Some travelogues make you want to visit the places yourself, some make you feel glad that you are reading this comfortably in your home and someone else is doing the hard work. This is definitely one of the latter. PNG sounds too wild for this city girl, although "a chorus of applause from flicking penis gourds" does sound like an interesting once-in-a-lifetime experience.

My favorite part is when they visit the Indonesian side of the island. There the natives live a suppressed and impoverished life under the Indonesians. They could hardly believe that in PNG the natives own businesses, and looked with reverence at the money bills proudly displaying their faces and cultures. On the other hand, the oppression make them hold hardly to their culture, while in PNG modern life erodes away much of the tradition. This reminds me of an article I read about a branch of Jewish who emigrated to China a few hundred years ago. There, without oppression, they merge into local culture and cross marry to the point that they are no longer recognized as Jewish. Whereas, in Europe, the isolation and oppression has kept the Jews a tight knitted group.

Little book is heading out for more travels!

Picked this out of the travel narrative book box. I have family members who lived in Papua New Guinea, so interested to see this point of view, and learn more.