Papua New Guinea

It’s not easy to travel to Papua New Guinea. The exact qualities that make the country so attractive to adventurers—its rugged natural beauty, thriving traditional cultures, and an anachronistic lack of infrastructure—are precisely what makes it such a challenging destination. The Australian government’s travel guidelines for the country serve as a long warning about various potential hazards: Landslides, car-jackings, gang violence, venomous snakes, and civil unrest.

A remote and still relatively undiscovered destination, Papua New Guinea is one of the few places left in the world where you can truly go off the beaten track. Whether you’re trekking in remote mountain ranges, searching for the elusive bird of paradise in cloud forests, or traveling to off-the-grid villages to get to know some 750 tribes who call PNG their home, you are likely to have the country’s wonders mostly to yourself.

Have you ever had a travel experience, or dreamt of one, that totally blows your mind?Such was the case for me back in 2006 in the highlands of Papua, Indonesia where I was to encounter something I had always dreamed of, in the remote mountains up in the clouds.