My first sight of the Sepik was from the air. It looped across the land in great festive bows. Around it, glinting in silvery puddles, were strewn dozens of oxbow lakes, bends the river has discarded. New Guinea - after Greenland the second-largest island in the world - is in
Papua New Guinea: Visitors to a distant world
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Children bathing in the Sepik river. Photo / Getty Images
Ambunti's "lean-down" market - so called because you have to lean down to see it - is spread on the earth in the shade of trees. It trades not only in the commonplace, such as vegetables, fruit, home-baked buns, sago powder and cakes of violet Was Was soap, but also river fish (still twitching), smoked pork, and small, gasping freshwater turtles. Men and women, their teeth rotted and lips and gums scarlet from chewing lime and betel, sold little piles of bananas, taro and maize. There were coconuts, bundles of spring onions and long twists of tobacco like sallow dreadlocks. The market also sold money. Not the notes and coins of kina, but shell money, still used as "bride money", or dowries. The amount is usually negotiated with the bridegroom by the bride's brothers who, it is fair to say, are just as likely to accept cash, pigs or beer. Here, though, the shells - small cowries - were woven into mats worth 20 and 40 kina (a word for shell) roughly equivalent to $8.80 and $18. "Money is nothing," said my guide loftily. "You can find it anywhere. This is special."
Papua New Guinea is the world as it was, a chance to travel as our fathers travelled, to go, not just off the beaten track, but to the edges of the beaten map.
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Getting there
The Silver Discoverer visits Papua New Guinea on its Port Vila-to-Cairns cruise departing October 25. Fares start $15,000pp.