Let me explain. I spent a week in September 1997 in Papua New Guinea making a video for the Lutheran church. My dad's concerns about headhunters and malaria didn't trouble me. On an Air Niugini prop jet we connected to Goroka, a small town wrapped around a jungle airstrip. Locals hanging from chicken wire fences stared as we left our plane.
Major towns are small and simple.
The new stoplight, misplaced not quite at Goroka's main intersection, is a local attraction. Goroka is a main town in the highlands, the part of PNG discovered by the outside world only in our generation. In an annual flexing of tribal muscles, countless clans send dancing groups to the Goroka cultural festival every September. The rugby field seethes with heavily greased and painted troupes. With wild boar tusks hanging from noses, pendulous earlobes swinging chains of tree kangaroo teeth, and the rustle of thrusting grass skirts, it's a spear-chuckers' moshpit.