Kavieng lagoon-edge house

Kavieng, at the northern tip of New Ireland, is the most accessible corner of Papua New Guinea and one of the great undiscovered water destinations of the Pacific. The town sits on a lagoon scattered with small islands, and the passages between them funnel current that brings sharks, eagle rays and dense reef life; from November to April those same passages produce clean, uncrowded reef surf.

The property is a hundred and ten square metre elevated house in the classic tropical colonial style: hardwood floors, louvred windows on all sides for cross-breeze, a corrugated roof with wide eaves and a covered verandah facing the lagoon fifty metres away. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a separate kitchen, water tanks, a generator with automatic changeover for town-supply outages, and a fenced garden of frangipani and coconut with a boat trailer bay.

Kavieng town has a hospital, a market that is one of the best in the country for fish and produce, supermarkets, banks, a hardware store, a yacht club and several dive operators. Air Niugini flies daily to Port Moresby, from which there are direct connections to Brisbane, Singapore and Manila; the Boluminski Highway runs south-east along the coast past village after village of white sand.

PNG rewards people who arrive with patience and respect for local custom. Land is overwhelmingly held under customary title, so foreign buyers work with state leases — typically ninety-nine-year urban leases in and around towns like Kavieng — and legal advice from a Port Moresby or Kavieng firm is essential. Prices are low because the market is small, not because the property is poor.

For divers, surfers, fishermen and sailors, few places on earth offer this quality of water with so little pressure on it. A house on the Kavieng lagoon is a base for one of the last genuinely wild tropical coastlines.