Thin clouds hung between the shore and mountains. A single tarmac road plodded east, and a smoky fire burned halfway up the hills. Inland, it would rain.
Port Moresby must be the only capital city in the world not connected to anywhere else by road. Port Moresby swelters alone.
Metal roofs, no apparent center, the parliament building was built in haus tambarin, or spirit house, style, just beside the runway.
A fair gale blew off the sea. Palms rattled along the utterly un-commercial waterfront. Brown shore water settled into azure after fifty meters, and a wooded hillock rose from the harbor half a mile out.
If you could face only this direction you’d be in paradise. Unfortunately, we had to turn back through town. Port Moresby is a hole you have to step through to get wherever you’re going in PNG.
So begins the chapter on Papua New Guinea in the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey. We traveled up the Sepik River and then on to the Goroka show, the annual highlands sing-sing, at which we took the photo above.
Just today we've come across a fabulous photo gallery called Tree People by George Steinmetz. A quote from his site:
"In 1995 I had the rare opportunity to document clans of tree-dwelling people in Indonesian New Guinea that had no prior contact with anyone outside their language group. I went there with Gerrit Van Enk, a Dutch missionary-anthropologist who at the time was the only outsider who spoke their language."
Enjoy his photos here.
There are a few more photos from Papua New Guinea, and many more to come, in EarthPhotos.com's Papua New Guinea gallery. As soon as we get the rest posted, we'll publish the rest of our Papua New Guinea tale.
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