Goroka Show

Fly into Port Moresby from Brisbane, Cairns, Singapore or Manila, arriving at whatever hour your connection allows. We meet you inside the terminal and drive you to the hotel, and the rest of the day is yours to sleep off the flight. If you land early there is time for the National Museum and Art Gallery, where the carvings, masks and shell valuables are the best introduction to what you will see worn at the show. It is Independence week, so expect flags on every car and the red, black and gold of the bird of paradise on every wall. We gather in the evening for dinner (paid separately) and the briefing.

A morning flight over the Owen Stanley Range and down into the Asaro valley. Goroka sits at about 1,550 metres, so the air is cool and the light is clean after the coast. Our Highlands guides meet you on the airstrip, which runs almost through the middle of town. After lunch (paid separately) we visit the J.K. McCarthy Museum, whose photographs from the 1930s patrols record the moment Highlanders and Australians first saw each other, then walk the market, where half the valley comes to sell sweet potato, pitpit and betel nut. Goroka is the centre of the country’s coffee trade, and we finish the afternoon at a roastery before checking in for six nights.

Out of Goroka in the dark with coffee in a flask. The Asaro Mudmen come from a valley about an hour away, and the reason to go early is the mist: at sunrise it lies along the valley floor and the clay heads come out of the treeline through it. The masks are fired from river clay and weigh several kilos, and the men wearing them move slowly because they can barely see. Afterwards we eat breakfast in the village (paid separately), hear the story of the raid the disguise was invented for, and spend time with the potters who still make the heads. We are back in town for the afternoon of Independence Day, the country’s 52nd: flag raisings, school bands, and a whole town dressed in red, black and gold.

The best day of the week for photographs, and the reason to be in Goroka before the weekend. In the morning we drive out to a village in the valleys around town whose group is dancing at the show, and spend a few unhurried hours with them while they rehearse, paint and fit headdresses on their own ground, with bush behind them instead of fencing and grandstands. In the afternoon we go to the showground for the Pikinini Festival, the children’s performances that open the show weekend, where the next generation dances in the same plumes and paint as their parents. In recent years the Friday has ended with fireworks over the ground.

We are at the National Sports Institute ground soon after dawn, while the arena is still empty and the real work is happening behind it. Groups arrive by truck and on foot and set up wherever they can find space: wigs unwrapped from leaves, ochre mixed in a tin, kina shell polished and hung. This is the hour most visitors miss because they come when the dancing starts. From late morning more than a hundred groups begin to enter the arena, and they keep coming for hours: Asaro Mudmen, Huli wigmen, the skeleton men of Simbu, Melpa from the Western Highlands and Sepik groups with carved masks and drums. Your packed lunch is paid separately and eaten where you stand, because leaving means losing your place.

Day two is calmer and better for it. You know the ground, you know which groups you want to find again, and the pressure of seeing everything at once has gone. The groups rotate through the arena again, the light is different, and what you missed on Saturday comes past a second time. We stay through the main performances, then leave before the crowd does. In the evening we are hosted in a village outside Goroka for a mumu meal (paid separately), pork and sweet potato cooked on hot stones under banana leaves, with a fire in the round house and the long unhurried conversation that never happens in an arena.

West out of the Asaro valley on the Highlands Highway, climbing to the Daulo Pass at about 2,450 metres, where cloud sits in the gaps and gardens run up slopes too steep to look farmable. Two hours brings us into Simbu, and at Mindima the skeleton men are waiting: they paint on a hillside above the village and then perform the Omo Masalai, the story of ancestors who disguised themselves as the dead to drive a spirit out of a cave, at close range and on their own ground rather than in an arena. We eat lunch in the village (paid separately) and drive back over the pass in the afternoon light for a farewell dinner in Goroka (also paid separately).

A morning flight from Goroka down to Port Moresby, where the expedition ends. Most international departures leave in the afternoon or evening, so there is usually time for a last coffee with a view of the harbour. Build a comfortable connection: Highlands flights depend on the weather and do run late, and we would rather you had hours in hand than minutes. If you want to keep going, this pairs naturally with the Sepik, with a week of private birding in the Highlands, or with a few days of diving at Tufi or Kimbe Bay, and we are glad to arrange any of it.