Puzzle #22 — 2026-08-10
The answer was Papua New Guinea. The scene was built from Tari. Difficulty: hard.
The clues, in the order they were revealed
- A high valley of sweet potato gardens enclosed by ditches and woven fences.
- Houses are low, round and thatched, scattered rather than grouped in a village.
- Birds with extravagant ornamental plumes live in the forest on the ranges.
- Most outside access is by light aircraft rather than by road.
- The country shares the world’s second-largest island with a neighbour.
What the scene was built from
The location is chosen first, from a hand-curated whitelist, and the image is generated to match the description below. That order is what makes the answer checkable: the scene is built for the place, not guessed from the picture.
| vegetation | montane rainforest, tree ferns, sweet potato gardens behind woven fences |
|---|---|
| terrain | a high valley at 1,600 m surrounded by forested ranges, often cloud-filled |
| architecture | low round thatched houses, gardens enclosed by ditches and woven fences |
| roadside | left-hand traffic, unsealed road, most access by light aircraft |
| signage | Latin script, English beside a creole (never rendered legibly) |
| light | equatorial highland cloud, cool air despite the latitude |
Where this actually is
Tari, Papua New Guinea sits at -5.85, 142.95 — see Tari, Papua New Guinea on OpenStreetMap. The clue ladder and the table above were both written from that place before any picture existed.
This day was one of the roughly third pulled for a second look at image quality and difficulty. How the pictures are made, and why none of them is a photograph.