Tufi Cultural Experiences
Papua New Guinea is the land of a million different journeys. Tufi explores many of these journeys and allows you to uncover culture and traditional ways that one thinks does not exist anymore.
Tufi is a great location to combine with other cultural festivals taking part in the country to give you a mix of the different provinces and their cultural differences. Tufi’s cultural festival will enlighten you into the Oro province traditional ways of food gathering and hunting, village life, spiritual beliefs and introduce you to their language “Karafe”. This is their place talk meaning the language spoken by their villages.
At Tufi we encourage school groups to come and spend time in the local village guesthouses. This will open children’s minds to a very basic way of life without the modern conveniences we rely on today such as computers, mobile phones, supermarkets, electricity and even running water. We encourage this form of educational experience to enlighten the young ones of today so that they can appreciate nature at its finest and learn a survival that they would not be exposed to in their own environment.
Daily life of the local villagers includes building their traditional homes and canoes from sago palms, traditionally gardening and fishing and processing of their food, making ropes for hunting pigs, fishing nets and processing various trees for tapa cloth which is a traditional clothing.
The “Getaway” factor of Tufi’s location is romantic and is conducive for weddings and honeymoons. There is no transfer time at Tufi as you virtually fly right into the resort. No other resort offers this convenience. So whether it's a wedding or a conference you will not find a better place for privacy and ambience.
European History
In the 18th century Tufi was first recognised as an idyllic anchorage for British capital ships. Later, and in the same period, it became a government station, occupied by the British. The first missionaries here were Anglican and their religion remains predominant today.
The Tufi Dive Resort occupies the site that was formally the District Manager's residence during PNG's colonial era.
During WWII the Tufi wharf was initially occupied by the Japanese but then was subsequently used as the site of a USN Advance PT Boat base from December 1942 with PT Boats operating along the coast from Buna to Mambare.
After WWII the original District Manager's residence was converted to a guesthouse for government employees and other buildings were added. The Laki Hotel was built in the 1970's and Tufi became a popular getaway for Port Moresby residents.
