In the 3 + 1 section we’ll be asking all sorts of people to delve deep into their memory banks – and memory cards – to answer two questions – what have been the three greatest travel experiences of your life? And where in the world have you always dreamt of traveling to? Perhaps we’ll get something profound; perhaps we won’t. In the end, all that matters is that you wasted a couple of minutes of your day that you might otherwise have used working productively.

Today, as part of ‘Meet the Kapowers’ week, it’s Lachlan.

Well, the photos from New Guinea have disappeared into the netherworld and the Filipino photo is actually a photo of a photo – but let’s do this thing.

1. Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea

Good old PNG. The dirt, the grime, the hundreds of men walking about with machetes hanging limply by their sides. The children screaming out directions to their teammates in pickup games of rugby league. The evangelists standing atop overturned milk crates with microphone in hand, their barked sermons distorted into grunts and squeals by the cheap amp at their feet. The smell of burning garbage everywhere, hanging over the city in dusty clouds. That immense blue harbour, with dark blotches marking the ships that sank to the bottom.

Port Moresby was my first true introduction to travel, and perhaps that clouds my judgment. We came to do the Kokoda Track, a miserable montage of mud and sweat for ten days and ninety-six kilometres, something I probably wouldn’t do again.

But Papua New Guinea itself was a place that threw open everything I thought I knew about the world. The villages were so isolated, so dusty and dry and unforgivably hot, with no access except by plane – or by foot. But the people – everything they did they did with energy and drive and smiles. They would hike some ninety kilometres to Port Moresby just to get crates of Coke that they would then hike back into the jungle, serving them to desperate trekkers with home-made donuts (of all things).

Look, I spent only a couple of days in Port Moresby, and in that time, cowered by all the horror stories, we spent most nights inside. Walking in the choking, garbage-strewn streets during the day, though – incredible. It’s not a pretty city, or a safe city, or even one with much to do. But in its intoxicating rawness I have never found its equal  - not in Bangkok, not Saigon, not even Phnom Penh or Manila. Papua New Guinea is one of the few frontiers left in the world, and Port Moresby is its eccentric, bloated, discoloured, arrhythmic heart.

2. Don Dett, Laos

During all of the year-long trip around Asia, we found ourselves in incredible places, but no matter the party credentials of an island like Ko Chang in Thailand or the sheer awe inspired by a stunning piece of real estate like Tiger Leaping Gorge in China, there was never any doubt about one thing: it’s nothing compared with Laos.

Laos was paradise. A paradise of friendly, smiling faces, a paradise of good food and constantly warm weather, a paradise of wilderness and empty spaces, a place where you could go days without seeing concrete or television or any of the ugly side-dishes to economic progress. And it reached its natural peak on Don Dett, one of many islands in the Mekong, where life was so laidback that we met an ageing British hippy whose life had been solely devoted to constructing a device, out of rope and bamboo, whereby a person could lie in the Mekong peacefully, without being dragged away by the current, and have a thickly-rolled joint handed down to them from the overlooking balcony. We rented a bungalow for less than a dollar a night, and lay in our hammocks watching the village boys rowing up and down the river endlessly. And that was it. And it was as close to perfection as I’ve ever come, or would ever care to come again.

3. Dumangas, Philippines

Dumangas is an utterly ordinary village outside an even more ordinary town, Iloilo City, on the island of Panay. The buildings there are made of concrete, the basketball courts out of dirt. During the evenings people get together and drink and play cards and gossip about the Deputy Mayor (who has a thing for breast milk, apparently). During the day they work in the rice fields, if they have a job, piling it up on the road to dry in the sun. They eat fish-head soup, it seems, two out of every three meals.

I came to Dumangas to do some work as a school teacher. I wasn’t trained, so it wasn’t paid, but I got to stay with a woman named Eden in the village and get a couple of meals a day and occasionally work on some construction projects around town. Which, I know, sounds like the least fun holiday in the world.

Every morning I would get up before dawn, woken by the incessant rooster crows and dogfights proceeding outside. I would walk up the road and wait for the jeepney – a stretched US army jeep, basically – and hold onto the back, standing on the rear bumper with the wind whipping through my hair. And then I’d knock on the metal roof when it came to my stop, a bland crossroads in the middle of some fields. And I’d walk along, waiting for a tricycle driver to come and pick me up for the last couple of kilometres to the school. I’d teach some ridiculous lesson from an out of date US textbook (most of them were about laser technology, which, like, okay), and everyone would leave at 11am – ostensibly for their three-hour lunch break / siesta, but they rarely came back.

Then I’d head back to town, and lie on my bed with the fan in my face and the shirt sticking to my back. I’d force down some fish head soup. Some of the men would ask me if I wanted to come and shoot some of the stray dogs, and I’d decline. Some other men would ask me if I wanted to come see a cockfight in the city, and again I’d decline (though I regret that, a little, now). And then some other men would come over, and open up a bottle of rum, and then the women would come in, and the children, and we would drink and talk and play cards and gossip about the Deputy Mayor. 

God I’d keep going but I’m making myself miss it too bad.

The +1: Nicaragua / West Africa

I’m lucky enough to be traveling here on our upcoming trip, and I can’t wait. I can’t say what it is about Nicaragua, what I’ve heard about it that separates it from, say, Honduras or Guatemala or Panama. But I see those images of canefields and volcanoes and lakes and jungle, and hear those names – Granada, Leon, Bluefields, – and something happens. I have a moment. A country of immense jungle, with English on one side and Spanish on the other, the Pacific and the Caribbean… 

Yes, I have a thing for steamy tropical backwaters. It’s a problem.

After this trip, West Africa is the next place I’d be dreaming to end up. I was actually trying to get to Ghana when I ended up in the Philippines (I couldn’t afford the airfare), so it’s been a long-held dream of mine, and with Sierra Leone and Liberia improving (or so it seems) I think it would be an incredible adventure to have.