The outside world didn’t make contact with the Chimbu Skeleton People of New Guinea . . until 1934, and nobody seems to have learned much about them since. At least nobody that Peggy and I met. Only that...

I first heard about Nuku Hiva in the ninth grade. From Herman Melville. In 1842, fed up with the life of a whaler, he and a fellow sailor named Toby jumped ship on Nuku Hiva. Then...

If Ireland is 40 shades of green, Palau is a hundred. Besides the four main islands, there are something like 800 Rock Islands     scattered across the Philippine Sea a few degrees north of New Guinea. The Rock Islands...

If your fashion sense leans toward revolutionary-chic, forget about berets and retro Che Guevara T-shirts. Go to the Islamic Republic, and you can return home outfitted as a fully-fledged state-sponsored terrorist. When you join Iran’s fighting...

Madagascar is one of those places that don’t seem to have a permanent government. What they have is an ongoing series of coups that make Italy’s shifting political coalitions look like models of permanence. In other...

For centuries, nobody was supposed to run with the bulls at Pamplona. Not that lots of people didn't do it anyway. And they've been doing it for a long time. The tradition kicked off in the...

People have been in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. Fifty-five, sixty-thousand years, maybe. Longer than anywhere else outside of Africa. For most of that...

A long time ago my mother died in Paris, and I thought she might have wound up in the Catacombs, because people still do. So when Peggy and I were in the area, we descended...

The southern peninsula of Sulawesi has got to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth.     Peggy and I wound up there because I’d been imprinted with the shape of the island back in second...

The Sepik is the longest river in New Guinea,   winding from Papua across to the Indonesian side of the island, then looping back.     Along the way it passes through dozens of tribes and language groups     and,...