Mount Hagen

Fly into Port Moresby from Brisbane, Singapore, Manila or Cairns, arriving at whatever hour your connection allows. We meet you inside the terminal and drive you to the hotel; nobody arrives in this city and finds their own taxi. The rest of the day is deliberately empty so you can sleep off the flight. If you land early there is time for the National Museum and Art Gallery and the Nature Park, where the captive birds of paradise are a useful preview of the plumes you are about to see worn. We gather in the evening for dinner (paid separately) and the briefing: how the show week runs, what the days look like, and the handful of things worth knowing before we fly into the Highlands.

An early flight over the Owen Stanley Range into Kagamuga, the airfield outside Mount Hagen, where our Highlands guides meet you as you land. The temperature drops about ten degrees as you climb: the Highlands are cool, often wet, and nothing like the coast. Then straight into the villages of the Waghi Valley. The Huli wigmen show how their human-hair wigs are grown, cut and shaped over years, the Melpa, the people of this valley, host us on their own ground, and the Spirit Women give a performance that almost no itinerary includes. The rest of the day is village studies in the proper sense: gardens, earth ovens, bilum weaving and bride-price shell, with time to ask about everything you are watching. We check in at Hagen before dinner, which is paid separately.

The best photographic day of the week, and the reason to come a day early. An hour southwest of Hagen, the village of Paiya hosts a sing-sing on the eve of the main show. Around fifty groups perform, most of them competing at Hagen the next day, but here they do it on grass with bush behind them and no crowd to shoot over. We arrive while the painting is still going on, watch the groups come in one by one through the morning, pay separately for a meal cooked by the hosts in a stone-and-banana-leaf earth oven, and spend the afternoon working with individual dancers who are happy to stand for a portrait away from the line. Those who want an early start can add a pre-dawn run up the Enga road to a Highlands lodge feeding table where ribbon-tailed astrapia and brown sicklebill come in at first light.

We are at the ground early, while the arena is still empty and the work is happening behind it. Groups arrive by truck and by foot and set up wherever they can find space: wigs unwrapped from leaves, ochre mixed in a tin, a father drawing his son's face from memory. This is the part most visitors miss because they turn up when the dancing starts. By late morning the groups begin entering the arena, and they keep coming for hours, Huli wigmen, Melpa, Enga, Simbu, Sepik groups with carved masks and drums that carry across the whole field. Your packed lunch is paid separately and eaten where you are standing, because leaving means losing your place. We finish when the ground empties in the late afternoon and go back to wash off the dust.

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. Judging happens today, so the biggest groups save something for the afternoon. We stay through the main performances, then leave before the crowd does and drive out of town to a river below the valley rim to swim, or simply to sit somewhere quiet after three days of noise. In the evening we are hosted at a village near Hagen: a fire in the middle of the round house, a meal cooked in the ground (paid separately), and the sort of long unhurried conversation that never happens in an arena.

East out of the Waghi Valley on the Highlands Highway, the single road that ties these provinces together. We climb over the Daulo Pass at around 2,450 metres, where cloud sits in the gaps and the gardens run up slopes too steep to look farmable, and after about two hours reach Simbu. 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 cave spirit out, at close range on their own ground, not on a stage. Nearby we spend time with the insect hunters, whose forebears fed a protein-poor valley from the forest itself, and with the Dokadaka, whose performance few visitors have seen. Two more hours on the road bring us down into Goroka in the late afternoon; if there is light left, the J.K. McCarthy Museum has the photographs from the 1930s patrols, taken when Highlanders and Australians first laid eyes on each other.

Out of Goroka in the dark with coffee in a flask. The Asaro Mudmen come from a valley about an hour away, and the whole point of going early is the mist: at sunrise it lies in the bottom of the valley and the clay heads come out of the treeline through it, which is what the photograph is supposed to look like and almost never does. The masks weigh several kilos, are fired from river clay, 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. The mudmen are not the valley's only performers: through the rest of the morning we also see the Mokomoko and the Kekepa, and a group whose piece tells the harder story of the region's cannibal past, performed as theatre by the descendants of those who ended it. Back in Goroka the afternoon is open: the market, the coffee roasteries, or nothing at all. Farewell dinner tonight, also paid separately.

An early 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 to sit somewhere with a view of the harbour first. Build a comfortable connection: Highlands flights are weather-dependent and do get delayed, 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 few days diving at Tufi or Kimbe Bay, or with our longer Papua New Guinea expedition across to Jayapura, and we are glad to arrange any of it.