Maprik to Pagwi, which is a landing, some government buildings going soft in the damp and two or three guesthouses. The road stops and the river starts. From here everything moves by motor canoe, at the speed of an outboard against a very large body of slow brown water, and the first village is an hour or two downstream.
The middle river
Iatmul villages, one bank to the other. The haus tambaran at Kanganaman is among the largest and most heavily carved spirit houses left on the Sepik and is formally protected as national cultural property. Carving is the cash economy here and photography is paid for, which is not a scam but the arrangement. The crocodile scarification some men carry is an initiation, not a demonstration, and is not performed for visitors.
Downriver to Angoram
Most of a day on the water to Angoram, the old administrative post on the lower river and the place the artefact trade was organised from — the carvings in European and American museums largely left the country through here. Then three hours of dirt road back to the coast, which means leaving the village at first light to be in Wewak before dark. Do not put an international flight on the end of this day.
Good to know
Read the current security advice before booking, because the line moves. Several governments advise against all but essential travel to Hela, Southern Highlands and Enga provinces on account of tribal fighting, which intensified around the Porgera valley from 2024 and has spilled into Western Highlands; this route deliberately stays east of Mount Hagen and goes no further west than the Wahgi Valley. In Port Moresby, Lae and Mount Hagen the standing rule is that you do not walk, at any hour — transfers are arranged by wherever you are staying, and residents follow the same rule. On the Highlands Highway itself the hazard is less robbery than the compensation system: any accident, whether it involves a pedestrian, a pig or another vehicle, brings an immediate claim from the clan concerned and is settled on the spot, which is why nobody local drives that road after dark and why you hire a driver known along it rather than a self-drive car. Unrelated disputes also close sections of the highway without warning, sometimes for a day or more, so keep slack between the last road leg and any flight. Port Moresby has no road link to the rest of the country — its highways run into Central and Gulf provinces and stop, and the Highlands Highway network is reachable only by air — so every long move here is a flight with no overland fallback: Air Niugini and PNG Air both reschedule and cancel routinely, the Madang–Wewak sector is not daily, and you should never book a domestic sector that connects the same day onto an international one. Apply for the eVisa through the Immigration and Citizenship Authority at evisa.ica.gov.pg well ahead; visa on arrival has narrowed to a short list of nationalities and is not something to count on. Around 97 per cent of land in Papua New Guinea is held under customary title, and this is the single most useful thing to understand before arriving — access to a village, a path, a beach or a photograph is granted by the people who own it and is paid for, in kina, in small notes, at a price agreed in advance through your guide. There are ATMs in Port Moresby, Mount Hagen, Goroka, Madang and Wewak and nowhere on the Sepik, so carry more cash than feels sensible. Malaria here is among the heaviest burdens outside Africa and the falciparum strain is chloroquine-resistant: prophylaxis, a treated net and covered arms after dusk, with the coast and the river being the real risk and the Highlands above about 1,800 metres much less so. On season, the Sepik runs high from roughly December to April, when a canoe can cut across flooded grass into the back-lakes, and low around July to September, when some channels get too shallow to use; the Highlands are passable all year but wettest from November to April. The Goroka Show falls on the weekend nearest Independence Day, 16 September, and the Mount Hagen Show in August — both fill every bed in their town months in advance and roughly double what a room costs.
Shorter or longer?
Fly Port Moresby to Tokua and give four or five days to Rabaul and the Gazelle Peninsula — Tavurvur, which buried the town in ash in September 1994 and moved the provincial capital to Kokopo, the Japanese tunnel systems in the hills, and the wrecks in Simpson Harbour.
Port Moresby, fly to Mount Hagen, then the Highlands Highway as far as Goroka and out by air from there. Keeps Kuk, Mount Wilhelm and the Asaro valley; cuts the Madang coast and the whole Sepik leg, which is where most of the cost and nearly all of the logistical risk sits.