Kokoda Track

The Kokoda Track runs for approximately 96 kilometres across the Owen Stanley Ranges from the village of Owers' Corner near Port Moresby to the small highland settlement of Kokoda, following the path of the 1942 Japanese advance and the Australian defensive campaign that stopped it. The track itself is not a constructed road: it is a highland footpath that existed before the war, connecting the coast to the interior through some of the most difficult terrain in Papua New Guinea — steep ridges, dense jungle, fast-running streams and a climate that can change from tropical heat to highland cold within the space of a single day's walk. The track crosses the Owen Stanleys at elevations above 2,400 metres, and the alternation between steamy lowland and cold highland conditions is one of the physical challenges that defines the experience.

The 1942 campaign is what makes this path different from any other long-distance trek. Between July and November 1942, Australian militia forces fought a retreating defensive action across the Owen Stanleys against the Japanese South Seas Detachment, which was advancing toward Port Moresby with the aim of cutting Australia off from its American allies. The Australians held at Ioribaiwa in September 1942, and the Japanese withdrawal that followed was as much a result of exhaustion, disease and supply failure as of military pressure. The track passes through the sites of these battles — Isurava, Templeton's Crossing, Eora Creek — and the terrain itself makes the military narrative viscerally comprehensible in a way that a museum display cannot.

The track is now maintained as a living memorial, and the villages along it benefit economically from the trekking season. The Papua New Guinean porters, guides and village communities who support trekkers are direct descendants of the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels — the PNG labourers who carried supplies and evacuated wounded under fire along the same paths in 1942. The relationship between trekkers and villages is managed by a cooperative Kokoda Track Authority, which sets fees, allocates guides and maintains the track in partnership with local communities. The fee structure is not trivial, and it goes substantially to the villages rather than to external operators, which is one of the more successful examples of community-managed tourism in the Pacific.

Most trekkers take between five and nine days to complete the track, walking with guides and staying in village camps rather than in lodges. The physical challenge is real: steep climbs and descents through jungle, river crossings in cold fast-moving water, and the altitude of the highland sections at the centre of the track. But the reward is an encounter with a landscape and a history that is genuinely difficult to find elsewhere — the combination of intact WWII heritage, living PNG village culture and one of the most dramatic natural environments in the Pacific makes Kokoda one of the world's significant memorial sites.

The Kokoda Track is the primary memorial site of the WWII Pacific Campaign in PNG, with intact battlefield heritage, military history and the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels narrative.

The trek crosses some of the most dramatic terrain in PNG, from tropical lowland jungle to highland ridgeline above 2,400 metres, in a continuous 96-kilometre wilderness journey.

The track is community-managed by the Kokoda Track Authority, with fees flowing substantially to PNG villages and communities along the route.

The combination of WWII history, PNG village culture and highland jungle environment creates a trekking experience that is without parallel in the Pacific.