"Mt. Hagen - the centre ..." a Mount Hagen Travel Page by Bwana_Brown

The further west one went in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the 'rougher' things seemed to get! My second trip after arriving in PNG was a flight into Mount Hagen, a rough and ready town in the middle of the central mountain ranges. I had another two or three trips there before my 3 years were up, sometimes driving up from the coastal city of Lae or vice-versa as I dealt with various power system problems on the 66,000 volt transmission system and the hydro & diesel power stations serving various small communities in this part of the country.

It was always nice to experience the cooler airs and different landscape of this highly populated and rugged part of PNG. I ran into this local wandering around town not far from my hotel on the first visit, dressed in the traditional 'working' outfit of a Western Highlander. The cloth frontpiece is called a laplap, with the bare buttocks being covered by a sheaf of long grass stuffed down through his belt. He was trying to sell me a couple of artifacts, including the set of boar's teeth on a necklace of seed-pods.