Papua New Guinea

There are two countries I've travelled to that have blown me away, and that I wouldn't hesitate to call home. While the conveniences of Singapore are pretty persuasive, I think I wouldn't quite mind giving it up in exchange for a life away from the city. Sure, it's nice to have a 24-hour supermarket just around the corner and to have a well-connected subway system, but living in a city kind of gives you a sense of disconnect from what's important. It's probably one of the strangest contradictions of our time that though there are so many opportunities for interaction and mobility, we've retreated into ourselves.

The traveling I've done over the past few years has opened my eyes and made me feel more responsible for giving back - whether to family, to society, or to Nature. When you visit places that are so beautiful, and you get a glimpse of the intricate mechanisms of Life that have, through millennia upon millennia, culminated in that butterfly, or that tree, or that dolphin, or that murmur of the waves, you realize you have an inherent responsibility to do your best in protecting the Earth.

Iceland opened the door to that for me, once, four years ago. Most recently, I rediscovered that sense of Beauty in Papua New Guinea.

My foremost motivation for visiting the country was solely because it sounded remote. Work was making me tired and discontent, and I wanted to go somewhere to be alone for a bit. Papua New Guinea seemed perfect.

It had its drawbacks, of course. Port Moresby was too dangerous for a lone female tourist. The agency I booked a tour with mysteriously closed down a week before I arrived. The guesthouse receptionist quit a month prior and took my room reservation with her. A group of men, high on Jungle Juice, leapt in front of our bus and tried to hold us up.

But for every such incident, there was a nice one to counter it. An elementary school teacher stopped me by the road and invited me to his classroom to meet his students. Swimming with manta rays just off the beach at an island two hours from the mainland. Taking a choppy boat ride up and down a string of islands dotting the crystal clear sea. Diving with hammerhead sharks and eagle rays. Coral walls that stretch into the depths of blue. Hiking into the mountains and watching birds of paradise dance in the canopy. A local family that offered me what little homegrown food they had on the table that day.

Papua New Guinea truly is stunning in more ways than one, and I can't wait for the day I set foot there again!