As a white American traveler, I have always reveled in rubbing shoulders (it's the Detroit in me) with ordinary people at the ends of the earth who have had scarce contact with my own kind. I like the freshness, the nakedness, the sheer unlikelihood of these engagements. I hunger to see that flash of recognition in their eyes.

Most of Alotau's business takes place outside. In a shaded marketplace, sellers hunker behind meager piles of homegrown betel nuts, peanuts, bananas, waving towels against the flies. Children stare at the alien in their midst. I greet a man squatting with his family, "How you doing?" He answers politely, "We just sitting around." It's hard to know where to begin.

The Orion's self-styled anthropologist, Justin Friend, says there's a word in the local pidgin tongue for people like us. A white person is a dim-dim. Dim-dims are revered in New Guinea for their wonderful possessions but snickered at because, for example, they blow their noses into rags that they put back in their pockets, or they work so hard in order to have things which don't make them happy.

Dim-dims cast long shadows. The war we once fought on the shores of New Guinea and the Solomons, the one we call World War II, left lots of wrecked weaponry lying around. Near Alotau, a dozen of us inspect a rusted-out landing craft at the spot where the Japanese stormed ashore in August 1942 on their triumphant sweep through the western Pacific after bombing Pearl Harbor. Here at the Battle of Milne Bay, a larger Australian force dealt Japan its first land defeat of the war—just the tonic the Allies needed.

At the edge of a dark forest, we marvel at the sight of nine U.S. Marine landing barges being devoured by the many-stilted roots of the banyan trees. I'm sitting on a log with a guide named Trouble, and he's talking cannibalism—how it was practiced around here until the war. It was ritual: "To get rid of all your frustration with your enemy, you cook him up and eat him. But quite a number of missionaries also were killed and eaten," he assures me. Back in town, colorful workboats ferry people and cargo to and from outlying islands. Alotau's main export, I'm told, is betel nuts. This addictive stimulant is the runaway pastime and, it appears, the linchpin of the economy. Billboards remind: "Do Not Discharge Spittle or Scum in Public Places or in the Rubbish Bin." But the whole town is polka-dotted with orange betel juice. Vendors of the green palm fruits, all charging the same price, line the waterfront.

I approach one woman to ask, "Would it make me sick?" and a crowd begins to form. With my teeth, I crack open the husk to get to the grape-sized fruit. "Don't swallow the juice," she advises, and kids giggle. I start chewing as instructed, adding a bite of pepper root (for flavor) dipped in crushed lime (for potency).