Since the outside world’s first encounters with the folk who live in New Guinea’s hills and valleys and highlands, we’ve called them Stone Age people. And it’s difficult for us to get past the mental image those words Stone Age bring up. But, in one of the great mind-expansions careful travel offers, instead of finding “primitive” people on our visits to the great island, we find instead, as Jared Diamond wrote so emphatically in his masterpiece, Guns, Germs, and Steel, “From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans [which spanned a couple of decades], they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.” And it’s that combination of dramatic, untethered nature with fellow humans of a particularly welcoming and astutely interactive open spirit that make journeys to New Guinea so magnificently memorable.