The Goroka Festival is an incredible riot of colour, sound, and sights. 150 tribal groups gather for the Independence Day weekend every September. Tens of thousands of locals come to watch. Only around 350 tourists get to see it.
On the Friday, I have created an Asaro Mudmen cultural day, spent in an Asaro village i have been working with for 11 years. We showcase Asaro culture through performances, stories, dances, and demonstrations, alongside traditions from other highland tribes, such as the cane-swallowing Bena warriors and the Chimbu Masalai Omo "Skeleton men" story.
Saturday and Sunday, we are at the festival, taking pictures and videos of the performers, around 3,000 of them, and tens of thousands of locals. It is an amazing event. I have been to every one since 2010, and I still get excited thinking about going back.
Through our brand, Best of PNG, we are the leading international tour operator for the country's main cultural festivals. With 16 years of PNG experience, knowledge, and contacts, our tours are the most insightful and immersive out there.
I put an emphasis on using locally owned accommodation, helping develop local tourism service providers using my 23 years of experience in bespoke wildlife and adventure travel running Indigo Safaris. I have been running trips to PNG under the Best of PNG brand since 2011, and have built up strong ties with locals in the highlands, coastal, and Sepik regions.
Apart from the fact that we run the best value tours in PNG, another reason to book with us is that we put the majority of the profit from these trips back into community projects. I have just bought 2500 cacao tree seedlings to start a community cacao farm for the Asaro mudmen in the Eastern Highlands, last year we put solar systems in two Sepik villages, we have set up educational scholarships in the Sepik, sponsor medical care in the Eastern Highlands, have sponsored football jerseys to teams on Fisherman Island, support a turtle nest conservation program in New Ireland, are looking into setting up a mobile river clinic in the Sepik.
We don't offer bespoke tours on this platform. We do run Sepik River trips to the Middle Sepik, and this can be either on a group trip that I lead after the festival for 5 nights, or a private trip before the festival. On the river, we stay in village guesthouses at Kamindimit and Kanganamun. We can arrange a fly-in to Karawari Lodge from My Hagen or Tari, as that is the only way to get to the lodge. We speak English, French, and some Spanish, but not Dutch, and our local guides only speak English.
