The Kokoda Track

A real WWII campaign route, and a genuinely dangerous walk

The Kokoda Track is a single-file footpath that runs 96 kilometres, 60 in a straight line, over the Owen Stanley Range of Papua New Guinea, from Owers' Corner in Central Province, 50 kilometres east of Port Moresby, to the village of Kokoda in Oro Province. It is passable only on foot and reaches 2,490 metres as it rounds Mount Bellamy. It crosses the land of the Mountain Koiari people, and the Koiari and Orokaiva are the traditional owners of the region. European miners first used it in the 1890s to reach the Yodda Kokoda goldfields.

Between July and November 1942 Japanese and Australian forces fought a series of battles along it, the Kokoda Track campaign, which UNESCO describes as turning the fortunes of the Japanese in the Pacific. Damien Parer filmed it for the newsreel Kokoda Front Line!, which won Australia's first Academy Award, for its director Ken G. Hall. Corporal John Metson crawled the track for three weeks rather than burden his comrades with a stretcher. After the war the path fell into disuse and in many places disappeared; in 1964 an art teacher at Sogeri High School, Angus Henry, crossed it with two students in three and a quarter days without guides, carriers, signposts or bridges.

The range it crosses rises to 3,800 metres and is one of the most biologically important areas in the Asia Pacific, with more than 4,000 plant species and endemic birds of paradise, bowerbirds and wallabies. In 2006 the Owen Stanley Ranges and the track went on UNESCO's tentative list. Mining has hovered nearby: in 2007 Frontier Resources announced plans to divert part of the track for a copper mine, and Papua New Guinea's foreign minister backed raising the track to the status of Gallipoli.

Walker numbers have climbed fast since 2001, past 3,000 in 2006, and the trek usually takes four to twelve days through hot, humid days, cold nights, torrential rain and malaria country, staying in village guesthouses. Six Australian trekkers have died of hyponatremia, four of them in 2009, and since 2010 tour operators have needed a licence from the Kokoda Track Authority. Villagers have closed the track at times over grievances such as the sharing of fees. In November 2009 the paralympian Kurt Fearnley crawled it north to south in 11 days.