As we make our final approach to the airfield, a fit Aussie sporting a short-crop haircut leans over my shoulder to peer out the window. He’s been sitting in silence since we took off from Brisbane three hours earlier. “Hi,” he offers, still focused on the city below. “My name is Steve. I’ll be keeping you alive down there.”
We land and taxi to the dilapidated terminal. Outside, it’s humid, wet, and dirty, as close to a proper introduction to Papua New Guinea as you can get. Its capital, Port Moresby, is like the Mos Eisley spaceport in Star Wars, except with significantly more scum and villainy. There are international cities in the world with worse reputations, I suppose, but not many. We leave the airport in an armored vehicle with reinforced steel slats over the windows, and I scan the edges of the road for what I can only assume is an impending zombie attack. The city is teeming with gang violence, and a carjacking here last week left three people dead. I encourage the driver to step on it.
Along the way, Steve reveals himself as an ex-military SAS officer contracted to provide private security for our expedition. He’s also one hell of a nice guy. We bring him up to speed on our itinerary, which is slightly more organized than our outing to Malaysia. This is an unpredictable place, and Steve’s presence here will be critical in navigating the intense local politics.
Despite the country’s geographical coziness to Australia, Papua New Guinea remains fiercely independent and yet alarmingly non-nationalist. Locals are more apt to identify with their clan than with their fellow countrymen. Nine hundred tribal dialects, endless regional bickering, and a nearly broken political system: many would argue that the country is simply a failed state. Not one prime minister has completed a full five-year parliamentary term in the last thirty years. And with more than $400 million somehow gone missing from government coffers in the last decade, it’s safe to say there might be a touch of corruption in the capital as well.
All of Port Moresby’s deficits are a particular shame, since the rest of the country is one of the best adventure destinations on earth. This is a place where the long arm of tourism hasn’t fully reached, where tribal culture prevails, and the rusted relics of World War II are still on full display. Plus, this tropical wonderland is brimming with uncataloged biodiversity. Each year dozens of new species are discovered in the nearly impenetrable jungles; scientists often refer to these archipelagos as a “lost world.”
This is our first and most ambitious stop of the season. We’ve come here to investigate three cryptozoological fugitives: a mermaid that has been spotted near the Papuan island of New Ireland for generations, as well as two different living dinosaurs purported to inhabit nearby New Britain Island. As outlandish as these creatures might sound, PNG, as it’s known, would certainly be the sort of place to harbor them.
We begin our investigation into the mermaid story, conducting a few interviews at the local university. Our time in the crime-stricken capital is thankfully brief, though, and before long we’re off to the airport for our flight to New Ireland. The process of checking in is unabashed chaos. The concept of a line hasn’t really caught on in this corner of the world, and every passenger on every Air Niugini flight simply mobs the counters from any available angle, waving his or her ticket in the air. We somehow manage to tag our bags, run down the tarmac, and board the plane.
The beat-up turboprop sputters up over the crystalline waters of the Bismarck Archipelago and the New Guinea Highlands. I gawk down at the virgin jungles with amazement. The more than one million people that inhabit this part of the country weren’t even discovered by the outside world until the 1930s. There are whispers that cannibalism, popular here for centuries, may still be ritually practiced.
At the tiny airport in Kavieng, we step down from the plane and into the blistering sunshine. Our bags are taken out of the hold of the plane and simply strewn along the tarmac, along with a dead body. I hear wails and crying from locals pressed up against the chain-link fence at the arrivals terminal as the crude coffin is moved out of the heat. It’s a distressing sight and a portentous introduction to the island.
After collecting our gear, we meet Lucas, our Papuan liaison, who is supposed to help facilitate our presence here. With his thick bristled moustache and short legs, he looks a little bit like Super Mario as he scampers across the tarmac, out of breath. His mouth and facial hair are covered in a thick bloodred juice, and just as he’s about to shake my hand, he literally doubles over and drops to the ground with dizziness. This is my introduction to buai.
The chewing of this bizarre combination of ingredients is nothing short of a national addiction in PNG. Also immensely popular throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia, buai is actually the fourth most consumed drug on the planet after nicotine, alcohol, and caffeine. A seemingly random recipe of betel nut, mustard stick, and lime (the chemical, not the fruit) is combined and chewed, producing torrential amounts of bright red saliva, which Papuans spit on just about every surface in sight. While it’s used universally as a mild pick-meup, its narcotic effects seem to render the population in a daze. I wait patiently for Lucas to regain his footing and look over as our pilot and copilot leave the aircraft; both men’s mouths are stained red, and they spit liberally on the tarmac. I’m suddenly feeling lucky to have landed in one piece.
The jeeps we arranged aren’t at the airstrip for some reason, but Lucas promises that they’re en route. While we wait, Lucas introduces me to two local cops who will accompany us on the expedition. Steve and I exchange a wary look as the two men present themselves. Both have buai spit stains on their shirts, and neither looks much like a police officer. I ask one of them to show me his gun, which he unholsters and places in my hand. I look down at a rusted Smith & Wesson revolver that appears to have been pried out of the dead hand of Wyatt Earp. I pop open the ancient cylinder to discover that all of the chambers are empty. I ask him if he has any ammo, and he fishes through his breast pocket to produce a handful of loose change and two bullets. One isn’t even the right caliber.
The jeeps finally arrive, but actually getting out of town is a challenge. I’ve experienced “island time” in my travels, but Papuans have taken ass dragging to a whole new level. It takes an hour to get the jeeps fueled and another hour to buy a few loaves of bread and bottled water. The estimated drive time to Nokon Village, the epicenter of supposed mermaid activity, is eleven hours, and we haven’t even started. My watch reads 3:00 p.m. It isn’t overly safe to drive through these jungles after dark, but we have little choice at this point. I’m just hopeful the local cops can use their one good bullet to put down any form of rebellion we might meet along the way.
The first few hours are a dream. Small villages glide by, and a riot of green rushes past the windows. Along the road, locals emerge from the brush, almost all of them carrying enormous machetes. Even the children are well armed. Still, they wave excitedly as we pass by, then recede in a cloud of dust and smiles. Eventually, however, the road falls apart, and we lose ten to fifteen kilometers per hour to absorb the bumps.
As darkness sets in, the machete-wielding villagers suddenly seem a bit more ominous when they appear in our headlight beams; most of the population retreats away from the road altogether. We finally call it quits in a nondescript village in the middle of God knows where. There’s not much to see here, but we’ve been told there’s a rough guesthouse to call home for the night. As we unload our gear into the basic cement rooms, I can hear a distant preacher yelling through a megaphone somewhere in the jungle. After settling in, we hit up what passes for a neighborhood bar, a thatched-roof hut with a transistor radio and a few wooden chairs. We gulp down warm South Pacific brand beers, and Neil and I throw a few rounds of darts onto a tattered board. The only food being served is some sort of mystery sausage that tastes gamey and dry. Possibly goat meat. But out here, who knows?
We eventually stroll back over to the guesthouse, tired, drunk, and happy. I stand on the porch looking out into the jungles, an empty beer bottle dangling between my fingers. Suddenly, every single light in the village clicks off. The whir of the town’s only generator spins down to silence and is replaced by the stinging buzz of insects. The power is gone for the night. Even the preacher has called it quits. There’s an immediacy to the stillness that’s unnerving. I use a headlamp to navigate back to my room and drift off to sleep in the pitch-black night.
Up before the sun (and well before the generator), we pack quietly and hit the road—or what’s left of it. By mid-morning we finally arrive in Nokon Village. We’re totally off the grid now. There’s no power, no running water, and only tribal law. Our jeeps are immediately swamped by machete-carrying locals who greet us warmly and welcome us to the village. Some of the children seem scared; no doubt they haven’t seen many “dim dims,” or white people, in these parts.
Steve acts as a vital go-between, since he can speak the native Tok Pisin, a pidgin English. For those who have never had the confused pleasure of encountering this hand-me-down language, it is genuinely bizarre. It consists largely of English words picked up by laborers and then repurposed throughout the Pacific as a unique language. Though the vocabulary sounds familiar, without an understanding of pidgin idioms, it’s gibberish. For instance, a helicopter is called a “Mixmaster belong ’em Jesus.” A “Mixmaster” is a blender with spinning blades and “belong ’em Jesus” refers to the fact that these aircraft seemingly appear from the heavens. To ask someone’s age one would say, “How many Christmas you?” To move quickly is to “hariup” (hurry up). A “Do not disturb” sign would read “Yu no ken kam insait” (You cannot come inside). While Steve is translating, a local picks up a pair of our binoculars and calls them “glasses belong ’em kaptin,” a reference to colonial sailors from centuries past. In short, the language is bonkers.
I try to follow along, but half the time it sounds like they’re drunk or talking shit about me.
We ask to speak to the village chief, who then comes loping out of a nearby grass hut. A stocky, white-haired old man with his mouth stained bright red and naturally, he’s wearing a decades-old Donkey Kong baseball cap. Not exactly Hiawatha. Still, he’s the elder of the community, and his favor is critical to our expedition. In PNG, even the elected officials defer to these traditional leaders. And considering the fifty machetes within our twenty-foot radius, if the boss here doesn’t approve of our presence, we’ll be leaving quickly. Fortunately, he’s more than happy to see us, spitting a huge wad of saliva on the ground to smile broadly with his few remaining teeth. He leads us into the main village, a scattered collection of huts along a sandy beach. We sit with the villagers and discuss the mysterious sightings.
For years, people here have seen what we would call a mermaid, though the Papuans refer to it as a “Ri.” Specifically, they see a figure bobbing at the surface of the water, which then descends beneath the waves. When pressed to actually describe the creature, however, the witnesses defer to the generic image of a beautiful nymph. The interviews illuminate one of the critical lessons learned while making Destination Truth: that truth itself is relative. Our Western obsession with objectivity and demonstrable evidence holds little sway in certain cultures. Places like Papua New Guinea have sliding scales when it comes to the value and interpretation of events. In this community, oral tradition is sacrosanct, and a storyteller’s narrative is true regardless of whether it’s factual. There’s little need for empirical evidence. It’s simply not a part of their belief system.
We hear a story about a man in possession of mermaid bones that (unsurprisingly) turns out to be hard to confirm. We’re then told that the bones are actually buried between two palm trees on the beach, and while I have little hope of finding anything, my team and I take turns digging, to the sheer delight of the locals. It’s not that they don’t believe in the creature: they absolutely do. Ardently. They just can’t imagine why anyone would toil in the hot sun for evidence. The longer I dig, the more I agree with them.
Coming up empty-handed, we attempt to verify additional sightings by scuba diving in the waters of nearby Elizabeth Bay. We explore untouched corals and hover over the carcasses of massive troop transport boats from World War II. The underwater investigation, while breathtaking, yields no actual mermaid sightings.
Back onshore, however, we do see something significant bobbing at the surface, which, for an instant, appears humanoid. Careful observation reveals that it’s something else entirely. The animal is a dugong: a marine mammal, relative of the manatee, and a strong candidate for what the locals are seeing. Additional research reveals that the dugong species is of the scientific order Sirenia. Sirenia are named for the Sirens of Greek mythology, since it is theorized that Mediterranean sailors historically mistook manatees as, you guessed it, mermaids. But the question remains: How did remote Papuans in the Pacific come to perfectly describe a creature from Greek mythology? The answer lies in the same cultural cross-pollination that makes pidgin such a bizarre hybrid language.
As the war’s Pacific theater unfolded on Papua New Guinea’s shores, the local population struggled to make sense of modern boats and futuristic-looking aircraft. Tribes famously created “cargo cults,” believing that arriving food rations and military gear were actually from God and meant for the Papuans themselves. They believed the soldiers were intercepting these holy supplies, and, in an effort to cut out the middleman, locals hastily constructed useless boat docks and primitive airstrips in the hopes that more cargo would simply, well, show up. These coveted supplies offered clues to a world that these people never knew existed. Many shipments included cans of tuna fish, on which they would have noticed the same logo that persists on packaging to this day: a reclining mermaid. The villagers in PNG are simply carrying on a muddled tradition of misidentification as old as Homer himself. So the next time you’re at the supermarket buying a can of Chicken of the Sea, take stock of the power of myth.
Satisfied at our explanation of the Papuan mermaid, we turn to face another creature on the nearby island of New Britain. The daylong drive back to the airport in Kavieng is going to knock us off schedule, so we decide to simply travel in a direct line, taking a boat between the two islands. I’m advised that the crossing can be rough and should be attempted just before dawn.
We wake up at 3:30 a.m. under the cover of darkness and haul our equipment down to the beach. It’s pouring, and even with rain gear, we’re drenched in minutes. I hike down over the rocks to get a look at the water; what I see is not overly encouraging. The ocean is dark and churning, and the banana boats the locals sourced don’t look particularly seaworthy. We try to wait out the rain for another half hour, but it’s relentless. Finally, we give it a go. We lash the gear under tarps and carry the boats to the water’s edge. It’s hard to tell if the ocean is getting worse or if the morning light is just revealing how bad the conditions really are. Either way, we don’t last long. After struggling to make it across the breakers, Neil and I take a rogue wave to the face. About $10,000 worth of gear is destroyed in an instant. We return to shore. So much for the boat idea.
Back on land, we dry off as the sun begins to break. The ocean remains rough, and the swells are worse than ever. I ask the villagers if there’s a field in the area. One of the locals guides us to an abandoned World War II airstrip. We tag the coordinates on GPS and fire up a satellite phone, eventually linking to a helicopter pilot on the other island. While we wait for a chopper, the locals paint my face using their stained saliva. It smells awful, but they’re enjoying it too much for me to argue. Finally, we hear the sound of spinning blades and wave our arms at the approaching helicopter. Belong ’em Jesus, indeed.
I climb into the front compartment, the crew hops in the back, and away we go. As we gain altitude, the entire island steadily resolves into a tapestry of palm trees and thatched roofs. The Duke of York Islands roll by as we course above the frothy waves and deep blue sea. As we approach New Britain, my eyes widen at plumes of menacing smoke that billow out of three active volcanoes. We arc around one of the larger cones, which, until fairly recently, was entirely underwater. In the 1800s it exploded up from the depths, and when it finally quieted, there was a new island here. Maps had to be redrawn. The large town of Rabaul constructed shortly after was one of PNG’s most cosmopolitan but also an astonishingly poor choice of real estate. In 1994 the inevitable finally happened.
A brutal eruption devastated Rabaul, with rocks the size of cars raining down over the city and heavy ash crushing most of the buildings. Today it is a chalky, abandoned ghost town resting peacefully in the shadow of still-smoldering giants. Six hundred feet away, a new Rabaul is springing up, unwilling to learn from the mistakes of its past.
Our helicopter lands on the outskirts of the ruined city. We are immediately presented with a hefty bill for our last-minute helicopter extraction, which Neil and I promptly charge to the network. We’re here to search for an iguanodon-like dinosaur that locals have reported seeing in the nearby jungles. Our mission is straightforward: head to the remote village where the creature was spotted, interview the locals, and attempt to figure out what they saw.
We meet with the town mayor, who directs us out of town and kindly insists on loaning us an additional security guard. As the mayor diplomatically prattles on about how I’m going to love the unspoiled rain forests and friendly natives, I can’t help but notice that my new escort is carrying a fully automatic machine gun. We drive out of Rabaul past ash-covered ruins on streets lined with charred palm trees. Above the blackened foliage, I notice the volcano belch out a cloud of vapor and cross my fingers that I’m not about to find myself in a Roland Emmerich movie.
After orchestrating the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto moved his base of operations to Rabaul. By 1941, this entire island was overrun with more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers. Today there are still lingering reminders of this bloody past all around us. The natural vegetation is broken up by huge gun turrets and scattered mechanical debris. By the side of the road I notice a graveyard and a long-abandoned execution area. It’s a disquieting sight and we continue on in silence.
The muddy road slits the jungle like a knife but becomes more and more compromised by the encroaching foliage. By the time we make it to our destination, the ground is barely visible. We step out of the jeeps into a clearing where I can make out a loose arrangement of huts. I also hear the sound of beating drums, which brings a smile to my face. We’re about to be given a proper welcome. The villagers emerge, and we’re surrounded by traditional painted dancers clad with necklaces of dried flowers. As the drumming picks up pace and the dancers encircle my team, I stand amazed at the vivid eruption of culture.
Since the whole scene feels a bit like the arrival at Skull Island in King Kong, we’re doing our best to ingratiate ourselves. The quickest way to fit in here is also the simplest; my crew and I agree to partake in a mouthful of buai. As the entire village looks on in delight, we make an earnest if pathetic attempt to chew the nearly inedible betel nut as drool comes spilling out of our mouths. We spit the juice out onto the ground, which is already stained red as far as the eye can see. The power of the bitter concoction hits us first-timers like a ton of bricks, and within minutes we’re all high as kites and stumbling around like a pack of fools. Marc Carter is dancing like a chicken, Neil is reeling and can barely stand, and the entire village laughs their collective ass off. For the next ten generations, they’ll probably be talking about the white idiots who came to their village one day.
The effects pass quickly, and we’re warmly embraced by the entire tribe. They serve us a challenging lunch of stewed bananas and taro root, which we diplomatically consume as best we can. I teach the kids how to use an iPod (it turns out that a click-wheel really is pretty intuitive); they squeal with laughter, tickled by the strange sounds of a little-known band called “the Beatles.”
A tour of the village is revelatory. There’s a vibrant community here that is totally divorced from the modern world. The discovery that the locals are still using seashells for currency is downright mind-blowing. I spend the better part of an hour trying to work out the dollars-to-shells conversion rate, but in the end I just give up. I’m offered a few thirteen-year-old brides, which I politely decline, as we weave our way between the simple huts and throngs of onlookers.
We get down to business and interview eyewitnesses who claim to have seen the iguanodon creature. They nearly universally describe the animal as having a dog-like head, a long body, and a spiked tail. Villagers seem to think it’s a dinosaur of some sort. Several people claim that the creature has eaten local dogs. We also buy a live chicken to use for bait that the mayor strangles to death, a process at which he doesn’t appear overly adept. The zombie chicken keeps coming back to life again and again, and I gnash my teeth waiting for it to be over.
Finally, with our (hopefully) dead chicken and a fan club comprising everyone in town, we head out to begin our investigation. One eyewitness is actually too scared to descend the slope where she spied the creature. This is a little nerve-racking, since it’s clear some kind of animal really did frighten this woman, iguanodon or not. A few of the locals assist in erecting a base camp, using machetes to create bamboo supports for our rain tarp. In the span of about three minutes, they turn the site into the Professor’s hut from Gilligan’s Island, fashioning a table, two chairs, and a roof out of bamboo, putting my own camp-building efforts to utter shame. I half expect them to install a coconut phone.
Just before dark, we string out a series of infrared cameras to survey the area for any movement. Thermal imagers aid our efforts as well, piercing the darkness and illuminating anything that emits heat. While part of the team begins a preliminary sweep, the rest of the group continues to activate the equipment at base camp.
The ensuing investigation is notable in that it marks the first of two instances when I nearly get my head blown off while making Destination Truth. It happens as we trudge through a swampy section of wilderness beyond our camp. I hack at a huge banana leaf that suddenly drops away to reveal a heavily cleared expanse and about twenty Papuans servicing construction equipment. The men immediately stop what they’re doing and accost our group, hysterically yelling and waving us away. Two of the men are holding pistols, which they wave about haphazardly in the general direction of my face; the rest step forward with machetes. I watch our Papuan security guard take the safety off of his machine gun and I motion the muzzle down while Steve politely apologizes for the intrusion. An argument ensues but is settled when we all back off from the site and agree to go around.
As we retreat, I glance back at the equipment, which appears to be dredging part of the swamp. Steve tells me that they’re looking for the wreckage of an American bomber from World War II, which they believe was carrying a shipment of gold. Clearly, they’re protective of the bounty.
We double back to base to begin our overnight investigation, more than a little wary of our newly discovered neighbors. I’m less than surprised to find that Lucas has fallen asleep on a log.
The rest of the night is monopolized by an extensive search of the jungles surrounding the village. Just after midnight, we encounter something that shakes the trees so hard I’m convinced it’s the Smoke Monster from Lost. Whatever it is, we never get a good look, and it quickly flees into the darkness. We trek on and eventually loop back to our camp. The video monitors back at our bamboo base show flickering scenes of static jungle and a dead chicken swaying in the breeze.
At dawn there’s little to report by way of findings, and the chicken is cooked and consumed by the villagers. Though our culprit is described as an iguanodon, the consistent elements from the interviews sound to me like this monster might be a large crocodile (of which Papua New Guinea has many).
We speed away from the village, waving back at a mob of cheering locals. Though we didn’t find their dinosaur, this was certainly a journey of discovery for my group. Palm fronds smack the front bumper of our car, clawing at the doors before releasing us and cloaking the road behind. I wonder if I’ll ever see this place again.
At the airstrip we board a flight to Lae, a city nestled in the Huon Gulf on the west side of the main Papuan island. We’re flying in an old de Havilland Dash 7, a plane better suited for a museum than the friendly skies. A rattling old piece of junk, the plane lurches up off the tarmac and lets out a cacophony of ill-fated mechanical sounds. As we level out, I watch as the copilot props his knee against the stick and opens a local newspaper across his lap. The headline reads, “GIANT CROC KILLS LOCAL WOMAN.” It seems the Iguanodon has struck again.
We’re now on the hunt for Papua New Guinea’s flying dinosaur. Known as the Ropen, this pterodactyl-like cryptid has been spotted in the skies over PNG for decades. The creature is said to be uniquely bioluminescent, glowing brightly as it flies. As the rusted wings of our plane shudder in the cloud line, we drop down toward the tarmac to begin the search.
The main airport here is in disrepair and closed, so we head for a World War II strip, which hasn’t seen much service in the last fifty years. We somehow touch down in one piece and make our way to a primitive yet serviceable hotel. It’s the first running water that we’ve seen in nearly a week. I shower quickly, and while the rest of the group cleans up, I grab the car keys and jump in the jeep. There’s a place nearby that I’ve always wanted to go.
I step out at the old Lae airfield, which now sits in abject disrepair. I walk along the silent runway and crouch down, skimming my hand across the rough stones at my feet. It was here, in 1937, on the very pebbles that now slip between my fingers, that a heavily loaded Lockheed Electra plane gained momentum and took off into the blue. The pilot, a wiry, thirty-nine-year-old woman, was bound for tiny Howland Island, more than 2,500 miles away. But Amelia Earhart would never arrive. I rise to my feet and slowly walk the length of the narrow field, looking up at the clouds and picturing her waving to the locals before arcing out over the ocean. I’m fascinated by her, of course. What adventurer isn’t? Her many exploits were brazen but undertaken with such surety of purpose that they appeared effortless. Earhart was seemingly unconstrained by gravity, an aviatrix Astaire who could glide across the globe with ease. During her trans-world flight, she wrote, “Please know I am quite aware of the hazards . . . I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.”
The magnificent thing about her is, in the eyes of the world, she simply never died. Her fear never witnessed, her failure never recorded, her shiny twin-engine Electra never recovered. Earhart’s legacy of inspiration is amplified because her adventure is perpetual. We don’t think of her as dead; we think of her as missing. She is forever flying, somewhere beyond Lae, over that limitless blue horizon.
I head back to town and to our comparatively modest adventure. The most recent sightings of the Ropen are concentrated along a small peninsula that we can only access by boat. I pilot one of two vessels, hugging the coast and riding the swells toward our target. We bank in toward a simple village, noticeable only by small fires set along the beach. We tie up at a primitive dock and begin to interview the witnesses. All of them describe a large, bat-like monster and then point up to the sky, recalling the Ropen’s strange glow. They gesture toward the jungles along the coast. The entire peninsula they’re referring to is now a nearly impenetrable mess of vegetation, snakes, and spiders. We look over wartime maps to see that, like in Rabaul, the Japanese did a thorough job of turning this particular sliver of land into a military powerhouse. Dozens of gun turrets are marked on the documents, as well as a vast network of defensive tunnels that underlie the entire area. Allied forces bombed the region so heavily that the Japanese spent much of their occupation underground. The locals believe that the Ropen now inhabits these tunnels.
Our first attempt at exploring the forest is by way of direct assault. We leave the beach, passing a perfectly preserved Japanese Zero plane that’s literally hanging out of a tree. The path degrades quickly, and we eventually reach a dead end. We revisit the maps, and the locals point out a nearby feature that we’ve missed: the entrance to a tunnel. They cut back vines to reveal a badly collapsed opening that’s now completely sealed. We translate back and forth between pidgin and English and are told that an earthquake destroyed the opening more than fifty years ago.
“How many people can you get together from the village?” Neil asks Lucas.
“Neil?” I interject. Even though I know exactly what he’s thinking.
“What? You’ll love it in there,” he offers smugly.
While Neil oversees the work of uncovering the tunnel entrance, I lead the rest of our group on a trail up the peninsula, searching for an alternate entrance. The heat is absolutely sweltering as we trek uphill, and by the time we reach the first Japanese gun turret, my clothes are soaked through. I sit behind the rusted barrel of the gun and look out through the natural camouflage of the canopy, imagining Allied ships in the distance. We press on as far as we can, but hordes of prickly vines and spiderwebs prevent much progress.
Back near the beach, we come across a forgotten graveyard. Here the final resting places of gold miners, soldiers, and wayward travelers are being reclaimed by nature. Some of the plots are dug up and empty. The locals say that they believe this to be the work of the flesh-feasting Ropen, though to me simple grave robbery seems a much more likely cause. Names are still legible on a number of the broken headstones, and I walk down the line reciting them aloud. “Jack Davies. Charles Collins. Keith Suttor.” I falter when I see a postscript under one soldier’s name that reads, “KILLED BY NATIVE ARROW.”
We hike back to the tunnel, where a hardworking team of locals has breached a small opening. With daylight fading, Carter and I wedge ourselves into the lightless cavity. We get to our feet, stooping forward under the low ceiling. The air is stale but breathable, and our headlamps illuminate crumbling walls and endless passages. To my dismay, we also find bats. Lots of bats. They whip through the chambers at high speeds and rush past our faces. We walk slowly and deliberately so that their echolocation can guide them around us (the best way to take a bat in the face is to panic and move quickly). Entire branches of the tunnel are collapsed, and we do our best not to think about how stupid an idea this is. Just keep moving. The sides of the tunnel are wet and flake to the touch. “Stay off the walls, Carter. They’re falling apart,” I whisper.
“Shit. Spiders,” he answers.
I look back at Carter’s headlamp beam, which illuminates the stocky legs of a tarantula drawing back into a hole. I scan the floor in front of me and see hundreds of glinting eyes retracting in the darkness.
The tunnel opens up a bit, and we come across railroad tracks originally used to deliver munitions to the guns on the hillside. I’m now adding unexploded ordnance to the list of things in here that could potentially kill us. We discover a few pieces of bone that look human but no signs of anything the size of a flying dinosaur. Once we’ve explored everything we can, we carefully pull back to the entrance. Neil and Eric pull Carter and me out of the hole and into the jungle darkness. The fresh air is a relief, and we sit on the ground for a few moments to catch our breath.
Our investigation continues throughout the night, and a few hours before dawn we, like so many others before us, do see strange lights. A small glowing ball appears low in the sky and streams slowly and steadily above the water. Since planes don’t fly here after dark, it’s not an aircraft, but I’m certainly not willing to concede that it’s a flying dinosaur, either. The event is captured on our infrared cameras and we continue to scan the skies until sunrise, but the light never reappears. While the footage is ultimately inconclusive, it does align with eyewitness testimony, leaving the case open for future investigation.
At dawn, we return to Port Moresby and board a flight bound for home. In the end, it’s hard to define PNG, and perhaps that’s what makes it so special. It is at once a sprawling scrap yard from the Second World War, a treasure trove of unknown biodiversity, and home to tribal cultures that have staved off the modern age. It is dirty and yet pristine, both criminally corrupt and blissfully pure, and brimming with ways to kill you.
On the margins of antique maritime maps, cartographers would often write, “Here be monsters.” It was a way of both warning and luring sailors to places unknown and uncharted. Papua New Guinea is such a destination, even today. Its highlands are barely explored and its jungles are among the wildest on earth. Its monsters come in many forms, from mermaids, iguanodons, and Ropens to crocodiles, spiders, and machete-carrying mercenaries. Some are folkloric and some all too real. Either way, though, the Papuans don’t much care. To them, these are all indelible inhabitants of this mysterious lost world.
Here be monsters. Find them if you dare.