Because there is no road between Port Moresby and the rest of the mainland, Lae's port does work the capital cannot. Ships unload here, trucks load up, and the Highlands Highway climbs inland through the Markham Valley toward Goroka and Mt. Hagen. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, cabbages, coffee beans from the cool uplands - most of what the Highlands produces rides down this road and sails out through Lae. In the other direction comes fuel, rice, hardware, consumer goods. For travelers who cannot afford a flight to Moresby, a berth on a coastal freighter from Lae is still the cheapest way to reach the capital. The city is often called the gateway to the Highlands, which flatters the Highlands more than it does Lae. In truth, Lae earns its keep as the working city of PNG, and it has a character all its own.

In the 1920s, something improbable happened on the coast of New Guinea. Prospectors had struck gold at Edie Creek and Wau, in the mountains south of Lae, but no road could reach them through the ridges. So pilots did it instead. A fleet of De Havillands and Junkers began flying machinery, supplies, and dynamite over the ranges, returning with gold. By the late 1920s the Lae airstrip was moving more freight by air than anywhere else on Earth - not because it was glamorous, but because the jungle left no other option. This was where the world first proved that cargo aviation could pay. The lesson learned at Lae would be carried across continents in the decades that followed. Before there was UPS, before there was FedEx, before there were jet freighters circling the globe, there was a dirt strip at the head of the Huon Gulf and a few stubborn men who figured out that a biplane could out-earn a mule team.

Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan arrived in Lae on June 29, 1937, near the end of a journey that had already taken them across the Atlantic, Africa, the Middle East, India, and Australia. They had about 7,000 miles left to reach Oakland. The next leg, Lae to Howland Island, was the hardest - 2,556 miles of open ocean to a target just over a mile long. On July 2 they climbed out from the Lae strip, turned east, and flew into the morning. Radio contact faded. A search by the U.S. Navy found nothing. The disappearance has haunted aviation ever since. The runway Earhart left on is largely gone now, reclaimed by undergrowth and time. Lae's current airport is 40 kilometers north at Nadzab, a former U.S. base from the end of World War II. But the old strip is still there, beneath the green, holding onto a very specific piece of the twentieth century.

Japanese forces seized Lae in March 1942 and held it for eighteen months, turning the town into a forward base with airstrips, tunnels, and submarine rendezvous points. The Allied counterattack in September 1943 was elaborate - an amphibious landing east of town, paratroopers dropped at Nadzab, and a pincer advance that drove the Japanese survivors north over the Finisterre Mountains. By the time the shooting stopped, the town had been bombed flat. The Lae War Cemetery, set among lawns and plumeria trees, holds 2,818 Commonwealth graves from the Second World War. 444 of them carry no name. Soldiers walk past these stones sometimes on the Morobe Show weekend in October, when provincial life spills into town with singsing groups, farming displays, and industrial exhibits - a city getting on with itself on ground that a previous generation paid dearly to take back.

For a city with a tough reputation - locals will warn you not to wander alone, and the advice is worth taking - Lae also harbors one of PNG's gentler surprises. On ten hectares of the Lae University of Technology campus, the Rainforest Habitat keeps around 80 birds of paradise in a 3,000 square meter enclosure of genuine rainforest. PNG has 30 species of these flamboyant birds. The Habitat has roughly a dozen of them, strutting and calling and doing the slow, patient courtship displays that David Attenborough documentaries made famous. The whole operation is self-funded. Out past the city, there is Salamaua two hours south by boat - a sleepy headland where pre-war colonials flew in for beach weekends, and where a Japanese wartime base has been slowly reabsorbed by the jungle. Further inland are Bulolo and Wau, old gold-rush towns turned timber centers, where the trekking into the highlands begins.