What Kept Jared Diamond in Miserable New Guinea?

Jared Diamond says life in New Guinea is physically miserable most of the time, and still fascinating enough to stay.

He had already felt physical misery in Peru. In New Guinea the food is sweet potatoes and rice, three meals a day, and the jungle means bites from scrub mites. His first year there he got dysentery that doctors at Harvard could not cure, and it stayed with him for a year. His third year he got malaria while climbing mountains. About once in three months he can sit at a campsite, look out, and call the view beautiful. The rest of the time he is physically miserable and dealing with New Guineans who have their own ideas about what to do in life.

The discomfort is the price of the fascination: the birds, and figuring out the difference between the Mabisen and the Pasukyabi.