The first rule of going out at night in Port Moresby is: don’t go out at night in Port Moresby. Although we joke and complain about being cooped up behind razor wire in hotels elsewhere the country, in Port Moresby (henceforth called PM) it is pretty necessary. Our taxi driver put it best: “I give my passengers rules. The first rule is, never get out of the car. Once an Irish lady got out of the car to take a photograph of the parliament building. She got robbed. At knife point. At ten in the morning. And I had to risk my life to save her – the robber was asking his friends for help in killing me, but they couldn’t be bothered. NEVER get out of the car. NEVER.”

This little speech was delivered on our way out to dinner on our last night in PNG. The fact that the robbers are quaintly called “raskols” in Pidgin doesn’t diminish the fact that this is a very dangerous city, known as one of the least liveable capitals in the world. We were stuck in a dingy, expensive hotel and wanted to stretch our wings a little. We had also had a restaurant recommendation from an excellent guide we had met in the Highlands (hi Nitin!) and wanted to try out “Dynasty” restaurant – it is meant to be one of the best places in town.

Let’s set the scene a little. One of the first hits you get when you google restaurants in PM is a blog post called Lower Your Expectations; Dynasty is a cookie cutter Chinese restaurant. In a shopping mall. While we are not natural mall rats, the advantage of a mall in PM is that you can (you guessed it) put a high fence round the outside and ring it with paramilitary-style security guards. This allows expats to wander round relatively safely with a particular mixture of homesickness and nostalgia – a wistful longing for home, as they knew it in the late 1980s.

Dynasty did us proud. No Alexis Carrington-style shoulder pads, but an actual, true-to-life half-decent Chinese restaurant. It was a little empty, seeing as we went at about 6pm so as to get home before the streets got too lively, but we had our dinner, had our beer, called a reputable cab to take us home, and nobody died.

[Lucy in busy, bustling, happening Port Moresby]

While we on the topic of shopping, it was while we were wondering round the mall with our ice creams looking in shop windows (Jesus, what has happened to us?) that we noticed the prices of everything. For example, an iPhone 4 was on sale in a shop for just over US1,250. Some questions: who in PNG can afford to buy them at this price? What heinous import duties are lining officials’ pockets to jack them up to that level? What must the locals think when every foreign student backpacker who passes through PNG has one in his pocket? The mind boggles.

Ahhh, Kumul Lodge. So right in many ways; so frustrating in so many others. It’s like PNG in miniature.

We headed there just after the Mt Hagen show – as you can imagine, we were still on a bit of a high after that. We’d plumped for Kumul as our destination as the alternative, Tari, sounded potentially a little far to travel and a little dangerous (rumours of an ongoing tribal war), and Kumul sounded nice – lots of birds of paradise, great hiking including to some local villages and a beautiful location not far from Mt Hagen. All of which was true.

Well, sort of. And there’s the rub.

There were birds of paradise – 8 species in fact. It’s just that only one species lives at the same altitude as the lodge, and for the others you need to take a tour to see them. Cost: $150 per person. There was hiking available – but only really along the road and a few short trails around the hotel; the other trails were never used, not really maintained and virtually un-passable (we tried: see “Mt Hagen Running Man”) and of course you needed to take a guide. The closest village was actually 10 kilometres and over 1,000 vertical metres away from the hotel – only walkable if the lodge provided a one way car transfer – and they didn’t have a car (we managed it by hitching a ride – with some other tourists one way and in a truck on the way back). Food was available – unless you were late or they forgot about you (both happened) – including a complimentary plate of fruit. Only it wasn’t complimentary, it was an additional $10 per mealtime.

Just enough minor annoyances to really take the shine off what should have been a great place – yes it was beautiful, yes the bungalow was lovely and rustic, and YES we saw birds of paradise. We both just ended up wildly frustrated by the place.

And yet, in some ways, we talk more about Kumul than we do about many of the more spectacular places we saw in PNG. We think that maybe in some ways, it provided a truer vision of the country than almost anywhere else we stayed.

A few vignettes:

The village down the road was abandoned and burned down. There had been a land dispute between villagers which escalated and ultimately culminated in some shootings. The entire village took sides, and war kicked off. Ultimately, the place became so dangerous that every single family abandoned both the village and their ancestral land (and only source of income) to stay with relatives. A man from Hagen was hired by one side to burn down the remaining houses – the other side found him and killed him. Negotiations were currently taking place as to appropriate reparations – in the form of live pigs to be transferred, and only once this had been agreed would any of the villagers be able to return home. This wasn’t considered at all unusual locally, other than the fact that the dispute was within just one village, rather than the usual two.

Our guide, Max, was a born naturalist with a burning ambition to start up his own eco-tourism business centred around an orchid garden. Only he couldn’t get any backing. Partially because under the PNG “wantok” system, he owed his loyalty to one of his relatives, the owner of Kumul Lodge – who preferred that Max spend his time guiding tourists and maintaining the grounds of the lodge. Partially because Max was wildly unrealistic – I’ve never met a man so bitter about the refusal of local people to work for him on the promise of future payment as and when the orchid garden took off. Partially because the whole idea is so flawed – who’s going to come to see a 40 foot square orchid garden, however nice, when it’s miles from anywhere and smack in the middle of Max’s sweet potato crop? But how do you work that out when you live in a country with minimal education and a staggering 75% unemployment?

We asked for the bill on our last day and were a little surprised when it took 20 minutes to produce. And then it was wrong. The reception lady simply couldn’t add. I’m not being unkind when I say that, rather it’s a simple statement of fact. Up until about 50 years ago, the PNG counting system consisted of 1, 2, 3, many. Given the relatively limited amount of cash trading, that system still works pretty well for much of the population and the basic numeracy skills that we take for granted are just not that widespread. Most adults over the age of 30 probably weren’t taught much (any?) maths and can’t do even basic sums without the aid of a calculator.

Our airport transfer, which we carefully arranged with the lodge manager the evening before. They forgot about it. We managed to make the plane, but only because they were able to speak to one of their wantoks down at the airport and get us ticketed (we arrived 10 minutes before the flight took off).

I could go on, but I won’t.

Suffice to say that Kumul, like PNG, got under our skin. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

So, we finally move on to the Mount Hagen Show. The show, or Sing Sing as it is called locally, was one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, for us coming to Papua New Guinea. It was certainly why we were in the country on this date (and it had been difficult to schedule our flights around it) so we had dangerously high expectations.

ALL of which were met. The Mount Hagen show is absolutely, jaw-droppingly amazing. Hopefully the 20 photographs below (culled after long discussion and at great emotional expense from an initial 330 photos) will do the place some justice.

You stand in the middle of a rugby pitch surrounded by several hundred performers, all dressed up to the nines in banana leaves, bird of paradise feathers, full body makeup, masks, drums and sticks. All of them are dancing and swaying and marching and singing their hearts out.  It goes on for two full days. It was only after a few hours of being overwhelmed by all this that we found out that half of the performers had actually stayed away. You see, their party had won the recent parliamentary elections, and they had stayed away for fear of violent reprisals from the losing side (welcome to PNG!).

The routine of the festival starts early in the morning, watching the performers arrive on the backs of buses and trucks and slowly metamorphosing from their usual street clothes into their performance costumes. Slowly the singing and dancing grows, before each group parades into the arena and joins an ever growing throng of pulsating, vibrant colour. At about 2pm the tourists and performers disperse – the tourists back to their enclosed hotels, the performers back into the surrounding shanty towns, from which loud chanting and singing can be heard late into the night. Despite Mount Hagen officially being a dry town (particularly around election season) the home brew industry must do a good trade at this time of year.

Alongside a relatively virulent strain of photographer tourist (see elsewhere) Mount Hagen also attracts a fascinating group of world travelers, amateur anthropologists and others attracted by interesting and difficult places. Our dinners in the evening were full of tales of tribal village stays in the 1960s, bushwhacking through WW2 trails in the deepest, darkest South Pacific and the occasional glancing reference to life on the ground during the Vietnam war. All pretty eye opening and awe-inspiring for a couple of humble office workers, I can tell you.

We wouldn’t have missed it for the world.