Papua New Guinea

The Kokoda Track is a 96-kilometre wartime trail across the Owen Stanley Ranges that was the site of some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific Theatre, and is now one of the world's most significant memorial treks.

The highest-altitude city in Papua New Guinea and the social hub of the highland cultures, Mount Hagen sits at roughly 1,700 metres in a broad highland valley where the annual cultural show brings together hundreds of clans in one of the most spectacular gatherings in Oceania.

Papua New Guinea's tropical capital sits on a natural harbour backed by brown hills and coral limestone, a city of contrasts where modern office towers neighbour informal settlements and the pace is shaped by the sea.

Rabaul is a town built inside the flooded caldera of an active volcano, ringed by steep volcanic peaks and thermal vents, with extraordinary WWII history that runs alongside its geothermal present.

Papua New Guinea's longest river winds through a vast lowland basin of floodplain, swamp and village clusters, and is one of the world's great repositories of traditional art — especially the carved and painted crocodile motifs that anchor Sepik identity.

A scattering of palm-fringed coral islands off the eastern tip of the PNG mainland, famous for the kukua exchange system, exceptional fishing, and the Trobriand stone money discs whose physical impossibility is the point.