In July 2016, I spent a few days in Mount Hagen, where I stayed at the Highlander Hotel. Mount Hagen is a short drive from the Kuk Early Agricultural Site, Papua New Guinea's only World Heritage Site, which demonstrates a technological leap that transformed plant exploitation to agriculture around 7,000 to 6,400 years ago, based on vegetative propagation of bananas, taro and yam. Kuk, however, is probably only interesting to agricultural historians and wasn't that interesting to a more casual visitor; in fact, the core area, at least to me, was indistinguishable from the buffer zone, which looked similar to most of the agricultural areas surrounding Mount Hagen. Prospective visitors should contact Nicholas Namba (email: nnamba77 (at) gmail.com), who acts in some type of official capacity and has lived at the site since the early Australian excavations; he's very familiar with the site and was, in fact, the first guide that I've had at any WHS to point out the core area as distinct from the buffer zone. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to rely on the WHS map to identify the core area, so a visitor should seek guidance from Mr. Namba. Perhaps the most surprising thing about my visit to Kuk was that the weather app on my iPhone recognized that I was at Kuk Agricultural Site.

Papau New Guinea is best known for its avifauna, so my main objective was to see at least one species of bird-of-paradise in the wild. I went bird watching at Kumul Lodge, which is located at high altitude about an hour from Mount Hagen. During my afternoon at Kumul, I saw two birds-of-paradise, a male ribbon-tailed astrapia, one of the iconic, flamboyant birds-of-paradise, and a female brown sicklebill, which is more restrained. I also visited two markets in Mount Hagen, the central market, which is largely devoted to agricultural products, and the betel nut market, which is on the road to Kumul Lodge but is not as frequently visited. Deep in the betel nut market you can find the vendors selling marijuana, which they refer to as PNG gold; contrary to my expectations, the marijuana vendors were not reserved and actively sought to be photographed.

I arranged my flights so that I would not have to overnight in Port Moresby, the very uninteresting capital of one of the most interesting countries, but I did coordinate to allow for a several hour stopover. During my time in Port Moresby, I visited Adventure Park PNG, which is more of an aviary and zoo than amusement park. The aviary displays 11 of the 42 species of bird-of-paradise, including Raggiana bird-of-paradise, the national bird of Papua New Guinea, and the zoo displays several species of tree kangaroo, the country's iconic mammal.

I made all of my arrangements with Aaron Hayes at Ecotourism Melanesia. PNG was the 164th country that I have visited and was, by far, the most expensive for independent travel. The value-to-cost ratio of my visit to Kuk was probably the lowest of any of the WHS that I have visited, but, it was worth the high price to visit other parts of PNG.