Alotau bay-view bungalow

Alotau sits at the head of Milne Bay, a deep fjord-like inlet at the eastern end of mainland Papua New Guinea, with steep green mountains dropping straight into calm water. It is the departure point for the Louisiade Archipelago, the D'Entrecasteaux islands and some of the best diving in the Coral Triangle, and every November it hosts the Kenu and Kundu festival, when hundreds of carved war canoes race in the bay.

The house is a ninety square metre bungalow on a hillside terrace above the town, with a covered verandah taking in the full sweep of the bay. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, an open living-kitchen area, hardwood joinery, louvred windows, security screens, a water tank and a small garden of hibiscus and betel palms. Four hundred metres of road leads down towards the waterfront and the market.

Alotau is a compact provincial capital: a hospital, a big waterfront market where island produce arrives by boat each morning, supermarkets, banks, a wharf, hotels and dive operators running trips out to the bay's wrecks and reefs. Gurney airport is twenty minutes away with daily Air Niugini flights to Port Moresby.

The surrounding province is a sailor's dream — hundreds of islands, sheltered anchorages, and villages where trade still moves by sailing canoe. Diving here is superb and almost entirely uncrowded: soft coral walls, WWII wrecks from the Battle of Milne Bay, manta cleaning stations and reefs with fish density that experienced divers travel a long way for.

As everywhere in PNG, land tenure requires care. Customary ownership dominates outside town boundaries, and foreign buyers take state leases in the urban area with proper legal representation. Do the diligence and the reward is a well-built house with one of the great tropical views, in a province where the water is still as it was fifty years ago.