PNG is on my list to visit.
It’s relatively complex to get to. Most flights either leave from Australia or Jakarta, they don’t run frequently enough to where you will probably spend the night in Jakarta or Australia in order to catch the flight the next day.
I visited Timor Leste earlier this year and what an interesting country
I tend to fly cheaply with multiple transfers/layovers. What I figured out recently is that it is nice to combine the flights in such a way that one of the layovers is _longer_.
When the airport has a good connection to major city then 12 hours during the day are enough, but I'm happy to bump it to 2-3 days.
I have managed to visit some Chinese and Canadian cities this way and it was both more interesting and much cheaper than taking a direct flight.
What's your criteria for mundane? Basically every decent sized island in that part of the world is going to have beautiful beaches, coral reefs, mountains, and jungles.
One of my parents' friends had spent a lot of time doing research in PNG as well as remote parts of South America. He was the nearest real life equivalent to Indiana Jones I've ever met. He told us some wild stories about the place. He would have been old enough to see the place when cannibalism was still around.
I have read somewhere that the cannibalism claims are overrated and kind of artificially inflated by the natives. (Most natives are actually Christian.) I have not looked closely into it though.
Unrelated. We have servers across the world; one in Mount Hagen. It has by far the biggest latency in the world; so I always use it as a "benchmark"; if it works in Mount Hagen, it works everywhere.
I feel as though it's a bit uncouth to mention Mick Leahy's exploration and documentation in fawning terms, in material meant to introduce the subject to people who are unfamiliar, without also mentioning that he was a colonialist murderer personally responsible for the killing of dozens of the people whose land he was invading. I don't deny that the material is historically interesting, but it is nonetheless kind of gross to admire someone for making historically interesting material with his own two hands in part by killing people.
PNG is on my list to visit. It’s relatively complex to get to. Most flights either leave from Australia or Jakarta, they don’t run frequently enough to where you will probably spend the night in Jakarta or Australia in order to catch the flight the next day.
I visited Timor Leste earlier this year and what an interesting country
I tend to fly cheaply with multiple transfers/layovers. What I figured out recently is that it is nice to combine the flights in such a way that one of the layovers is _longer_.
When the airport has a good connection to major city then 12 hours during the day are enough, but I'm happy to bump it to 2-3 days.
I have managed to visit some Chinese and Canadian cities this way and it was both more interesting and much cheaper than taking a direct flight.
Any cool facts to share about Timor Leste? My usual go to - wikipedia - does paint a rather mundane picture of it.
What's your criteria for mundane? Basically every decent sized island in that part of the world is going to have beautiful beaches, coral reefs, mountains, and jungles.
It sounds like it is easy to get to Port Moresby (which is apparently a bit of a dump and very dangerous), but difficult to get anywhere else.
PNG has changed very rapidly. Parts of the country were in the Stone Age within living memory and are moving over.
There was a discussion on it here yesterday: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1wfdnus/why...
lol don't go there it's a trap. Civilization, despite all these people, is good.
two great films in PNG are joe leahy's neighbours and black harvest
really excellent insight into society and values there as it meets capitalism
One of my parents' friends had spent a lot of time doing research in PNG as well as remote parts of South America. He was the nearest real life equivalent to Indiana Jones I've ever met. He told us some wild stories about the place. He would have been old enough to see the place when cannibalism was still around.
I have read somewhere that the cannibalism claims are overrated and kind of artificially inflated by the natives. (Most natives are actually Christian.) I have not looked closely into it though.
Unrelated. We have servers across the world; one in Mount Hagen. It has by far the biggest latency in the world; so I always use it as a "benchmark"; if it works in Mount Hagen, it works everywhere.
I feel as though it's a bit uncouth to mention Mick Leahy's exploration and documentation in fawning terms, in material meant to introduce the subject to people who are unfamiliar, without also mentioning that he was a colonialist murderer personally responsible for the killing of dozens of the people whose land he was invading. I don't deny that the material is historically interesting, but it is nonetheless kind of gross to admire someone for making historically interesting material with his own two hands in part by killing people.