Paradise: Solo Across New Guinea

Having parted company with his wife of four years, Chuck McAllister decides to clear his head by wandering solo across Papua New Guinea—a rainforest island where tribal loyalty still reigns supreme—where travel is achieved on foot, by canoe, or hitching a lift with a missionary pilot. Here, many of the people still live as subsistence hunter-farmers, building houses of bamboo and thatch, and getting by without running water, electricity, medicine, or roads. Clan wars are common and celebrations are enacted with drums, dancing, and feathered headdresses. Living in their grass houses and sleeping alongside their pigs, McAllister survives narrow escapes from jungle disease and freezing mountaintops, and makes acquaintances of every description, from Western missionaries to the grandchildren of headhunters. His story is offered in a breezy anecdotal style, enlivened with comic adventures, bits of history, tribal mythology, and personal revelations, and touches upon all those areas central to the human experience—love, sex, religion, war and peace, wealth and poverty, life and death, joy and sorrow. Through it all McAllister learns to live in the moment, look to the future, and let go of the past.