Birds not yet dead
Nancy Sullivan
When Peter’s contract expires he must go finish to Melbourne. But first we head for a trek in Irian Jaya, across the western border of Papua New Guinea. This is where we’ve both always wanted to go, where it’s still possible to walk freely and sleep in remote villages without fear of ambush and homemade shotguns. We fly from Hagen to Wewak to Vanimo and across the border to Jayapura, capital of the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea, formerly Netherlands New Guinea. At the airport in Vanimo, where there is actually a second room for international departures, we stare out the open doors to what looks like a WWII relic parked by stones in overgrown grass at the side of the tarmac. I know so little about planes that I’m afraid to say as much to Peter, but neither of us are reassured by the boarding call that directs us across the field to this single engine prop plane. We’re two of five passengers, and the plane flies so low we can see the bubbling carpet of various trees below, and feel wind rushing by our ankles somehow. Soon the dirt and thatch clearings of PNG give way to corrugated a-line roofing and unfamiliar kits houses of another country. Then we see the curled rooflines and fishing dhows of Asia. Suddenly we’ve slipped the skein of western modernity’s very light overlay on New Guinea and moved into Asia’s imprint on the other side. Here and there the same thatch homes and clearings of PNG can be seen, but now the settlements are very different: clustered at the water’s edge, crowded and tin-roofed and painted bright blue and red. We land in a very different New Guinea, where Indonesians open the aircraft door and speak to us in Bahasa, and swarms of men assault us after customs hawking taxis and guest houses and restaurants. There are fair few Melanesians to be seen. We’re surrounded by hawkers and motor rickshaws and I turn to Peter, bewildered, who says only, "Welcome to Asia."
Our first chore when we get to town is the police permit--a
surat jalan--for travel to the interior, which means the highlands town of Wamena. The ‘interior’ more generally is one of the largest under-patrolled, under-mapped places in the world, but it’s the shadow half of PNG to us, a twin adopted out to Indonesians, raised very differently than its Australian sibling. In truth, the PNG sibling has had a mixed German-British-Australian fosterage, but most importantly, been 2
independent for the past fifteen years. Irian Jaya, or West Papua, had a brief placement with the Dutch, before a dubious vote in 1963 forced its transfer to the hands of Indonesia, who made a distant familial claim. So, rather than gain its political independence, the relatively un-developed and autonomous territory has been belatedly colonized and, on the one hand, immunized from drastic social change, while on the other, denied all its political and social integrity. Irian Jaya is an anachronistically traditional and subjugated state, where proud tribal leaders cower under the rifles of Javanese soldiers and police. To make things worse by far, the World Bank, in one of its least clever schemes, funded the transplantation of thousands of peasants from the overcrowded island of Java to points all over the province, flooding the voting rolls as they simply grabbed tracts of land from indigenous owners. Indeed, Irian Jaya is one of the last places in the world where the indigenes have no rights to their land. And as Melanesians, some of the world’s oldest gardeners, not to mention hunters and gatherers, land is everything. Thus, while tourists can trek through what are gloriously unspoiled rainforest and ancient garden plots, and be greeted by welcoming villagers who rarely see Europeans, they often mistake ‘authenticity’ for self-determination, because these people are especially vulnerable and un-self-determined. It’s also common to stumble across the fields and home of a poor Javanese family who’ve been plunked into the middle of some Melanesian community, without forewarning or agreement, not to mention rent.
We wanted to come anyway, to see a bit of New Guinea
taim bifo, in a more traditional state. Our police permit seems a paper tiger, however, as a civil servant checks a hand-scribbled list on the wall to confirm that tourists are not currently allowed in to Enaratoli, Ilaga or Ok Sibil, all places we’d like to visit; but for the time being are allowed to visit the Baliem Valley. During the nineties, the Baliem Valley came to represent the province’s one link to the outside world, sort of the showcase of West Papuan ecotourism. This was before the Asmat on the south coast was open to tourists (at this time it was more or less the private shopping mall of the Soehartos), and marked the end of a rough period in the Baliem when police were sent in to put down tribal fights with automatic rifles, and tourists were less than welcome. So we fly to Wamena, which is sort of the Mt. Hagen of West Papua. And it’s definitely the highlands when we disembark to see a ribbon of blue-3
violet mountains surrounding the airfield. The town is a grid of dirt roads sprawling out to villages in every direction, with cinderblock and corrugated iron roofing, some timber structures, and a few American-style Lincoln-log and colonial homes for the missionaries. Everywhere the roads are filled with Javanese, Moluccans and Timorese, running noodle stalls and shops of colorful Taiwanese goods. Here and there are American missionaries appear like a touring company of Grease--shirtwaist dresses and straw handbags, flips and barettes in their hair; and equally as bizarre are the minority of impressive, barefoot, indigenous Dani, wearing little more than grass skirts and penis gourds. If you took a group of Central African bushmen and placed them in downtown Manila, you might get a feel for the visual frisson of this mix. The Dani are walking around in traditional dress, going to and from the village and the central vegetable market with heads and backs piled with produce; the women and men walking separately, in their own groups. They appear almost oblivious to the arrival of all these people who’ve set up stalls and churches all over town and are conducting trade and proselytizing in business as usual. The Americans and Australians stride about in pressed khaki and calico, shopping for radios and spare parts before jumping back in their heavyweight four wheel drive vehicles. There is an almost total lack of social integration. Like backstage at a movie studio. It makes Hagen look like a World’s Fair of multiculturalism: Is it a small world after all?
A young Dani guide, Sam, attaches himself to us at the airport and, pretending not to know about the hotel we mention, steers us to a backpacker’s
losmen where he obviously gets a commission, because there is otherwise nothing redeeming about it at all. Instead, we turn on our heels and find the bright and cheery Anggrek losmen run by a jolly Javanese woman named Attie. Sam bows and scrapes to her, as he seems the usurper in light of the other young guides hanging about her establishment. And we soon learn that Sam is a loveable spiv whose flashpoint moods drive him to brandish a bushknife at another guide who dares to approach us. We also find he’s already booked himself with a Dutch couple, to whom he has sworn allegiance and a hatred of Australians, before double-booking with us and swearing hatred of the Dutch. After a ridiculous confrontation, during which he nods and smiles, apologizes for his ‘Ingriss’ and says things in 4
German the Dutch couple barely understand, everyone’s anger dissipates, and Peter and I come out the dubious winners, retaining the services of this resourceful and unstable young man.
The next morning we set out by bus trip north to the village of Jiwika, a few klicks north by the only road. Just as he might in Jakarta, the bus driver has preserved every surface in plastic slipcovers, filled the interior with air freshener, and placed a musical doll on the dashboard. We arrive and Sam pops us into the roadside La’uk Inn, then marches us to the
polisi where we fork over 2000 rupiah for no clear reason, before we take a stroll through the Jiwika market. This wide flat valley is much like the Wahgi around Hagen. It’s covered with gardens made familiar to me from John Gardner’s classic ethnographic film 'Dead Birds', shot during the 1963 Harvard-Peabody Expedition. Recent additions are the few tin roofs, a dirt road, cars and motorcycles, some western clothes and police checkpoints; but essentially the same place. Behind Jiwika’s market we climb a steep pass between two mountains to the traditional Hitigima salt wells, where men and women soak banana leaves in briny spring water, leave them to dry, then carry them home where they’re burned and their ashes become salty flavoring. The walk is exhausting, and when I stumble on rocks, an old man reaches out to graciously take my hand. Sam tries to shoo him away. What he really wants, it seems, is a smoke.
By the time we get back to the Inn we’re exhausted. Approaching, Peter and I see a Javanese soldier with automatic rifle standing in the doorway.
"Nancy!" Peter looks to me. Both of us remember how earlier, I’d written something like ‘Free West Papua’ in the guest book. But the soldier merely smiles, steps aside, and we enter.
In the afternoon we’re off the see a mummy, or ‘mummi’ as the roadside sign has it. This is a theme park village, very popular with tourists as the place where they pull out a smoked body and explain that it’s a ‘king’ who died 300 years ago. All over New Guinea people use words like ‘king’ and ‘chief’ to describe prominent men who have no such title in local language. Leader would be the appropriate word, as the highlands don’t have hereditary titles. This is the land of proto-entrepreneurs, of ‘big men’ who rise to power by chutzpah, charm, diplomacy and warfare skills,
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and who lead clansmen in important material exchanges and political decisions, but who by no means inherit a title or pass their position on.
"Take photos now," Sam instructs us. He’s busy batting away kids who approach for smokes and rupiah. "Yes, is very old, maybe hundreds years old."
Back at the Inn, Peter and I have a grand-mal fight as we slip into sleeping bags in one of the thin-walled rooms. He’s furious because I’ve let the old Dani man take my hand, and because I spend a little too much time talking to Sam. And because I haven’t given up everything in New York to be with him. I am, it’s true, being bad to everyone who cares. Then he pouts refuses to speak and more.
In the morning Sam hands me an English itinerary for a proposed walk north to his village of Bokondini:
To Bokondini Valley there do may can we take 7 days for Bokondini valley than next continue to small village the name Bilu--there/ one more again because a different Original Dance Culture Bokondini Valley and Wamena Baliem Valley here than because very interest Dance myself Bokondini Areas there: Thank you! Yours: Sam Payokwa Dani Guide.
Bokondini, Sam assures us, is "very traditional Dani culture." I’m very impressed and ask how he’s learned his English. "Tourists help me." He also shows me a small English-Japanese dictionary he’s carrying in his net bag, obviously anticipating the next wave. As we sit on the bench outside the Inn, there’s a big, convulsive, prolonged earthquake. The walls sway, the bench spills us over, and Peter plants his feet widely to keep from falling down. As my stomach pitches, the horizon actually shimmies before my eyes. "God hates Americans" Peter snarls.
Our way to Bokondini begins as an easy flat walk through a valley between Maigama and Lakwama, staying close to the Baliem River with sweet potato gardens all around us. No more tin roofs, it’s all thatch huts now. At one point Peter and I jump into a beautiful clear tributary under a log bridge, fully clothed. It’s more exhilarating than a flip from a high dive. When we emerge, soggy and weighed down, we meet a man named Eddie on the track who takes us to his home in
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Lakwama for the night. Inside his low thatch hut we sit by the light of the fire and accept gifts of greens and pumpkin to cook with our rice. Cooked, we share it out with Eddie and, among others, his cheerful toothless mother, whose breasts are like soft silken pouches, and whose forearms are covered in the black rubber washers that recollect Madonna circa 1985. These are scavenged from diesel and avgas drums dropped by missions and airlines on grass strips, where, once divested of washers, they evaporate and require replacement. Hence their ubiquity on arms across the island. The hut quickly fills with brothers, cousins and uncles, like someone’s just rung the dinner bell. Claustrophobia, smoke, exhaustion. We’ve reached a state of inert pleasure than can only come from this kind of trekking (and it’s a feeling I will soon become addicted to). So I exercise my second class status and fall asleep, leaving Peter to mimic and belly laugh with our kindhearted hosts. In the morning we take a group shot of the whole village standing before their spiked wooden gate, and Eddie presses a handwritten note with an illegible address for some relative in PNG. Peter and I will later spend hours trying to find the exact location of its barely discernable village name, before giving up.
The morning is filled with soft rises and descents, until we reach a steep climb that offers spectacular scenery everywhere. "
Waaaa," we say, hello, to what may be a hundred people along the way, some grabbing our hands and hugging Sam, whom they all know. The older women have missing fingers, chopped off at the first knuckle in mourning for a male relative, a practice that begins in childhood and continues throughout their lives. One woman reaches out a hand with no fingers whatsoever, but with surprising agility she grips my palm.
Sam wants to hurry us up, we’re laggards, and he moves us right through these lovely communities with well-kept gardens and circular thatch houses, little pigs dashing about under foot. The women wear woven hemp skirts that rest precariously on pinched grooves at their hips just above their pelvis, their backs covered with net bags slung from their forehead to keep warm. It’s cool up here, even as we’re sweating from the climb. Our packs are heavy and we’re struggling up and down two or three mountains a day now. Above a certain altitude the vertical mountain
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faces, sharp limestone walls, garden plots bounded by stone walls, and rock cairns---it’s all like Scotland or Wales. Verdant but rocky terrain.
Peter gets miffed if Sam talks too much to me, or when he takes my hand to assist at a garden fence. I grow silent, refusing to deal with him. It sometimes seems to me I make enemies of friends at the most dangerous moments. Like being driven through Umbria by a petulant businessman in a sports car and a need for speed. My problem is never knowing how to relent. We turn off a garden path to scale a two-metre high rock wall and reach a clearing. Here we stumble upon two old men sitting cross legged facing each other. They’re watching a frantic, scampering mouse that’s tied by cord to a stick planted between them. They barely take note of us, and appear to ignore Sam. "They want to know something about their enemies," Sam explains. The men look up expressionless, then smile lamely to our
nyak and la-uk hello’s. We walk to a point just out of earshot.
"Primitive!" Sam sneers. "Something against God!"
Throughout our walks, the Baliem Valley is an overwhelming sight. A wild river running through a twisting gorge that throws up spectacular views at every turn. Gardens as high and vertical as those in Simbu surround us like tall sloping walls. Here and there are strong vine bridges, and young kids scrambling across mere logs thrown across the raging whitewaters of the Baliem River. As accustomed as I’ve become to arse-grass in PNG, it’s also a very different thing to see men and women everywhere in traditional dress. The Dugum Dani men wear penis gourds and garlands of chicken feathers or flowers in their hair, sometimes with cowry or
tambu shell headbands and pigs’ tusks in their septums. Unmarried women wear full river reed skirts with one or two hemp nets bags (called noken) slung down their backs from their foreheads. Married women wear woven noken skirts draped across their hips so low they defy gravity, eventually carving deep shelves in the women’s thighs.
Finally, after three days, we reach Bokondini, which we’ve been able to see like a tin-roof jewel throughout the decent of the last mountain. Entering, the garden path widens to a narrow road. On both sides are square wooden homes raised on pilings, with small steps to their front doors. These doors, we notice, all have padlocks. Sam’s ‘very traditional Dani culture’ turns out to be a town
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that’s hosted American missionaries since 1947. They live in enormous Lincoln-log homes with well-manicured lawns, while their parishioners live in boxes with padlocked doors. But the men in Bokondini still wear enormous penis gourds--the most exaggerated penis gourds around. The land of the very-big-gourd, kingdom of size that matters. Roughly ten centimetres in diameter, and maybe twenty five in length, these gourds are secured with handsome wide red sashes around the men’s chests. Accessories are everything. Sam shows us how men avail the gourds to carry betelnut and smokes, plugging the tops with banana leaves and cuscus fur.
We take a wash in the river that night, slipping and laughing in the pitch black and freezing cold water. Then enjoy rice and noodles meal in Sam’s brother’s house. It’s a wooden shack, and the brother and wife kindly evacuate the one bed for us, and go sleep in the back room. The whole family is pouring over our Paradise magazines from Air Niugini, all their incredible photos of Papua New Guineans in uniforms, hard shoes, pressed trousers. Modernity that has arrived for their cousins across the border. We fall asleep to the plaintive sounds of men harmonizing outside nearby, in soft guttural tones that remind us of Mt. Hagen. It makes us feel at home.
Our three days in Bokondini are spent taking long walks, washing in mountain streams, and visiting villages nearby. We’re so used to speaking Pidgin to villagers who look exactly like this, that it’s a little disconcerting at first when these people just smile quizzically in response. In town, everyone seems to be wearing their padlock keys around their necks and t shirts from a place where
Kaboom Funtastic Go! and Disco Pinball mean something. We follow Sam to the secondary school on a knoll above town, where he behaves obsequiously in the face of brusque and patronizing Javanese teachers, one of them even pocketing his Japanese dictionary. They’re lolling about on the long veranda teasing a lame owl with a stick--a beautiful thing with a broken wing that’s bleeding from its mouth. We plead with them to buy it so we can kill it quickly, but they refuse. Laughing.
Let’s go, I suggest. But we’re here because Sam wants to introduce us to his sweetheart, who turns out to be one of the Indonesian teachers, not much friendlier to him than the rest. When we’re finally gone from the school, we notice Sam’s missing the cheap watch Peter gave him yesterday, and he shrugs, saying his sweetheart took it. That’s when we come across the enormous
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Lincoln-log two-storied home in a wide lake of manicured lawn, with a picnic table in the
haus win, a golden retriever under a tree, and a helicopter-hangar garage to one side. The sort of home you imagine Garth Brooks must own in a suburb of Nashville.
"Missionaries," Sam says.
We’re back sitting on the scrub grass outside Sam’s brother’s house when we start to hear a low rumbling. The sound of men singing. Chanting really, that monotone chorus you hear at singsings in highlands New Guinea. It builds as it grows closer. People marching? Running? Vaguely experienced in these things, we get up and start for cover, assuming trouble’s on the way. The posse’s riding into Tombstone. "No, no, come watch," Sam smiles.
And behind a tall hedge that lines the main road, a wave of wafting and bouncing cassowary feather head-dresses jogs into town in phalanxes three or four men wide, possibly two hundred men strong. It seems to go one for a long time, everyone carrying shields in one hand and an occasional spear in the other. We notice some carrying sticks, sugarcanes and long pandanus fruits. They move rhythmically, the sound frightening but awesome, as they bound along the main roadway and down to the open lawn before the big white church. We follow at a distance and sit on a rock wall, away from the proceedings.
The men are piling their instruments of war before them, on an invisible stage onto which a pastor now enters. He speaks to them in homiletic tones of Bahasa, which we don’t understand. Just then an expatriate woman and teenage girl walk up to a spot near us and nod hello. The girl has a curling-iron flip in her blond hair. We make small talk, "lovely day," "Should rain by tonight"--ridiculously inappropriate to the setting, the way I imagine Romans at the coliseums might have greeted each other as they took seats while lions shredded the Christian slaves below, and I notice they’re American, or Canadian. Somehow they understand us to be tourist trekkers, not worth prolonged socialization. They move off quickly, no doubt to their Lincoln-log. I have an image of life behind their gingham curtains, rocking chair with homemade cushions and the kids home schooled, headed to Bible College somewhere. These people would understand the feeling of
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besieged, and in those old westerns where the fort is surrounded by Apaches, these people alone would feel a special kind of empathy.
We try to settle our bill with Sam’s brother. Something for staying at the house, a little more for use of their cook stove. He quotes a price that’s so high, we’re not even carrying that much rupiah
. It’s the cost of a standard hotel in Jayapura. We’re crying, this is so funny. But in the end, we get away with paying more for two nights than we have in three nights at the losmen in Wamena. Fleeced by Christians! This is the vanguard of globalization.
Back in Wamena, and rested, we set out again, this time southward, down the Baliem Valley. First we take a bus to Sugopma, then walk on to our first stop, Kerima village. Here we meet Bud Hamilton, a middle aged American with a notepad and tape recorder. He’s conducting some research, he tells us. Part of a "long project on Irian Jaya" which also includes a photo essay and ethnographic film. A self-taught anthropologist, we presume (Peter calls him a ‘messer’), he’s conducting hours of interviews through his Javanese porters. But pleasant enough. We stay at on the floor of an Indonesian schoolteacher’s house after politely refusing a weird, slightly threatening invitation to stay with the police. Sam is relieved.
One night we stay in Iberoma, which is a lovely little village of few houses and friendly people. Around the fire at the schoolteacher’s house (again), Sam has an emotional discussion about the Free Papua target date for Independence, May 15 1992--three years away. Why doesn’t Australia help, or Europe? It’s America’s fault, he says, which is largely true. When the UN asked for a vote on whether the Irianese wanted to stay a Dutch protectorate or go to Indonesia, Indonesia flooded the island with landless Javanese peasants, the
transmigraci. Not surprisingly, the vote went to Indonesia in 1963, and despite appeals in the UN, American and the rest of the First World refused to touch the issue of rigged elections, assuming at the time that a policy of manifest destiny could not apply to non-western States.
Sam tells us some Austrian army trekkers have written a letter to him pledging to send guns in the mail, which doesn’t sound like a good idea. This is a dangerous time in Irian Jaya. Just after the
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Dilli massacre in East Timor, before the klieg lights of world attention have been thrown on Indonesia. This was a time when you can clearly hear the rat-tat-tat of automatic rifles coming from neighbouring valleys. We would ask why an army helicopter was flying in the distance and people would shrug, saying ‘tribal fight,’ suggesting this was the normal course of civil control, just an everyday pogrom. We’d pass a series of wooden huts, Bokondini-style, all of them empty and disused, and again people would shrug, explaining how the government had relocated a village only to have everyone run away.
Our whole trip becomes a lesson in contrasts. We’ve left PNG, where the Bougainville succession struggle is in full swing, and where the coffee market is in such a slump that villagers are leaving red cherry on the trees and banks are foreclosing on trade stores and PMV’s. Crime is up, especially in the highlands. And yet in Irian Jaya, we can walk freely anywhere at any time and be greeted with uninhibited excitement in every village. There’s no drinking (by law), no crime, and outside Wamena, virtually no cash economy. That’s the silver lining to a Police State. But nowhere in PNG have we seen the bowing and scraping to authority that we witness in Sam and others when they approach police checkpoints.
On our walk to Hetegima we pass Bud again, who’s all kitted out and sitting in swamp grass with a microphone to a young Dani woman. "Howdy," he says, head down, very busy. At Hetegima Sam prefers to take a bus, rather than walk back to Wamena, complaining of weakness. Driving through Hetegima, we notice armed soldiers everywhere, and then find ourselves following a flatbed filled with Dani men flanked by soldiers: they’re being taken to jail for tribal fighting.
Back in Wamena again, we visit the noodle shop owned by Sam Chandra, Wamena’s great tourism entrepreneur, purveyor of trips, guides, and good stories. A small, swaggering middle-aged Moluccan, born in Irian Jaya, he has a piece of the biggest hotel, knows every important person who’s ever passed through, and claims to have been the first man to organize tours to the Dugum Dani people. We are joined by a young Indonesian named Bob, who was raised in Jayapura and is not only an "anthropology student of Sam’s," but "believes in the integrity of the Dani people."
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Bob tells us he recently went around with Robert Gardner, who returned to Sioroba village after all these years to visit the subjects of his documentary
Dead Birds. In 1961 Gardner was part of the historic Harvard-Peabody Expedition to the Baliem Valley, along with the anthropologists Karl Heider and Jan Broekhuijse, the writer Peter Matthiesson (who wrote Under the Mountain Wall from it), and the young photographer Michael Rockefeller (whose photographs illustrate Heider’s book Gardens of War). He tells us Gardner is called ‘Pom’ here, and that he chartered a helicopter and lowered Pue, one of the subjects of his film, down by rope. Bob corresponds with Gardner, we’re told, who sends him $50 a month just for goodwill. He says Gardner is remorseful about the changes to Sioroba, and that he thanked Sam Chandra for all he’s done for Sioroba and the Dugum Dani. But he’s happy Sam has taught these people that they must keep their land, not sell it. Wow, we keep saying, wolfing down noodles. When we ask about what happens when the government wants to lay claim to Dani land, Bob shrugs, and says that when the government wants land the Dani have no choice in the matter. They’re happy to give it.
Peter clutches my shoulder, "Look!"—and I turn to see Bud sitting behind us. He’s like a phantom now, a djinn of some level of nostalgia or yearning from the outside looking in on Irian Jaya. It’s all mixed up with these rumors of Robert Gardner, romancing some West Papuan stone, conjuring images of pith helmets and Explorers Club lectures, and a memoir by some California socialite--
I married a Dani, recollecting Osa Johnson’s I married adventure, and all those Kodak sponsored naturalist films where the proboscis monkeys of Borneo are dubbed by Jimmie Durante. We go sit with Bud now, who tells us about personally pacifying the Asmat region at the behest of an Indonesian general. Now he tells us he’s done work gathering intelligence for the army in preventing tribal warfare while they work security for private mineral surveying companies. Been head of exploration, he says, for two years. Peter and I are intrigued for different reasons. Now Bud’s "doing a project on mountains around the world." One whiff of my skepticism ("Well there's a big topic") and he clams up. Peter changes the subject and gets him talking about Indonesia in general. This is one facet about Peter I admire, his ability to create a cozy forum for anyone. Bud waxes on about the government’s "genuine efforts to develop and assist Irian Jaya." Then he calls 13
the Chinese the Jews of Asia and justifies Indonesia’s historic pogrom against them as revenge for their monopolizing the economy. But he’s proud of Indonesia’s constitutional religious tolerance, so unique amongst Islamic nations, and runs through a list of national politicians he knows personally.
The next morning Sam’s a no-show, so we enlist a young Moluccan guide named Sam Motorbongs, a really nice kid with a professional demeanor and an off-sider named Daniel, who’s a Yali from the Star Mountains. We’re talking rates and itineraries in the courtyard, when Sam Payokwa shows up. This is when he pulls a bush knife and tries to take a piece of Sam Motorbongs. Daniel the Yali dashes off, no doubt thinking police crack-down. But Sam M. catches Sam P.’s wrist, wrenches it, and sends the latter off down the street waving his knife in the air.
We love Sam Motorbongs. Later that night, as we’re eating noodles in lovely Seima village beside the Baliem River, Sam M. asks us why in the world we ever went walking with Sam Payokwa anyway. Don’t we know he has a reputation for being...well....crazy? He even asked Attie, the manageress at the
losmen, and she told him we seemed to like the kid. Peter’s laughing about all the wrong turns and slight deceptions we’ve suffered at his hands, and Sam and Daniel reenact the bushknife incident, striking the pose of a raised arm caught by another’s fist, which becomes the sight gag of our trip. It’s so hilarious, Daniel falls backwards howling to remember it.
We walk along the Baliem from Seima up to Hitugi, where there are limestone outcroppings everywhere. Men stop to admire the Hagen net bag I carry, which is made from colorful acrylic yarns rather than the traditional bush fiber they use. We take a wash in a cool mountain stream, and emerge to find villagers washing pig innards just upstream from us, as they’re having a big
mumu for a Dani pastor. At one point we stand on a trail looking down to a funerary congregation. Men and women crying and keening, and a body is raised, seated knees to chest, covered with long cowry shell and fibre bands that the Dani men make. They’re just lighting the funeral pyre, and we want to move closer to watch, thinking they’ll surely chop a finger during this remarkably non-Christian ceremony. But Sam M tactfully suggests we won’t be welcome. 14
At night Peter and I devour every crossword and word game in two booklets he’s brought along. Sam M watches us avidly, then ask to give it a try, and winds up outdoing us on most of them. The next day we visit a waterfall in the midst of dense oily rainforest, where Peter appeases bush spirits with two cigarettes slipped into a crack on the mossy rock wall, before we slide behind the fall on the rock ledge, where we can look through the glittering wall of water but see nothing, crossing to the other side with lots of little kids in tow. Walking back we watch a little boy, no more than eight years old, dash duckfooted across a slippery log 40 meters above the raging Baliem River whitewaters. Breathtaking.
Stopping in Hitugi for the night, we chat as best we can with several men and kids in the empty schoolteacher’s house. An Angguruk man, very small, from Daniel’s place, shows up to sell bows and arrows. Once again Paradise magazine is the evening’s hit, along with our snapshots (our friend Tilly from Hagen is considered very buff, all the men oooo and aaaaaahhh at her smiling face). Fragments of Lower Dani language they try to teach me are retained for minute, and then completely forgotten. Men and women flock in for smokes, and they’re all welcome. We’re very popular with the magazine and photos. One small boy with paralysed legs must propel himself around by his arms, and people are neither solicitous nor indifferent to him. It’s like he’s not beyond the range of normal, nothing to think twice about. I really like the clucking and snickering sound of approval here, like in highlands PNG. One man keeps snapping his fingers on his front teeth as he looks at the girls of Paradise magazine. Our porter Daniel is now wearing two band-aids on his forehead because, he says, he has a headache.
Back in Wamena Sam Motorbongs organizes a surprise. He’s found Pue for me in the market. As a child, Pue starred in John Gardner’s now-classic
Dead Birds. The film chronicles the events leading to a clan war on the valley floor just outside Wamena, and much of the story is told through the eyes of young Pue, a typical Dugum Dani boy with sad eyes and a disarmingly wide smile. In Heider’s book, Gardens of War, they refer to him as Tukum, the swineherd. I saw the film first not long after it was made, and I remember calculating that the boy was exactly my own age. He was my New Guinea child counterpart. By 1989, he’s become a charming, soft-spoken adult with 15
that same enormous, impish grin. When he smiles, his mouth opens in a perfect crescent moon across his face, the ends turned up in a twist. Peter’s napping when Pue comes to the
losmen to find me, with Sam M. He says he’s in town to go to market for his nephew’s birthday coming up. Will I join them for the mumu next week? He smiles that record-breaking smile and my heart swells. He’s fit, lanky but muscular, wearing only a penis gourd, cowry necklace and ferns in his hair. My brush with celebrity. Unfortunately we’ll be gone next week. So sorry. Sam translates my English to Bahasa. Suddenly a minivan pulls up and eight Indonesians tumble out. They call Pue over and quickly surround him for a group photo, assembling themselves arm in arm, careful in all ways not to touch the subject. Cameras are handed back and forth, several shots taken, and then with equal haste, the group jumps back in the minivan and drives off, leaving Pue with a 100 rupiah note (barely ten cents). I ask if he minds the intrusion, and he shrugs, smiling serenely.
"More money for rice," Sam tells me.
The next day we hire a bus to visit Sioroba, Pue’s place, with Sam Chandra, the entrepreneur. (Yes, it does seem like everyone in Wamena is named Sam.) It’s quiet, everyone in the gardens. Pue finds us on the path and leads us in, smiling his winning smile and clasping his wrists behind his back. We see the limestone escarpment behind the village which inspired Matthiesson’s
Under the Mountain Wall. Alittle farther down the path we stop to admire the small compound of traditional huts the village has just sensibly constructed for visitors. And who do we see emerging from one of them but Bud! He waves. "Well hullo. Fancy meeting you here."
Sam Chandra turns to us."This man is anthropologist. Very interested in untouched culture."
Back in Melbourne, Peter’s twenty-one year old daughter has been living in his house, saving rent, while her Dad’s been in PNG, which she intends to continue living with him until she can buy her own place, because "renting is a waste of money." We unpack our backpacks all over the living room floor, with gifts for everyone and plenty of boring stories, as she rolls her eyes and leaves the room. By morning, she’s cleared away everything and explains she simply couldn’t live with the
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mess any longer. She catches her father bringing a cup of coffee to me in bad and says, "Don’t demean yourself Dad." Peter wants to sell the big anonymous suburban house with wood chip hedges, for something smaller. We go on a house-hunting spree through the inner city suburbs, looking at everything in and above Peter’s price range, and pretending money is no object. There are spectacular homes with pools and acres of gardens, and lovely renovated bungalows with period fixtures. Soon enough he’s bought a charming inner-city clapboard, with front verandah and a wild tropical garden out back (at least until his elderly father prunes it back to the patio stones one afternoon). On moving day, Peter’s mother arrives at the old house with a bucket and cleaning fluids, "I can’t wait to get behind that refrigerator." Both parents have made it known they’re frightened I’m a ‘feral’—which is Australian for hippie. And by now Lara isn’t talking to me. This becomes uncomfortable in the new house, where I develop chronic indigestion, and find my bottle of Mylanta periodically thrown into the rubbish. The ex-wife calls to abuse me because I’m not sympathetic to her daughter, and when I inappropriately reply that the daughter needs to learn a little sympathy herself, she says I don’t need to tell her about sympathy, she knows sympathy because she works as a hotline counselor and talks people out of suicide on a regular basis. Peter is chuckling at all this. The neighbor woman comes over to complain about the muezzin call to prayer, and the fact that people who migrate to this country don’t even try to become Australian any more. I tell her I find the sound beautiful, and then later tell Peter I’m insulted anyone thinks they can spill bigotry in my lap like that. He says I jyst provoke situations with my ‘liberal idea.’ Which means it’s well past time for me to go.
So I decide to head back to PNG the way we came, through Irian Jaya. My first stop is Wamena, where I go for noodles at Sam Chandra’s shop. He is gracious as usual and suggests a couple of itineraries to extreme places. This time I want to walk out farther, someplace different. Then he tells me about a Hong Kong feature film called
Stone Age Warrior which shot a segment here last year. Sam was asked to round up hundreds of Dugum Dani extras and kit them out with props. The prices varied for a man with a pig on his shoulder and a woman with a net bag of sweet potato, that sort of thing. 17
"Who set the price?"
"The Dani did!"
There was some confusion in the big battle scene, even though the production crew supplied these men with blunted spears and arrows. They failed to mix the clans on both sides, and so the sides coalesced into old enemies, and when the first arrows fell, all hell broke loose. The Chinese loved it and just kept rolling.
Sam laughs. "No dead. Just wounded."
Sam Chandra was born "on this island" in 1939 and came to Wamena in 1977, where he has since become a founding father of Dani tourism. A small slight man, he exudes self-confidence and a kind of arrogant opportunism that tells you he is not interested in small fry or compromise. As a woman, I sense he’s a player.
Sam’s first job in Wamena was managing the old Baliem Cottages Hotel, the frontier town’s first hotel. In 1978 an American tourist showed him the photo essay, ‘Gardens of War’, compiled by Karl Heider from the Harvard Peabody expedition, and asked Sam where he might find Pue, the swineherd. This is when Sam twigged to the industry potential in presenting the Dani people as an ‘ethnographic’ destination. They asked a young man in town where he might find this Pue, showing him the book’s photos, and the man told him,
"I’m Pue."
At this point the tourist said, "Okay then: Smile" and Pue broke open his split-melon smile, at which the tourist said, "Yep, you’re Pue, how do ya do?"
Pue then brought him to Weninibaga Village to meet Weaklekek, one of the original warriors of Gardner’s film, and one of the few surviving stars from that adult generation. Sam says he then helped the Sioroba people to construct separate cottages for visiting tourists, because Pue wouldn’t have been able to accomplish it on his own. "It is what I can do for the people, you see." He performs a distinctive gesture of pushing air with his hands, and jerking his head, which Tony so masterfully imitated just a couple of days ago.
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Now I want him to help me video interviews with a couple of Dani who might still be around from Gardner’s
Dead Birds. I plan to submit this to PNG television station, EMTV, and the idea so appeals to Sam’s vanity that I’m permitted an audience in his living room, behind the noodle shop, where his wife prepares us a pot of tea. There’s an old TV, a teletype machine, a big plush sofa, chrome tables and silky Chinese lampshades. Sam is ethnically Timorese, which technically is part of the occupying Indonesian culture, although this is also the dawn of the East Timorese struggle for Independence. The next morning Sam takes me out to interview Pue, who is his always-charming and hugely-grinning self. Yes of course he remembers me from before, Sam assures me he’s saying, although he adds, "It is possible he does not."
Pue chats on about
Dead Birds, his memories of the expedition when they first arrived, everyone’s complete ignorance of what the cameras were for, and the goofy things these strangers appeared to be doing. He also admits to never having seen Gardner’s film, and never going to the picture house in Wamena, where the posters outside advertise runs of Hindi language and Hong Kong films. He seems utterly unconcerned with what the rest of the world has to offer, as he sits chewing a piece of ginger roots and wearing an especially fetching red whit and blue knit cap with sprigs of fern over each ear. A vehicle would be nice, but not necessary. If his kids want to go to school, he’s happy to let them go. But really the tourist windfall represents more pigs, more wives for sons, more smokes and more packaged noodles when they like.
We’re sitting in the main Sioroba compound, which is smaller than a soccer field but big enough to include a central sing-sing ground, banked by a long pig sty, a small men’s house, and on the other side, a long low thatch house for women and children. On a plank bench under a thatched eave, Pue sits next to another gent, an older man, who is silent and yet who grins so wide and warmly that I cannot help but adore him. Still, it’s Pue who charms me: his smile that seems to run earlobe to earlobe with slight curls at the end of his lips, his red, yellow and black woven cap, and a Gold’s gym body wearing nothing more than a small penis gourd that’s secured by twine around his waist. I’ve set up my tripod and am squatting behind it as he talks softly, sometimes giggling when he makes a point. Sam is also on his haunches, translating so imperfectly that I’ve
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given up getting precise information. But it’s relaxed and, for me, so gratifying to be let into this man’s circle for a minute.
A Dutch tour group arrives. They are five middle aged safari-suited couple with videocameras, and now Pue and two others leap into action. With expert deftness, as now a phalanx of handheld videocameras roll, they rouse a small pig from the pigsty; chase it down and kill it with bow and arrow; seer its skin on the fire that’s heating stones for a
mumu; and readies the pit with banana leaves and greens, to roast the pig. If everywhere else in this province people have just begun to entertain tourists, Pue and his mob clearly have the business down pat. There’s more to it than this, though, because, if there’s a poignancy to the performance, it’s also encouraging to me. Pue’s just finished telling me how good their remote life still is, how much autonomy they’ve been able to maintain from the occupying culture (which is just down the road in all it’s horns, blinking lights, megaphoned music and noddle stalls). I know in my heart that as long as the outside world remains interested in Wamena, the Dani will be able to live as they please, and as soon as the klieg lights go off, the importation of transmigraci, shops, missionaries and all the agents of change will be stepped up. That includes unregulated mining interests and lawless resource exploitation on an international scale. In West Irian, even more than in PNG, tourists are not the enemy; indeed, they are the closest thing to salvation of traditional cultural systems. It impresses me that Pue’s interactions with these exotic, if curious, Dutch tourists are as gracious and yet impersonal as they are.
The next day Sam takes me to Jiwika to meet Weaklekek, now a very old man. He’s hanging out in a neighboring hamlet called Wenenenaga where the men are having a pig kill to mark the cleaning of their holy objects normally hidden in the men’s house. Today they’ll eat only the fat from the seven slaughtered pigs, tomorrow they’ll eat the meat. The women remain inside a long pigsty that flanks the compound, eating greasy fat slabs they’ve been given to distribute amongst themselves and the kids. Forty or so men sit in the central clearing around the mound of recently disinterred
mumu stones. Weaklekek invites Sam and I to sit with him, just at edge of the group, where he explains that this occurs pretty regularly, the last one being two years ago at a marriage 20
ceremony. He is pleased I have heard of him, and shakes my hand firmly. I’m guessing he’s seventy something years old now. If his skin is slack, he still has all his hair, white now, and ringed with a garland of ferns. His lanky frame is still muscular, and certainly agile enough to sit cross-legged in the dirt for hours. He’s talkative and friendly throughout the entire the three hours from the opening of the
mumu oven through the distribution and consumption of pork, and a light rain shower that comes at the end. We are kindly included in it all.
His adult son, Kapuke, walks two or three kilometres home to get the old photos of Weaklekek and his wife taken by Eliot Elisofon in 1961. There’s an 8x10" black and white, brown and curled at the edges, but kept precious in manila folder, showing his first wife as young woman. She’s maybe twenty five, a very handsome Dani woman, squatting by a sweet potato mound with digging stick in one three-fingered hand, and six-inch long dreadlocks falling evenly around her face. It’s a lovely shot, and she’s smiling a little at the photographer.
Weaklekek strikes his chest with an open hand, bends forward to touch her with his finger, and sits back, sighing. He loved her very much, he says to Sam, who translates. He misses her still. She died in childbirth not long after this shot.
There’s a medium long shot of Weaklekek himself standing on a hill, spear in one hand. The handsome young warrior looks to the horizon. Weaklekek was one of the first men to greet Heider and Gardner when they came scouting for a base camp location for the expedition. He greeted what he considered living ghosts and led them to Dugum, close by here, to live. Only when the white men ate the pig offered them did the Dani realize these were real men. (This is a much quicker assessment that was made in Hagen, when the first white men showed up there; Hagen women say they only knew the white men were men, not ghosts, when they dropped their trousers.) Sam Chandra waits through whole chapters of talk before turning to me with, "Yes, he says he does remember Karl Heider too."
There’s another photo of Weaklekek in
Gardens of War, from the back, where his body is tipped to the left, left hand out from the waist, and right hand holding a bundle of arrows. He’s in battle, looking off to the left and exemplifying the Adonis-like beauty of so many of these lean 21
athletic men. I describe this picture to Weaklekek now, telling him he was so handsome then, and when I look to Sam his eyes squint disapproval under his baby blue golf cap. This is how Peter Matthiessen described Weaklekek:
Weaklekek was darker than most Dani, a dark brown which looked black, and the blackness of his naked body was set off by the white symmetries of his snail-shell bib. He looked taller than his five feet and a half, lean and cat-muscled, with narrow shoulders and flat narrow hips. At rest on the long spear, he gave an impression of indolent grace, a grace by no means gentle but rather a kind of coiling which permitted him to move quickly from a still position.1
1
Matthiessen, Peter 1987[1967]. Under the Mountain Wall, A chronicle of two seasons in Stone Age New Guinea, New York: Penguin Books, p.6.
Two peers of Weaklekek, Uap Kosi and Husak Kosi, come over to listen and add reminiscences as they merrily peer through the viewfinder of my video camera. Kapuke tells us his father now has three wives, but that one just ran off with another man and they’re waiting for him to pay compensation of ten pigs. Weaklekek puts the photos away carefully and says they’ll be passed to his son when he dies. He brightens remembering both Karl and Pom (which is what they call Gardner), and he tells us Karl used to bandage people’s spear wounds during battle and in general smile a lot during his stay. Kapuke, the son, gave Pom a pig kill when Pom returned a year ago. I want to know if it’s true Gardner raised Pue by a rope from a helicopter at that, and Weaklekek nods, either imagining it or confirming it, I can’t tell.
The men around us are remarkably unconcerned with my attentions to Weaklekek. They sit on their haunches or cross legged, eating the strips of fat cut from sides of pig belly, as the main host distributes these to each small cluster of men. Many of them have one or two fingers chopped off, which was something I thought only women experienced. It’s a mourning practice once common throughout the New Guinea highlands. Weaklekek poignantly asks, 'Where are Karl and Pom today? Will I see them again before they die?'
Sam translates the question for me with a knowing grin, as if to say, ‘Isn’t that quaint?'
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Now it begins to rain and we crowd into one of the long women's houses which they share with the pigs. Inside, there are three evenly spaced fireplaces between posts supporting the low thatch. It’s too low to stand, and we crawl in by hands and knees. Smoky, warm and rank, this is nevertheless the most comfortable place around. It’s cozy in here with the rain pelting down outside, and the men telling kind-hearted stories about the white men who once lived amongst them. They also brag about tribal fights back then, about conquests and who really scored that injury or not; all this Sam only sketchily translates. I consider thumping him for the negligence, but figure I don’t need to make a scene. When the rain subsides we can hear other men, those who’ve moved into the men’s house across the compound, chanting in low monotonous tones. They must be replacing the sacred objects now. Those men around me move on to explain, laughing, that at the time of the Harvard-Peabody expedition they had no knowledge of cameras at all, they had no idea their pictures were being taken by the movie camera and Pom never really explained it to them as such. We were such dolts! they all laugh.
When we move to leave, everyone thanks Sam profusely, calling him ‘Bapu,’ for remembering them and bringing me to see them. They want him to bring more tourists here to Jiwika rather than Soiroba and Dugum. Thank your father for showing his photos, I tell Kapuke, who pulls out the image of Weaklekek’s first wife once again, and we both glance again at the woman who still breaks his father’s heart.
I have vaguely remembered Matthiessen’s description of Weaklekek in his book, but it’s only later, going through it again, that I read again his characterization of his Weaklekek’s first wife:
Except when in the act of love, in wayside grass or the night darkness of the ebeai, a man and wife are entirely undemonstrative; this is prudishness, not lack of warmth. Weaklekek and Lakaloklek are no exception. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that Weaklekek has other wives, he is plainly closest to Lakaloklek. Lakaloklek herself, a slim, spirited woman with a pretty, elfin face, took upon herself the disapproval of the community by rishing to Weaklekek immediately after the death of her first husband: her name means "She Who Would Not Wait."
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More than any other man and wife in the southern Kurelu, they seem a pair. There is an air of strong communion when they are together, of wild and unarticulated tenderness. 2
2 Ibid, p.41.
Sam and I stand together at the open gate to his small noodle shop one night, darkness everywhere in this frontier town with so little electricity. Behind us it’s all Indonesians under the fluorescent lights and young Timorese and Dani kids serving them. But then I begin to hear the unmistakable sound of American English. "We’ll walk you back if you like."
I turn to find a tall handsome Indonesian, standing with a shorter man, and he’s smiling warmly. He’s an Indonesian photographer who spent his teens in New York and whose English, his slang, even his popular cultural references, are entirely my own. "Hi, I’m Tara." Instantly, I have a crush on this man. Tara and Tony, his photo assistant, walk me back to Anggrek Losmen and tell me they’re traveling to Kosarek in the Star Mountains tomorrow, on a scheduled MAF flight that Sam has just been pitching to me as an expensive charter. That Sam, we laugh. Always hustling. Sure, I can come along. Why not? Tara has an advertising gig for one of the airlines, and is traveling all over the country for different shots. I want to walk on my own from Kosarek to Angguruk, and then fly back to Wamena from there.
When I get to the MAF hangar the next day they say they want to put a training pilot on the flight, and bump me. It’s only a six-seater Cessna. I am reconciled to this until Tara suggests he drop his guide and bring me instead. Sam Chandra is there and throws a wobbly because the guide is his, and he’ll lose the commission; he aggressively suggests I go somewhere else with a guide. Tara looks at him from his towering height. "No, I don’t think so." Then the pilot relents, they drop the trainee, and I jump aboard after all. I am really beginning to like this Tara.
The shocking thing about Kosarek is that, so far away and perched on a spectacularly narrow ridge top, it does have a grass strip, a loony missionary couple in residence, and kids who constantly reach out for smokes. When we arrive, the plane taxis up the steep gradient to turn around for take-off (over a sheer cliff), and two toe-headed mission kids come running up with a
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letter for the pilot. Their folks have a nice wooden home right by the strip, and there’s a visiting missionary cabin up the hill from the strip where we can stay (for a price). Kids come from everywhere now, hands outstretched. "Smoke! Smoke!" Everyone wants a cigarette! It’s like entering a spa with one bag of jellybeans, everybody scrambles for a Winfield Blue. Clusters of teenage girls in short reed skirts have been standing around laughing at me now for what seems hours.
Okay, but I’m not that funny. Now I’m not even sure if I like the place.
Fortunately my attitude improves. The Yali men wear dog bones in their septums and a few cockatoo and cassowary feathers in their hair--but accessories are really played down in favor of the main article: tens of rattan hoops around their waist, widening like an inverted cone down to their knees, and a long thin penis gourd that is held by a cord at forty-five degree from their chest, which keeps the hoops from spilling to the ground. One of the couture lines of New Guinea. The Vivienne Westwood of West Irian. Inside our cabin, an old man squats on his haunches, his cone of hoops hiked up around his hips and his yard-long skinny penis gourd resting on his shoulder. He’s poring over my photos of PNG, nodding and smiling. Now I know how they deal with bodily functions.
One of the kids steals one of the shots and never brings it back. Some go after him at first but then give up. Its been raining all day and videotaping is out. There are higher mountain ranges all around us with villages perched on their ridges, and we’re dying to walk to them. We hear singing from one of them. The clouds come in and sit in the valley beyond our ridge, so that in the afternoon it looks like you might walk off the grass onto a downy white carpet to reach the vertical gardens on the mountainside just across. A Biak, north coast island, man is headmaster at the school. We go visit him so Tara can take some handsome shots of this man in his crisp batik shirt sitting on a school desk. Then he tells us about the local courtship custom which brings girls and boys together from various villages for a night of singing that winds up in one big orgy. I dunno. Coastal people love to go on about highland barbarisms.
Tony, the assistant, once worked for Dea Suderman, the Japanese ethnographic filmmaker, who’s done a few 16mm films of Irian Jaya for Japanese TV. At one time, Tony claims, he and a pre
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production crew canoed the rivers north of Wamena, closer to Jayapura, searching for a mythical ‘Amazon’ tribe said to abduct men for insemination and then kill their male babies. (Perhaps this is one of men’s universal fears because it is just so sensible.) They found traces of broken camps, and huts where they once lived, Tony says. But now the woman are assimilated into other tribes. Of course Tara and Tony are old hands at Amazonia, they say, because they’re married to matriarchal women from South Sumatra. And they love to be bossed around. I’ve fallen through the looking glass to the inverse of an Aussie male fantasy. It’s heaven. At night we eat by candlelight while a sea or dirty noses are pressed against the louvered window panes. Even when we unroll our bags to sleep, hanging towels over the glass, we see eyes peering in around the cracks.
The next day we meet the Summer Institute of Linguistic Bible translation people, two Germans and their kids, plus an Australian woman--all very pleasant. They say this begging for smokes is fairly recent, since last year when the first backpackers walked through. I dare not ask whether they smoke, themselves. Most Kosarek are serious bush tobacco smokers anyway. Now they’re also nicotine freaks. We visit Walsatek, a small hamlet across the valley on another steep ridgetop, where Tara and Tony take lots of shots and views are breathtaking, literally. The ridge is so narrow that the village is barely one footpath wide, all the huts spilling off down the sides.
In the evening Tara plays someone's guitar, all of us sitting around at the timber table in the cabin. There’s Tara, Tony, Olfiet their guide, Judas the porter (whose name shall serve him well), a young Kosarek boy, and the old man from yesterday who’s already been a portrait model several times over. Tara sings Indonesian pop songs, Paul Simon, James Taylor, and Tracy Chapman in a strong voice, under pounding rain, by candlelight. I am always so impressed when people know all the lyrics. The mood is golden. I don’t miss anyone of anything, and my heart swells for being so content. I look over at the young boy who reaches his hand to me. "Smoke."
The next day we walk to Welarek where Tony organizes handsome young men in traditional dress to sit for portraits. There are reflectors and fill in flashes and all manner of interesting gadgets for these people who’ve barely seen cameras before. One man is most beautiful and patient as Tony fusses and tilts him like a bored supermodel.
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"Sau wali," Tony says in local language--Excellent. But after about fifteen minutes he looks at the nearly useless paper notes, plus the set-up Polaroid he’s been handed, figures he’s been cheated and storms off. No smokes.
The next night we’re all asleep when Tony, Tara and Olfiet wake to hear footsteps and noises in the cook room behind the house. They’re all in one room and, in deference to Olfiet who’s a Timorese kid with a gold cross, I’m in another. But they come wake me now and insist I bring my bag in with them. It could be the disgruntled Welarek model, I say, and Tara says, "More likely his agent."
In the morning Tara finds dog fur where a wall plank’s been broken. "I just hope it’s that three-legged cur who could use a good meal."
We walk an hour or more to Nohomas village, and as we come round the final bend in a path hugging the mountainside, we spot a terrifying mob on the ridge above us--forty or more men in full clay-paint and hoops and pig tusk necklaces and nose ornaments, yodeling, jumping up and down with their spears. Ambushed again! They’re wearing tall cassowary feathers and their hoops running from chest to knee, which make them look like militant Michelene men. Someone has sent word that two photographers want to take their picture, and the whole village has dressed in fighting attire, and even made a
mumu of sweet potato for us.
When we crest the ridge we see seventy or eighty men and women dancing and whooping in a circle, men in the centre chanting and stomping, running counterclockwise; women on the perimeter, holding their swaying breasts, running clockwise, and chanting at full volume. We’re welcomed by an older man who now lights the
mumu fire. Our stash of cut tobacco goes to this man to distribute, even as the kids persist in begging for smokes. The dancing is so impressive and enthusiastic, at one point Tara with his camera lies on the ground in the center of the circle as everyone runs over him. We are all as if balanced on a long narrow ridge top with 360 degree views of surrounding valleys.
As the
singsing dies down we can hear faint but harmonious singing across the valley, where men are relaxing after clearing a garden. They’re singing for themselves, without even trying to 27
please us. The dancing stops, and everyone sits in three rows for a group portrait, which is all the more like a school picture when Tara sets a timer and tries unsuccessfully several times to run from camera to front row center, and people keep spilling out in infectious laughter. Finally, the rains come. All these rakish Yali men are frantic for shelter, protecting their attire, and man, woman and child race scatter for the space under the eaves of their circular thatch houses, with kids sliding down the suddenly muddy paths and screaming with silliness. We wait and watch, and a fog slips over the ridge like a sleeve, erasing all the surrounding mountains.
Paulius, a young Yali, joins us for dinner and explains that knowledge, rather than wealth, is what makes a man important here. Nowadays that includes traditional knowledge as well as knowledge of the Indonesian language and bureaucracy. Also, now that things have opened up with pacification in the past ten years, men can seek wives from distant places. If a Yali marries a Dani woman, from the valley surrounding Wamena, he will move down there rather than vice versa. Paulius himself plans to go with another kid to Angguruk, a mission station in the star mountains here, for some aid post training and, if possible, further medical training in Wamena. He hasn’t yet got enough pigs for a wife, even though, he clams, most men marry at 16 here, and girls by 14. Paulius explains that missionaries first brought chits for buying basic goods at their stores some thirty years ago. Today the Yali are firmly locked into the cash economy, if only for a few items: salt, sugar, smokes, rice.
Tony does a great Sam Chandra imitation, stroking his chin, strutting, tipping his golf hat. Then he tells a story about an old man who accompanied us from Nohomas today, stroking his balls all the way, then bending to inspect a bit of pig dung on the path; apparently, Tony adds, he helped Olfiet make the potato fritters tonight.
Two days later the Nohomas people show up early, all dressed for a photo shoot. Women with white clay dots and red noses, men with spears and cuscus and cassowary and lesser bird of paradise feathers in their hair. Paulius mediates, Tony and Olfiet negotiate, and it’s decided each person will get roughly two dollars for the morning's posing. Olfiet’s a smooth and pretty Timorese boy who wears shockingly short shorts and smokes incessantly. He argues that the potential
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benefits in tourism call for their coming down to fifty cents a day, but Tara agrees to the first rate. The airline’s paying anyway. Tara's first polaroids are respectfully handed to everyone sitting on the grass, as Tara sets up his tripod and reflectors facing the side wall. Groups of two, four, sometimes one, stand, kneel and sit, one after another, on a little proscenium of banana leaves. Very stagy, interesting shots. No false candids. Really simple, frank poses. A couple of unexpectedly cheesecake shots of young girls sitting side-saddle looking over their shoulders. One favorite model is Tara's greatest and giggliest admirer, a young girl named Marta, and she poses for him against the a red door inside the house, a reflector to bounce the light off the wall and warm her skin.
Tara takes some Mapplethorpe-esque shots of me and the old man with the three legged dog, back to back, medium close. He’s in hoops and penis gourd, I’m in a sarong up to my armpits. The old man turns around and snuggles his nose into my hair and everyone laughs.
It’s the day before I’m supposed to go off on my own to Angguruk and I’m scared of being caught in the rain, cold and miserable. It is now perfectly clear to me that I am not just overdue with my period, but worse. When I confess this to Tony and Tara, we all decide my long walk shall become Mission Miscarriage. Rain will now be an asset, and I can slip footholds and tumble down any number of mountains. The old man wants to be a porter, but Paulius and Judas have told him he’s not needed, and he’s become very huffy. Tara wants to shoot him again but he turns on his heel saying he’s not being paid enough, and leaves heads for home in Nohomas. And now the rain comes. We sit inside chilled, as a downfall hammers the roof and walls all around, and a young boy reaches through the window for a cigarette.
I say goodbye to Tony and Tara. The MAF plane flies them back to Wamena and the next leg of their photo trip. I’ll miss them both, their stupid hand puppets, lighting farts and burping armpits included. Tony’s brilliant imitations, even the one he’s doing one of me in the cessna as they taxi away. The SIL man comes out with mail for the pilot, waves the two off, and pulls a puckering face when Tara bends to kiss my cheek.
Olfiet is coming with me to Aggurruk, as is Judas, the unsmiling porter. The old man comes along after all, too. He and his ridiculously long penis gourd and his three legged runt of a dog.
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What is to me the hardest of all possible treks is a walk in the park for this guy. We reach Sarkasi this first afternoon, on top of the next mountain away. The walk is unbelievably steep and the last leg almost kills me. I stop for a breather every few minutes, sucking oxygen, while the porters ask for a smoke. The old man never smiles. Olfiet organizes camp in a lovely timber home filled with women at the doorway and men in the front room. It’s the Yali pastor’s home. A blue-eyed albino baby gurgles in one woman’s arms. We’re only two hours from Kosarek and I’m nearly dead, already missing Tony and Tara. Kids crowding in on me, in my face, and I’m exhausted trying to entertain them on my own. I’ve given away all my pens. We’re at the highest point in this narrow slanted strip of a village. It’s such a magnificent view on top of this ridge, with two--faintly three--mountain ranges below us, crosscut by layers of dense white cloud. Tall poinsettias and croton bushed surround the house.
Next day we reach Delambela, another beautiful hilltop village. We climb and climb, then descend forever through dense rainforest, hacking at vines or sliding down logs. The main mountain we’ve scaled is Mt. Timike. Here and there the garden paths give way to raw wet bush and getting a grip is hard. My left leg has gone sore from all the steep descents, but I find some solace from discovering that the tap-tap-tapping on my left shoulder is not, as I imagine and keep checking, the old man trying to get my attention, but the tip of his penis gourd as he descends too closely behind me.
We’re now squatting on the dirt floor of the church with crowds of people at each door and peeping through the wooden slats around the sides. It’s a far walk to the river, so Olfiet, Paulius and the porters (the original two having mysteriously become four) borrow many pots for water to save trips, and I go down with them for a wash. But then they all stop for a smoke in the men's house, or honai, of a settlement just below, leaving me barefoot and useless outside for an hour. Welcome to the double standard, girl. My leg has seized up and I’m pissed off, so three little girls show me down to the river by shortcut. We all jump in together, laughing, and they lather up with my soap, reaching under our shorts and laplaps. I wish there were a province filled exclusively with New Guinea women, all as gracious and cheerful as they are here and now. They would have photos
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of their male relatives dressed in those wonderful penis gourds and cassowary head-dresses, but would explain ruefully how they’ve moved away or been killed off, not one of them to found anymore.
By late afternoon everyone’s come back from the gardens and crowded in to see the circus we represent. Thirty people watch as I write the diary note that’s behind this. Olfiet has boiled water to put hot towel compresses around my left calf, which I consider amputating were it not for the mess. Most of the walk today has been in cloud, but for a while we climbed under the forest canopy of one mountainside, which was cool and quiet. It was covered with moss and surface roots, lawyer and liana vines across our path. When we stopped for lunch in a clearing several men out hunting wandered through our party and sat for a smoke. One had some cooked sweet potatoes which we bought off him and shared around. I find the walking so tough that I have to remember to stop and look around to enjoy it, which often irritates my companions. These guys race up killer steep and slippery slopes in the drizzling rain. The scrawny three legged dog pities me, I can tell. We’re pressing ourselves to reach Angguruk by Monday, because an MAF flight comes in Tuesday and can get me to Wamena. Where I shall take a bath.
And now at this summit the clouds lift to reveal a brilliant panoramic view, just as the sun sets into deep violet. Our camp is in one cozy corner of a big empty church. After dinner the kids--tens of them--come in and sit down with candles in the floor before them. It’s blackness all around, their little faces bending into a pool of amber light. As a young boy strums a ukelele, they sing a couple of local language songs in perfect harmony, and then the Papua New Guinea anthem memorized from PNG radio. This almost makes me cry. Until Paulius, the party animal, starts up on a guitar he’s borrowed, strumming his own discordant background noise. We all stop to listen to him sing a Kosarek song. But then as the kids began to sing a 'Free Papua' song, he persists in his crude strumming against their soft
acapella voices.
"Olfiet, can you get him to stop?"
"Do you want the guitar?"
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We set out from Delambela just after nine this morning while it’s still raining. Olfiet stops someone strolling by with a live chicken, and buys it, then ties feet together and carries it under his arms. My leg hurts very much now that it’s all downhill, and I’m afraid to stop, for fear of not starting again, so by midday, I’m overjoyed that we’ve hit a flat walk through a valley. But then we climb again and, god bless these guys, they slow down for my sake. This feels like an enormous accomplishment, getting most of the troop to slow down, and now I’m enjoying it so much more. Lovely moments listening to nearby birds of paradise, and stopping to greet people coming down from their gardens. The porters are all predictably forty-five minutes to an hour ahead, so they get long breaks sitting and smoking as they wait for us--- and jump up to begin as we arrive.
At one point we reach a vine bridge crossing a narrow, fast running river and we see on the other side, obscured by the bush, a family camped on the hillside mulching, milking and sedimenting flour from felled sago palms. Making sago flour. It’s a familiar sight in PNG and makes me feel at home for the moment.
Olfiet calculated the day's walk to be four to five hours, and it’s been eight, with only a short pause for a lunch of bananas, peanut butter and cigarettes. Paulius has become disagreeable to Olfiet today, sick of being bossed around by the Indonesian. He occasionally offers a wanky to me though. "Bad man I think," he shakes his head.
One day, after we’ve probably climbed and descended four mountains, Olfiet spots our destination--the Membaham aid post, up near the summit of the next mountain as we stand in a valley clearing. "Just up there."
But it’s a cruel illusion that we’re anywhere near. We climb endlessly, and Olfiet stops every ten or fifteen minutes to point to the apparition above. Three hours later and very near tears, I stumble to the aid post door, nearly mad from the pain in my left leg. We camp in the aid post under tattered posters of medical lexicons and in the loving care of a kind woman who apparently is married to the absent aid post worker. The five room building is perched on a small cliffside landing, it’s back to the bush, with a lovely waterfall spilling down only a few paces away. I hobble
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to the far side of the waterfall to wash before my legs seize up, then return just as Olfiet’s gotten hot compresses and tea ready.
There’s no real pattern to how these places receive tourists. Olfiet’s brought tourists here before, and they’re as kind as can be. Delambela, on the other hand, would be more remote, and they reacted a little coolly when we first arrived. But then, we’re walking through areas where people still fear their neighbors and live on ridge tops for a reason. I have recurrent dreams of falling off a mountainside. The kind of dreams where you’re aware you’re dreaming but you can’t help falling anyway, which is like a juggernaut that gains momentum and yet never ends.
The next day, just before finally descending into Angguruk, we all rest at a precipice with a 270 degree view of the valley below. It’s a windy extreme place to sit, and it doesn’t take much to imagine being blown off. This is where the porters--at Paulius' nod--go on strike. They want a full day’s pay for the first and last days, both half days, and for a fourth man who attached himself to us along the way. I sit silent as Olfiet and Paulius argue in Indonesian and the porters, Judas scowling, all look on. The charming old man now becomes snarly in his claims of having personally helped me over every mountaintop. I tell Olfiet to tell him to stuff it, he wasn’t asked to come in the first place. He’s come along on an errand to Angguruk anyway, I know, and got free meals along the way.
Our sullen mob now descends into town. We walk to the hospital, which treats people from villages all over the region, with a doctor who is Timorese, like Olfiet. But I dislike him instantly. With a gang of snotty assistants he blithely reports that tomorrow's plane will fly from here to Welarek to pick up passengers, making it full for the leg too Wamena. Too bad, they all shrug. But Friday (four days from now) a tourist charter is expected and I can no doubt charter is back. Olfiet makes noises about my international connection, but this man literally turns his back on him. He is keeper of the radio and can’t be alienated, but it’s also possible for them to get on the radio and consult MAF with a little stroking. Olfiet shakes his head. I ask him to ask them to ask the doctor if he can radio Wamena
please. Olfiet smiles nervously at the doctor's refusal and explains to me in English that he’s a "joker." 33
What?
"I think he is making a joke."
And I think I’ll be walking back to Wamena.
"We come back."
Angguruk is pleasant. The entire town is embraced by steep mountain walls with gardens climbing up to the top; and there are cows grazing on the airstrip. Across the airfield there are neat wooden abandoned mission houses with slightly overgrown gardens behind them. The mission left two years ago, I’m told, but these houses tell a poignant story. We explore one of them which has wormy books in the glass cases and a big cast iron stove that must have been hellish to transport. There are three large bedrooms with adjoining baths. Ghosts everywhere, people who didn’t pack everything when they left. We make our way across the strip to the guest house, which is really a string of bare wooden rooms off a raised walkway, like a motel. We crowd into one and slump to the floor to settle accounts with Paulius and his gang of merry men. Soap, biscuits, instant coffee changes hands. As each man receives his
rupiahs from Olfiet, he slithers off to the porch with barely a nod in my direction. In weakness, I hand the old man a cigarette, for which he says nothing and walks away.
At midafternoon we return to the kindly doctor, who appears to be organizing a hugely expensive charter in my behalf. Or, we can walk to Welarek tomorrow and jump the flight from there. Come back tomorrow.
In the yard behind the guest house the schoolteacher, his brother, and their families come to see the photos of PNG they’ve heard about. More people arrive, and soon fifty or more men, women and kids are passing around my stack of snapshots and an Air Niugini in-flight magazine with shots of Papua new Guineans in traditional and western dress. The school teacher raises the photos of heavily decorated highlanders at the Goroka Show and they all ooooo and aahhhh as he explains in local language. Kids jump up and down to see the images, some of them wandering off on their own when they get one to intently study the big head-dresses, the body paint, the faces of these people who are so much like them, but not.
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The teacher holds up and extreme close up shot of William, a Huli from Ambua lodge, wearing his traditional hair wig with daisies and yellow face paint. The crowd roars. He turns the page and there’s Willie in Huli dress next to two bikini-clad girls on the beach in Australia, on a trip to a cultural show there. The kids reach and throw fingers at Willie's pig tusk necklace, his ass grass and fiber apron, asking urgent questions to the schoolteacher that I can’t understand. Clearly they’re oblivious to the girls in bikinis.
Then the teacher opens to the magazine's central map showing the PNG side of the country with barely an inch of Irian Jaya over the western border. He points to the space not illustrated and indicates where Wamena and Jayapura and Angguruk would be. Everyone stares or exclaims politely, as though they haven’t seen a map before. I wonder how many of these kids, all in penis gourds and grass skirts, go to school. The older people stand for long minutes holding a snapshot near their face, or they open the magazine and stop at the masthead where a small square picture shows a Papua New Guinean in shirtsleeves and tie, the Minister of Civil Aviation. This may be the most awesome of all contrasts between their colonized and undeveloped existence and that of a free PNG.
The next day Olfiet and I get on the MAF Beechcraft back to Wamena. Turns out the doctor was pulling our legs all the time, and our seats have all the while been secure. He tells Olfiet he just wanted to see my face when he mentioned the cost of a charter. Asshole.
I watch this tough little Cessna touch down with delicacy and then drop its full weight to the nosewheel. You can feel it sigh before the engine revs loudly and the plane shudders up the graded grass strip. Such incredible machines, single engine planes. They’re so fluttery and frail moving through these enormous gorges, so hollow and exhausted when they land on isolated hilltops. High altitude single engine flying is as risky as it gets.
Almost as though the plane knows this, it always seems to catch its own breath before take off. There’s always that hesitation, that pause when the plane squares up at the edge of the runway and turns to go, that second thought, the slight window of opportunity during the final checks, before pulling the throttle and racing down the straightaway in a vibrating defiance of gravity. You’re
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whole body is thrust back by the force of inevitability, shoulders pinned to the seat, then jolted up in a miraculous lift--when you’re stomach falls and your bowels loosen, and then your heart races with a compressed feeling of ascension. For thirty seconds or so the body is as exalted as the little machine wrapped around you, it’s slicing through turbulence to a calmer space in the sky. The descent into Wamena is beautiful, soaring low over gardens and kunai thatch homes with their feathery plumes of smoke. Streams that oxbow across valley floors, fields of mounded sweet potatoes hung from the sky at eighty five degree angles.
We touch down with a bounce in Wamena, at about nine thirty AM. Just as I’m descending the plane a young Dani boy comes running onto the tarmac with a note in hand.
"Nassisoolivin! Nassisoolivin!"
"Me?"
It’s a note from Tony and Tara. Folded inside is one of Tara's Polaroid’s: of a tall Bokondini man in wide penis gourd, red sash around his waist, cassowary feather head-dress and beard, standing against a blue sailcloth, his eyes closed and head tilted, and his arms are crossed tenderly hugging his neck--the posture of New Guineans who emerge from their huts into the cold morning air. The image is only 2x2" and in its preciousness it makes my heart sink, suddenly missing my friends. The note is in Tara's hand. From the Baliem Cottages hotel, dated this very morning:
Querida Nancy,
As you can see we’ve yet to leave the valley. The day we got back from Kosarek we positively decided to push on to Karubaga...We decided to scrap our plans and stay on till the 9th in Wamena to do some more portraits (one example included). This morning as fate would have it, we found ourselves basking In the unseasonably warm sun on the airport tarmac eagerly awaiting the arrival of a MAF plane from Angguruk. My heart would beat like crazy in anticipation of the arrival of a certain passenger I thought (stupidly) I was fated to meet again. Alas, it was not to be...During our wait we photographed the cockpit crew if a Merpati Twin Otter bound for Ewer (Asmat) and ensuing
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conversation afterwards yielded a surprising reward--a quick (& free) flight to Ewer and back with a brief walkabout--about 25 minutes around the boundaries of the fabled Asmat land. That should make my client happy, plus I got some astounding aerials thanks to the crew. The fact that we were the only two passengers aboard helped too, I think. WHERE WERE YOU NANCY? This may sound fucking ridiculous to you now, but I must admit I’m just plain smitten. I realize this can be attributed to a variety of well known (classical) causes of which elaboration would be no less than redundant, but as you must have deduced by now, I’m all the time sucker of circumstance. The incurable romantic--how cliché can you get right? Anyway...as I recall you were having trouble deciding what to do with the empty space in your schedule (between Wamena and Jayapura). You could always stay on in Wamena till two days before your flight back home--a perfectly pleasant thing to do--cool weather, frontier town, naked buttocks, exaggerated gourds (or maybe they aren’t), or you could lock in on someone else’s schedule--some one who is dying for your company & possibly book yourself on a series of flights not too unsimilar to the following: (He lists an itinerary that meets him in Jayapuri and continues on to Manokwari in the Bird’s Head of Irian Jaya with him.) Check into the Sentani Inn, near the airport if you fly out on the 9th (Tues). There you will be greeted by a Javanese song and dance duo of unparalleled talent. The Javanese duo will arrange for your accommodation (lodge and board) Our party will overnight to comfortable lodging in the big city, or wherever suits your unquestionable preference. The Javense duo will proceed to Sorong, then onwards to countless exotic and decidedly unerotic destinations in the Molluca islands and Bali...It’ll break this Javanese boy’s heart if you choose to shiver alone in Wamena, but don’t let me try to overly influence you. Ha! My
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eyes are starting to water already. Seriously though...I thank you for your wonderful warmth and company!
Abrazos, T
P.S. Any out of the way expenditures incurred are refundable through the Javanese duo.
I'm washed (no small feat), packed and at the Merpati desk in half an hour. When the plane touches down in Jayapura I can see the two standing at the edge of the field. I know my being here is consent to share an adventure with Tara, and I’m nervous-- but game, very game. The next day we’re all in Manokwari, a surprisingly unlovely seaport. But it’s TNT again, and by the snapshots I have of that trip, we’re happier than students on holiday. Tara shoots sunset at a Japanese War Memorial above town, with the two Indonesian drivers gawking unpleasantly at me. I register at the cinderblock
losmen as Tara’s wife, and, as snapshots of the time indicate, it’s more fun that students on holiday. Tara never pouts, argues, sulks, or bullies me; and Tony is always performing the funniest impersonations. I’ve forgotten how much fun it can be. At night we walk the market where kids giggle and trail behind the very tall Tara. How handsome he is, with big white teeth in an easy smile. In one stall I find pressed butterflies to send to a friend, and Tara is delighted to find a working old Polaroid for his collection. We feast on nail fish at a seaside restaurant where, at about eight o’ clock, the lights go down, the music goes up and young couples start necking all around us. The balcony is strung with colored lights and we sit outside with our feet up on a small table, making puerile comments as Tara and Tony get drunk, me not far behind. The next day we fly on to Sorong, an oil town with no real photo ops. We walk through the market stalls near the bus depot and sit for beef innard soup and sate. Between the stalls of foodstuffs, pots, pans, rainbow bags, herbal remedies and thongs, there are a couple of merchants touting aphrodisiacs over portable microphones--at least that’s what Tara says, and I’d be hard pressed to imagine what else would invoke such snickering crowds and melodramatic hucksterism: "Give this to a married woman--not a virgin, and if you don’t believe me give it to a bitch and she will howl for it and rub herself raw on a post if she cant get it!" Someone holds up dusty laminated photos, including an old 38
ad of Natasia Kinski wrapped in a boa constrictor, which are said to reveal the full range of human sexual tastes and their bizarre outcomes, including half-human/half-ape offspring and three legged men. Someone else barks: "We Indonesians are weak because we play with ourselves in the toilet--the five-finger game!"
Tara and I linger in our choice of snake oils, laughing so hard that we both get a stitch and have to walk around for a minute before coming back. We buy something that enhances performance and prevents the conception of Siamese twins. The next day we all go for a boat ride with some airline employee friends of Tony (whose gift has been revealed to be personal friendships everywhere we go), out to the bigger of two airports here. It’s a run down place, but what’s nice is, sitting in a coffee shop outside, we meet yet another friend of Tony's, actually a famous name in expeditions I’m told, Herman Lantang. He’s a founding member of the University of Indonesia Explorer's Club, and an oil exploration executive now. Charming and jovial, he speaks English for my sake, and shows photos from his wallet of his wife and kids standing on the highest peak in Indonesia. More interesting yet are old black and white shots of himself as a young anthropologist in the Baliem Valley twenty years ago. He was in the South Baliem gorge, southwest of Tangma, in 1968 or 9. Here he is in a courting ceremony and then again posed in penis gourd and a hairnet (traditional dress) with his arm around a Dani man. I feel like I’ve opened a great cupboard of new information, and I long to rummage around awhile, but Herman has to dash, he stands and graciously bows goodbye.
Now we bump into another friend of Tony’s, a pot-smoking chopper pilot sitting in the coffee shop. He works for a timber company and will take Tare and Tony for aerial shots this afternoon. The airline manager comes by and invites us all to a big seafood lunch feast: sates, grilled fish, prawns, watercress and a dry mint of some sort. All the familiarity and kindness, and Tony’s broad social net, makes Indonesia, not to mention Irian Jaya, seem like one village. Everyone’s a school chum, a cousin, in-law or business associate. At night we all get roaring drunk at a cavernous seaside restaurant near the hotel. Me on two beers, Tony and Tara on shots of whiskey; we can’t even finish our food, and end up giggling about the prostitutes swarming around as if I were
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invisible. Back at the hotel I retch in the toilet bowl, and afterwards, Tara sets the timer and takes shots of us posing half naked and bleary eyed. He’s handsome, I’m half alive. Parting shots. In the morning I reluctantly see Tony and Tara off. The instant they’re gone I miss them desperately, miss the good company and fun of it all. At the airport, two airline friends of Tony take pity and treat me to breakfast with grilled fish in jackroot sauce, then, god bless them, strain for over an hour to entertain me in English.
Suddenly I feel more abandoned than ever before, fully aware that there’s no road forward for Tara and myself. For some time afterward, though, we do stay in touch, and there are scratchy radio-phone calls from Jakarta to me in Hagen. Could we meet in Singapore for New Year’s? Maybe I could move to Hong Kong? But the calls fade away.
Three years on, I’m sitting at a big table in a New Jersey diner with several girlfriends from Manhattan. I’ve brought them out for the day for joyrides while I practice flying at a small airport. They’ve just survived a hairy spin with an old man in a WWII-era twin-engine (not unlike the first plane I flew from Vanimo to Irian Jaya) who hijacked them while I was flying practice patterns in my Cessna. I’ve been back in the States finishing my PhD coursework, holed up in rural New Jersey with a young Dutch flight instructor, Mark, and now this phase is over. Sandy, Corinne, Michelle, and my soon-to-be-ex, Mark, and I are having lunch at the diner near the airfield and laughing about the old man who mistook my friends for models and set off to impress them but forgot to wear his headphones. Meanwhile, I’m zooming around in the practice pattern, when the wind shifts, and the tower tells me to reverse my course and land on the opposite end of the field now. The fields in these little airports are two ends of the same strip, and planes take off and land in one or another direction according to the wind pattern. No problem: but I’m still a novice and my focus is all hands, instruments, horizon and little else. What I fail to see is this big moose of a plane pitching down to land at the other end of the airstrip just as I begin to descend. No headphone, the old goon hasn’t been told to switch directions, so, quickly, I zoom the engine and pitch up and right, into a fly-by that takes me close enough to see the terror on my friends’ faces just before I’m airborne. I fly around again and see the old plane has landed safely. But when I arrive at the tower
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ready to bark at the pilot for risking everyone’s life, he smiles broadly and says, "Well Nance, it’s a good thing you knew your emergency procedures."
"What emergency procedures??"
So we’re drinking vanilla sundaes and eating sloppy tuna fish sandwiches, remembering all this, when Sandy remembers something. She’s a photo editor with a big photo archive in New York and always has good stories. Once she was caught in an elevator with Claudia Schiffer and explained how perfect the woman’s skin was, absolutely exquisite. "I met the most interesting Indonesian man last week. Tall, funny. A good photographer, too. He had some New Guinea photos, I think from the other side, what’s that? Irian Jaya. But mostly news shots. Cool guy, he was in town for the weekend and came to the office. Tara something."
"Tara? Tara Sosowardoyo?"
"Maybe. Do you know him? Could be something like that."
"Tara!? Tara’s the man from Irian Jaya—I told you about him—the Javanese duo! Where is he? Is he here—in New York?"---Could he be near? Could he return just in time to make me forget Mark and want to be in New Guinea again?
"Oh, Nance, I think he’s gone. Sorry about that. "
But it’s enough to be reminded. The angst over my flight instructor, over my leaving the little cabin in the woods and the temporary comfort of the States gradually dissolves. A weightlessness comes over me: Tara, the big world outside, other lives. It is a perceptible shift in gears, almost an epistemological change, and now I’m anxious to be back in PNG.
It’s four years before I get back to Irian Jaya. I’m living in PNG and have been hired to guide an American tour group through the Baliem Valley, where it’s thrilling to just stand in the wide open landscape again. But first there’s a flight to Wewak where I overnight at the Windjammer Hotel and meet a salty dog at the bar named Paul, who entertains me with stories. He’s skinny, with a bum eye and a big hole in his face from skin cancer. He’s up from Brisbane and tells me he makes a circuit through PNG regularly, selling machine parts. But as the evening evolves, I discover he’s
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really prospecting for gold, and will go bush with two national partners in the morning, flying to Vanimo first, and then off by road somewhere. One more mystery, one more loose end wandering this country looking for the next big break. He loves PNG and shouts me beers as we stand outside the diningroom looking across the big bay at a Malaysian fishing boat that’s well within national waters. It’s a free for all, I think. No way to monitor the major infractions, no interest in monitoring the little ones. I realize how rare it was to know someone like Peter, in Hagen, who was ever-driven to ‘do the right thing.’ Would that every expat here shared the objective.
In the morning, Paul’s there at the airport waiting to catch his twin-prop flight before mine. It’s raining and a lot of people are milling about, making the linoleum floors wet and muddy, as the plane touches down and a handful of passengers disembark. The pilot dashes into the back of the terminal and waits. And we all wait and wait in the driving rain now. He comes out to run his preflight checks, then dashes back inside and waits. A ticket counter commotion erupts, and the flight is announced. People file up to board, and I wave sincere good luck to Paul and his Vanimo mate. The plane takes off without hitch, and only then does the sun begin to break out.
An Australian sits on the bench near me and begins a monologue about his rough and ready life with Ok Tedi mine in Tabubil, Western Province. He often goes to Jayapura, just to shop, but Air Niugini, he says, is absolutely hopeless, a right joke of an airline. I look away, but he keeps talking at me. Finally, my tourists arrive in transit, and we all board for Jayapura, where our guide Sitepu meets us at the airport and conveys us to a hotel downtown. That’s where I meet the two Borneo men who will accompany us on a ‘fam’, or familiarization, tour from the company that’s hired me. Bambang and Pungkao. And they’ve not only brought each of us a t-shirt, but they present me with a Swiss Army knife engraved in my name. I’m touched nearly to tears. They’re here on a historic visit, which begins after our trek, when they’ll climb Irian Jaya’s tallest mountain in commemoration of Pungkao’s father’s climb, some forty years before, when he was amongst the first Dayak tribesman to scale its snowcapped peak, as part of a Dutch expedition at that time. This was the Anton Colijn Expedition of 1936, which scaled the snowcapped Cartensz Peak, and although it wasn’t the first time a Dayak came along as a carrier, it was the first time one of these
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Dayak ‘sherpas’ to the Dutch explorers’ summitted the island’s tallest peak. The Cartensz lies on the southern half of the Irian Jaya mainland, as the western extension of a mountain cordillera running east-west across Papua New Guinea. It’s because the entire New Guinea island is slightly tipped southeastward that this mountain line runs through the northern part of the eastern side and then the southern end of its western side. But the Cartensz is estimated to be 5050 metres high, making it the tallest peak on the entire island, and with its glaciers and icy peaks, unquestionably its most dramatic and improbably beautiful sights in all the tropics. The Colijn expedition brought eight Dayak carriers along, most of whom were picked up at the coastal town of Babo, on the Bird’s Head, where these migrants from Borneo were working for a Dutch oil exploration company. There are photos from the expedition that show these young Dayak men in their bowl haircuts and knee socks, standing beside the slighter Amungme tribesmen in penis gourds and cane belts; and then beside the taller Dutchmen in their long white trousers and crisp shirts.
3
3
See Ballard, Chris, Steven Vink and Anton Ploeg, 2001, Race to the Snow, Photography and the exploration of Dutch New Guinea, 1907-1936. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, pp.73 ff.
The group is an interesting mix. There are Katie and Lil, a cheerful middle aged lesbian couple from Minneapolis, and the Bernsteins, a sharp and funny couple from Colorado, he’s in the music business. Then there’s Maureen, who is frightfully anxious about her preparedness, and yet, throughout the trip, will recount her adventures on cattle drives and ice breakers, when it seems Herculean that’s she’s managed to even leave her Boston co-op. And there’s Ron, who seems tetchy and uncooperative at first: Don’t they want to speak English? Don’t they feel shamed by our talk about penis gourds? Have they just taken their shirts off for us? Didn’t I tell him the opposite thing yesterday? And yet, for all his niggling, he is also the first say, in a lull, "Isn’t this lovely?" and "I really love this."
In Wamena we’re joined by Pini, our Torajaland guide, and check into the Baliem Palace Hotel. This is what the frontier town of Wamena calls upmarket, and it’s very new, with a central courtyard and grotto-like bathrooms with skylights. Partially owned by Sam Chandra, I discover later. Sam and Wamena have both come up a bit in the world. Outside the hotel, there’s a
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permanent audience of semi-naked would-be porters, waiting for work and artifacts sales; inside, lounging on the vestibule sofas, are the neatly dressed Indonesian guides, with a few Dani, in safari vests and jeans. There’s always an assimilation period for visitors, when they accommodate themselves to the terms of their basic comfort: to realize there are towels, flush toilets for tonight, buckets of water rather than a shower, and about forty percent of claims to be on the menu. When we order a Coke, a small kid is sent across the road to fetch one at a trade store. Katie and Lil have read books and seen videos, so they’re attention is fixed on the trek, not their accommodation tonight. But because I haven’t anticipated the uneven quality of our rooms, or the damp chill that descends by late afternoon, this is my most difficult time, putting all my chicks to bed without crises. When Lil unexpectedly needs a tampon, despite hormone replacement, I drag her through every Javanese shop in a bank of dry good shops across from the market--both of us struggling in absurd Bahasian gestures to make our need known. When Lil finally gestures inserting something in the vagina, and laughter breaks out all around, I know this is going to be a fun trip.
Still, these are Americans. Ron is the first to be upset to find Pini giving cigarettes to young kids. He’s on a quest for the real thing, the genuine article, first-contact experience where naked is not staged; and he shopped for this from a brochure. But there is nothing really tourist-tableau about Irian Jaya, even as it’s experienced thousands of mainly Dutch trekkers thus far. Americans find it hardest to believe their presence doesn’t corrupt the natives, or inspire traumatic envy. For one thing, tourism is so small an industry here that none of the villages are dedicated to it. Our first trek is a day-trip around Wamena, and at the end of it, I press Pini to take us to Sioroba, to see the mountain wall of Peter Matthiessen’s book. Maureen is raveling with a copy of it. We walk through a drizzle into the village, across log bridges and tracks of mud beneath pandanas trees, where Pungkau, tenderly holding Maureen’s hand, demonstrates the Dayak headhunting call. And when we come upon the guest cottages for Sioroba, we see a clutch of Dutch tourists we saw earlier in Jayapura. Then we follow a path familiar to me, to enter the central compound where I’ve seen Pue kill, singe and cook pigs for his guests a number of times. A young girl walks past and I stop to ask her, Pini translating, Where’s Pue? She looks up and they both ask, You know Pue? Yes, of course, I
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say. The girl says nothing. Pini says he died last year. Ohmygod. Was it a fight? Oh no, not a fight. He died of shortness of breath, some respiratory infection they suppose. How could that be? The little girl says something, and Pini agrees, without translating. But as we exit the compound, from behind, Pini says, "He was an old man anyway I think. He died of old age." Pue was 37. My age.
We set off in buses to Sugokmo the next morning, with sixteen Dani attendants in little more than penis gourds piled on the mound of our gear in a dump truck. From Sugokmo we assemble day packs and hand out heavy gear to these handsome and friendly young men, some wearing those familiar red Bokondini sashes. It’s great to be back. Great to see the place has so little changed in ways that count. We cross a rope bridge, this one secured by steel cable and hanging next to the poured cement pylons of its replacement under construction. Pini tells me how a Japanese tourist and his guide were swept away from this bridge the year before, and he points to a concrete marker with Japanese inscriptions on the shore. I look down to the rough clip of whitewater below us. "Forgodsake Pini, don’t tell the tourists."
At one village I come pulling up the rear, and pass the open door of a teacher’s house on the hillside, through which I see Maureen and Pungkau, who’s been kindly helping her, sitting with the teacher, having a chat. I descend to the school, meet up with Ron, Pini and the rest, and we walk on. Not much later I’ve already forgotten about Maureen and Pungkau when we pull uphill and away from the valley village. I look back and they’re nowhere to be seen, so I send Pini back to the teacher’s house. But Pini runs back saying he can’t find either of them, they’re nowhere. The Bernsteins are way ahead of us now, across the river and cresting the next ridge top, were I assume they’ll join Katie and Lil. This time I send a porter back, and we trudge forward toward Kurima, where we plan to stop for lunch. Waiting there, as the porters and I organize noodles and cheese sandwiches for lunch, patience ebbs away and this Maureen and Pungkau disappearance takes on the proportions of an emergency. Ron is getting stroppy. What if she’s fallen off a ledge? What if they’re lost and wandering off somewhere? Unlike PNG, where rascal gangs are a worry in the bush, this is a Police State with virtually no crime against trekkers. Hot water is ready, here’s the peanut butter and crackers, Pini helping me now with more natural hospitality than I will ever muster. The
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Bernsteins offer to walk back after lunch. And finally Pungkau and Maureen saunter in, having never seen Pini or the porter sent to muster them. They’ve had a really wonderful time with the schoolteacher and been shown around the entire village. Pungkau apologizes. Maureen stands above me now, slathered in sunscreen, hat tied at the chin, leaning on a walking stick and looking more refreshed than any of us.
"Really, you shouldn’t be such a worrywort, I can handle myself."
That night we camp in the high and lovely village of Ibouroma. Most of us are on one huge new hut, and Katie and Lil beg for a second one because they claim to be dreadful snorers. This they don’t so much prove tonight, but a few nights later, when we’re all forced together in one hut, and the monotonous rolling bass of the two of them seem to make the walls heave, like in a cartoon. Pini miraculously pulls from his pack tinned garlic mussels for all of us to share, and then makes the most wonderful pot of peanut soup. Over the course of the trip he will make fried egg dishes, banana gelatins, and hand around mixed nuts periodically. I’m laughing with tears in my eye at how these guys are supposed to learn about tour guiding from me!
The porters all sit with us in Ibouroma and tell their stories, first explaining their names, ages and marital status. All so young--between 17 and 20—they agree that, yes, they have girlfriends, but are otherwise endearingly shy. One has a name meaning blanket, because he was the new blanket his mother received at his birth. I try to tell them this is a lover’s nickname in PNG, but it’s too hard to explain. Then they sing nonsense and love songs, in beautiful harmonies, beating their chests and thumping their thighs; one kid really gets rocking with his head shaking and hands beating in double-time. I take a picture of this moment that always reminds me of everything I love about Irian Jaya.
Ibouroma throws us a pig kill and mock-battle the next day, which are more fun than I’d have imagined. Curious about one albino boy whose skin is scabbed and red, Arnie and Polly Bernstein and I approach and send this lad into fits of terror, while no one else around seems bothered. In the afternoon, we head off to Tangma--the hardest leg of the trek. I’ve been dreading the sight Peter and I faced when he descended this mountain face years ago---of a near-ninety degree wall with
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narrow, barely perceptible, footpaths snaking down the ledge for 500 feet or more. This time, thankfully, the ledge is covered in brush and the view is slightly less vertiginous. I find myself able to clutch grass clumps as I pretty much slide down in a hunched position. Low-lying cloud fills the valley basin below us, one great cotton pillow thrown down a depression, and near the bottom I turn back to cheer everyone else on, just as Arnie’s coaching Polly not to fall. One by one, we make the bottom, hearts pounding and throats aching from thirst. Like an idiot, I chose this time to inform them they’ll be returning the same route tomorrow, which prompts the group to collectively slump to the ground. Then Ron realizes climbing is never as bad as descending. This seems to raise morale slightly, until a troop of barefoot six-year-olds comes running down the path behind us, light as air. "Rub it in," says Lil.
We’re good walkers, though, none of us real complainers. When one of the porters straddles a pig-fence to help Katie over, nothing but a penis gourd and a smile as he lifts her up, she turns back to the rest of us, deadpan.
"I’ve seen more scrotum on this trip than I have my entire adult life."
Pungkau teaches us the Dayak war cry, which scares no one but gives us great pleasure when one of us occasionally breaks into it. During one never-ending climb, we have to double over every few feet to keep from cramping. My lungs are wheezing and my calves ache. I’m with the last stragglers, bringing up the rear. The porters scramble ahead, and I’m ready to puke from exhaustion, one leg trembling now as I plant it uphill. Out of nowhere a porter scrambled back down to me and hands me a cool can of Coke. I look up to see Bambang waving at the top. He’s held this can in a freezer bag for days, just for such an occasion. The man is amazing.
"I asked for a Sprite." The porter smiles anyway.
Once I’ve reached the top, I find the entire crew’s been enjoying a break and a long smoke, and even Ron is relaxed, wanting to push off now. "Waaaiiiiiit!" I gasp. "Who’s missing?" First Katie crests the ridge, her head inching itself over the crest step by step, until we find it arrives with a big smile. We applaud. Then ten long minutes later we see the top of Lil’s head appear, then her full
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head, and two porter’s heads on either side. They’ve got hold of her elbows, and she’s shaking her head. "You have no idea what trouble I’ve had getting these kids up here."
Wanem is an administrative center, well landscaped and pretty, but also cramped, two rows of clapboard houses and a tall post with a speaker continuously playing one radio station. The village men are congregating in the school, which is the only public building and, as such, the place we hope to bed down tonight. So for now, we hang about outside watching the Dani listen obediently to a government appointed official from Wamena, whom everyone calls ‘chief.’ They’re planning the opening of a new aid post, we learn, which will involve donations of sweet potato and one pig from every family. Is this a health tax? Or just an honorarium? All the Dani squat on their haunches and share hand-rolled smokes, looking submissive to this young well-dressed Irian official who takes everyone’s name down on a list. There is no dissent or correction we can make out. It’s hard to know whether this official is Dani, or coastal, an actual ‘chief’ or an outsider. But its an interesting scene, not unlike a few I’ve seen n PNG, including elderly villagers paying absolute respect to some educated youth, maybe an Uncle Tom, maybe the next Independence leader. I can’t find the back story, which is what makes it so interesting. Is this the Wanem representative? Why so much ‘in kind’ contributions for an aid post? Will they have a feast? All these questions are left unanswered, reflecting so many veils dropped by language and familiarity that I might somehow raise, were we across the border.
Hours later we take possession of the building ourselves. This is our last night in the bush, tomorrow we’ll descend from here back to Wamena. So I must count out tips and pay for everyone. When the porters drift in to collect, Pini, perhaps flush with the officialdom of the day, establishes a forum with the young men for all of us to ask them questions. Once again, the Dani sit cross-legged on the floor, while the rest of us have plastic chairs, and a kerosene lamp keeps a descending darkness at bay. It’s a remarkably officious stage direction for what becomes a relaxed and good humored conversation. But it begins stiffly, with some of us asking meaningless questions, or questions mean nothing to these young men--Do they think about tourists as intruders? Do they feel humiliated by showing off their simple lives to us? No. And no. Ron isn’t
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buying this and mutters something about predictable responses. Polly just wants to know what it is about us that always makes them laugh? But this loses its punch in translation and just makes us laugh, which thereby reduces everyone to giggles. Ron turns to Polly and says if she’ll just calm down for a minute he can get his question across. But in the end we learn that most of the young men don’t speak Indonesian anyway, and it’s Pini who’s been formulating their answers.
Maureen and I turn into our bedrolls in the main room, while all the others get deluxe closets, Katie and Lil providing soundtrack. Maureen wakes at 5 AM for extended ablutions, and my nose wakes me to the earthy cookfire smells of every highlands village. Muscle by strained muscle I start to revive, obliquely watching Maureen, sitting at the end of her sleeping bag, studying a hand mirror. Don’t be a worry wort. I can handle myself. She evenly applies a liquid base coat, holding the mirror deftly enough to catch intruding daylight. Then the finer details of her eyes and lips. She mimics the concentration of singsing performers in PNG, backstage, as they finish the fussy lines of ochre and charcoal face paintings with orchid vine brushes. When the sun rises we assemble for a parting photo, everyone standing to the side of the school building on a ridgeline. What the photo doesn’t show is the scene behind, and below, where a cluster of round huts are emitting cookfire smoke and one enormous long pigsty appears to house all the children, women and swine together, most of them waving at us.
Our very last night in Irian Jaya is spent in Sentani, near the Jayapura airport. There’s a dwarf standing on a chair at the front desk and, like so many
losman, a family lounging behind him watching children sing pop songs on TV. The toilets are broken, milk is finished, and laundry will take overnight now, very sorry. That’s okay, we agree. We’re happy for sheets. And, despite the dead waterbugs in my bathroom, I’m relieved not to feel wind when I squat to pee. The best thing about our stay is the cold beer we take on a driving tour to McArthur’s base camp above town. The worst thing comes the following morning, when everyone receives their clean laundry but Ron, who seems to be missing socks and underwear. Where would they be? The dwarf is so sorry, and he checks out back where the laundry girls assure us everything’s come in from the line. Ron checks his room, but no, they’re not there. He calls for the Manager, who finds this implied theft hard to 49
believe and, very apologetically, begins another search out back. We all check our own laundry piles, but to no avail. Then we break for lunch at a nearby restaurant where a loopy Mickey Mouse is painted on one wall and the clientele seem to be a mix of American missionaries and unshaven Vietnam vets with their child brides. Next door we find a big brightly lit supermarket where, as if in a dream, we find Dove ice cream bars for dessert. But back at the hotel, Ron’s laundry hasn’t materialized. He’s angry now, and a row starts between the dwarf, in his fractured English, and Ron in his over-articulated condescension. Our guides Sitepu, Cornelius and Andreas don’t defuse it by stepping in to defend the beleaguered receptionist, although the level of ironic courtesy in all of this is really comic.
"He is telling you, Sir, how very sorry he is, Sir, but the laundry, Sir, he says, is not here."
"And I am telling you, kid, that I am sorry but I will not leave this desk until it reappears."
"We are sorry Sir for your trouble Sir."
"Fine, thank you, now what’re you going to do about it?"
"The laundry Sir, is not to be found. We look everywhere."
I ask what the socks and underwear might be worth, thinking this might be solved by my petty cash. Sixty dollars, Ron tells me, although the solution is unsatisfying, as he is sure someone’s lifted his clean white articles.
"It is their responsibility and I expect them to do something about it."
"Well, they’re not likely to have that kind of money, I’d guess," knowing this is roughly the price of three rooms for a night. Sitepu and the staff look mortified. "Why don’t I just reimburse you."
Lil says from her spot at a card game that Ron should just calm down and be grateful he has underwear. "It’s not the worst that can happen, after all."
"It won’t be, believe me!" Ron returns to his room.
The rest of us play Twentyone and Hearts, until the power goes out. So we light candles and open the French doors to see that the whole town’s now lying in darkness. In the trill of birds and electric cicadas we can also hear three howling cats who must be competing for a female in heat
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somewhere. Eventually Ron returns, sheepish, to tell us that, while repacking, the missing laundry’s tumbled out in neatly folded piles. He apologizes to the reception and to anyone who’ll listen. Lil tells him he’s got a lot more courage than she does, "I’d probably just lie about it at this point myself." We all laugh, finally a group again.
At the airport, over coffee, Arnie and Polly tell us the story of a terrible bicycle accident Polly had that fractured everything in her face. Even with the best cranial surgeons--including one of the best in the world, of whom I actually from an Oprah segment I think--they were not at all sure she’d ever look, well, okay again. They took bone from her skull to build up her cheeks and chin, and of course all kinds of stitches gave her a virtually bespoke facelift. And all her teeth are new. But to look at her now, you’d be hard pressed to say she’s even had a peel; the skin is ruddy, and natural, the shape of her face balanced and elegant; she’s so attractive. We’re stupefied. Not one of us has something comparable to say. I broke my wrist once. Polly says she misses her naturally high cheekbones. Arnie says the whole experience terrified him more than her. People are never what they seem…I have new-found respect for plastic surgery and a sliver of hope that, were I dropped on my face from a tall building, I might, so to speak, rebound. Now we shuffle past immigration and into the pre-board lounge. Just when our plane arrives, and before people stand to board, I jet to the ladies room one last time. The stall has a floor to ceiling door, which is unusual, but I imagine it affords more privacy for those squatting over the ceramic hole in the floor. But when I’m ready to leave, I find the latch is broken, locked. I’m all alone in the place while the speakers announces boarding for our flight. I shake the door, unable to get a grip anywhere. The hinge pins look rusted, they’ll be a nightmare to get out. Climbing over can’t be done--the door has barely six inches to the ceiling. So I call out, "Help me! Someone please help!" to the sound of passengers mingling and the repeat call to board. My head is on fire and tears are welling in my eyes. Get me out of here---get me home to PNG, to my privacy, my comfort zone, tok Pisin, backwards Australians and all---to my life! I give the door one great shove and it bursts open.
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The next day we meet the Summer Institute of Linguistic Bible translation people, two Germans and their kids, plus an Australian woman--all very pleasant. They say this begging for smokes is fairly recent, since last year when the first backpackers walked through. I dare not ask whether they smoke, themselves. Most Kosarek are serious bush tobacco smokers anyway. Now they’re also nicotine freaks. We visit Walsatek, a small hamlet across the valley on another steep ridgetop, where Tara and Tony take lots of shots and views are breathtaking, literally. The ridge is so narrow that the village is barely one footpath wide, all the huts spilling off down the sides.
In the evening Tara plays someone's guitar, all of us sitting around at the timber table in the cabin. There’s Tara, Tony, Olfiet their guide, Judas the porter (whose name shall serve him well), a young Kosarek boy, and the old man from yesterday who’s already been a portrait model several times over. Tara sings Indonesian pop songs, Paul Simon, James Taylor, and Tracy Chapman in a strong voice, under pounding rain, by candlelight. I am always so impressed when people know all the lyrics. The mood is golden. I don’t miss anyone of anything, and my heart swells for being so content. I look over at the young boy who reaches his hand to me. "Smoke."
The next day we walk to Welarek where Tony organizes handsome young men in traditional dress to sit for portraits. There are reflectors and fill in flashes and all manner of interesting gadgets for these people who’ve barely seen cameras before. One man is most beautiful and patient as Tony fusses and tilts him like a bored supermodel.
"Sau wali," Tony says in local language--Excellent. But after about fifteen minutes he looks at the nearly useless paper notes, plus the set-up Polaroid he’s been handed, figures he’s been cheated and storms off. No smokes.
The next night we’re all asleep when Tony, Tara and Olfiet wake to hear footsteps and noises in the cook room behind the house. They’re all in one room and, in deference to Olfiet who’s a Timorese kid with a gold cross, I’m in another. But they come wake me now and insist I bring my bag in with them. It could be the disgruntled Welarek model, I say, and Tara says, "More likely his agent."
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In the morning Tara finds dog fur where a wall plank’s been broken. "I just hope it’s that three-legged cur who could use a good meal."
We walk an hour or more to Nohomas village, and as we come round the final bend in a path hugging the mountainside, we spot a terrifying mob on the ridge above us--forty or more men in full clay-paint and hoops and pig tusk necklaces and nose ornaments, yodeling, jumping up and down with their spears. Ambushed again! They’re wearing tall cassowary feathers and their hoops running from chest to knee, which make them look like militant Michelene men. Someone has sent word that two photographers want to take their picture, and the whole village has dressed in fighting attire, and even made a
mumu of sweet potato for us.
When we crest the ridge we see seventy or eighty men and women dancing and whooping in a circle, men in the centre chanting and stomping, running counterclockwise; women on the perimeter, holding their swaying breasts, running clockwise, and chanting at full volume. We’re welcomed by an older man who now lights the
mumu fire. Our stash of cut tobacco goes to this man to distribute, even as the kids persist in begging for smokes. The dancing is so impressive and enthusiastic, at one point Tara with his camera lies on the ground in the center of the circle as everyone runs over him. We are all as if balanced on a long narrow ridge top with 360 degree views of surrounding valleys.
As the
singsing dies down we can hear faint but harmonious singing across the valley, where men are relaxing after clearing a garden. They’re singing for themselves, without even trying to please us. The dancing stops, and everyone sits in three rows for a group portrait, which is all the more like a school picture when Tara sets a timer and tries unsuccessfully several times to run from camera to front row center, and people keep spilling out in infectious laughter. Finally, the rains come. All these rakish Yali men are frantic for shelter, protecting their attire, and man, woman and child race scatter for the space under the eaves of their circular thatch houses, with kids sliding down the suddenly muddy paths and screaming with silliness. We wait and watch, and a fog slips over the ridge like a sleeve, erasing all the surrounding mountains. 53
Paulius, a young Yali, joins us for dinner and explains that knowledge, rather than wealth, is what makes a man important here. Nowadays that includes traditional knowledge as well as knowledge of the Indonesian language and bureaucracy. Also, now that things have opened up with pacification in the past ten years, men can seek wives from distant places. If a Yali marries a Dani woman, from the valley surrounding Wamena, he will move down there rather than vice versa. Paulius himself plans to go with another kid to Angguruk, a mission station in the star mountains here, for some aid post training and, if possible, further medical training in Wamena. He hasn’t yet got enough pigs for a wife, even though, he clams, most men marry at 16 here, and girls by 14. Paulius explains that missionaries first brought chits for buying basic goods at their stores some thirty years ago. Today the Yali are firmly locked into the cash economy, if only for a few items: salt, sugar, smokes, rice.
Tony does a great Sam Chandra imitation, stroking his chin, strutting, tipping his golf hat. Then he tells a story about an old man who accompanied us from Nohomas today, stroking his balls all the way, then bending to inspect a bit of pig dung on the path; apparently, Tony adds, he helped Olfiet make the potato fritters tonight.
Two days later the Nohomas people show up early, all dressed for a photo shoot. Women with white clay dots and red noses, men with spears and cuscus and cassowary and lesser bird of paradise feathers in their hair. Paulius mediates, Tony and Olfiet negotiate, and it’s decided each person will get roughly two dollars for the morning's posing. Olfiet’s a smooth and pretty Timorese boy who wears shockingly short shorts and smokes incessantly. He argues that the potential benefits in tourism call for their coming down to fifty cents a day, but Tara agrees to the first rate. The airline’s paying anyway. Tara's first polaroids are respectfully handed to everyone sitting on the grass, as Tara sets up his tripod and reflectors facing the side wall. Groups of two, four, sometimes one, stand, kneel and sit, one after another, on a little proscenium of banana leaves. Very stagy, interesting shots. No false candids. Really simple, frank poses. A couple of unexpectedly cheesecake shots of young girls sitting side-saddle looking over their shoulders. One favorite model is Tara's
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greatest and giggliest admirer, a young girl named Marta, and she poses for him against the a red door inside the house, a reflector to bounce the light off the wall and warm her skin.
Tara takes some Mapplethorpe-esque shots of me and the old man with the three legged dog, back to back, medium close. He’s in hoops and penis gourd, I’m in a sarong up to my armpits. The old man turns around and snuggles his nose into my hair and everyone laughs.
It’s the day before I’m supposed to go off on my own to Angguruk and I’m scared of being caught in the rain, cold and miserable. It is now perfectly clear to me that I am not just overdue with my period, but worse. When I confess this to Tony and Tara, we all decide my long walk shall become Mission Miscarriage. Rain will now be an asset, and I can slip footholds and tumble down any number of mountains. The old man wants to be a porter, but Paulius and Judas have told him he’s not needed, and he’s become very huffy. Tara wants to shoot him again but he turns on his heel saying he’s not being paid enough, and leaves heads for home in Nohomas. And now the rain comes. We sit inside chilled, as a downfall hammers the roof and walls all around, and a young boy reaches through the window for a cigarette.
I say goodbye to Tony and Tara. The MAF plane flies them back to Wamena and the next leg of their photo trip. I’ll miss them both, their stupid hand puppets, lighting farts and burping armpits included. Tony’s brilliant imitations, even the one he’s doing one of me in the cessna as they taxi away. The SIL man comes out with mail for the pilot, waves the two off, and pulls a puckering face when Tara bends to kiss my cheek.
Olfiet is coming with me to Aggurruk, as is Judas, the unsmiling porter. The old man comes along after all, too. He and his ridiculously long penis gourd and his three legged runt of a dog. What is to me the hardest of all possible treks is a walk in the park for this guy. We reach Sarkasi this first afternoon, on top of the next mountain away. The walk is unbelievably steep and the last leg almost kills me. I stop for a breather every few minutes, sucking oxygen, while the porters ask for a smoke. The old man never smiles. Olfiet organizes camp in a lovely timber home filled with women at the doorway and men in the front room. It’s the Yali pastor’s home. A blue-eyed albino baby gurgles in one woman’s arms. We’re only two hours from Kosarek and I’m nearly dead,
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already missing Tony and Tara. Kids crowding in on me, in my face, and I’m exhausted trying to entertain them on my own. I’ve given away all my pens. We’re at the highest point in this narrow slanted strip of a village. It’s such a magnificent view on top of this ridge, with two--faintly three--mountain ranges below us, crosscut by layers of dense white cloud. Tall poinsettias and croton bushed surround the house.
Next day we reach Delambela, another beautiful hilltop village. We climb and climb, then descend forever through dense rainforest, hacking at vines or sliding down logs. The main mountain we’ve scaled is Mt. Timike. Here and there the garden paths give way to raw wet bush and getting a grip is hard. My left leg has gone sore from all the steep descents, but I find some solace from discovering that the tap-tap-tapping on my left shoulder is not, as I imagine and keep checking, the old man trying to get my attention, but the tip of his penis gourd as he descends too closely behind me.
We’re now squatting on the dirt floor of the church with crowds of people at each door and peeping through the wooden slats around the sides. It’s a far walk to the river, so Olfiet, Paulius and the porters (the original two having mysteriously become four) borrow many pots for water to save trips, and I go down with them for a wash. But then they all stop for a smoke in the men's house, or honai, of a settlement just below, leaving me barefoot and useless outside for an hour. Welcome to the double standard, girl. My leg has seized up and I’m pissed off, so three little girls show me down to the river by shortcut. We all jump in together, laughing, and they lather up with my soap, reaching under our shorts and laplaps. I wish there were a province filled exclusively with New Guinea women, all as gracious and cheerful as they are here and now. They would have photos of their male relatives dressed in those wonderful penis gourds and cassowary head-dresses, but would explain ruefully how they’ve moved away or been killed off, not one of them to found anymore.
By late afternoon everyone’s come back from the gardens and crowded in to see the circus we represent. Thirty people watch as I write the diary note that’s behind this. Olfiet has boiled water to put hot towel compresses around my left calf, which I consider amputating were it not for the
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mess. Most of the walk today has been in cloud, but for a while we climbed under the forest canopy of one mountainside, which was cool and quiet. It was covered with moss and surface roots, lawyer and liana vines across our path. When we stopped for lunch in a clearing several men out hunting wandered through our party and sat for a smoke. One had some cooked sweet potatoes which we bought off him and shared around. I find the walking so tough that I have to remember to stop and look around to enjoy it, which often irritates my companions. These guys race up killer steep and slippery slopes in the drizzling rain. The scrawny three legged dog pities me, I can tell. We’re pressing ourselves to reach Angguruk by Monday, because an MAF flight comes in Tuesday and can get me to Wamena. Where I shall take a bath.
And now at this summit the clouds lift to reveal a brilliant panoramic view, just as the sun sets into deep violet. Our camp is in one cozy corner of a big empty church. After dinner the kids--tens of them--come in and sit down with candles in the floor before them. It’s blackness all around, their little faces bending into a pool of amber light. As a young boy strums a ukelele, they sing a couple of local language songs in perfect harmony, and then the Papua New Guinea anthem memorized from PNG radio. This almost makes me cry. Until Paulius, the party animal, starts up on a guitar he’s borrowed, strumming his own discordant background noise. We all stop to listen to him sing a Kosarek song. But then as the kids began to sing a 'Free Papua' song, he persists in his crude strumming against their soft
acapella voices.
"Olfiet, can you get him to stop?"
"Do you want the guitar?"
We set out from Delambela just after nine this morning while it’s still raining. Olfiet stops someone strolling by with a live chicken, and buys it, then ties feet together and carries it under his arms. My leg hurts very much now that it’s all downhill, and I’m afraid to stop, for fear of not starting again, so by midday, I’m overjoyed that we’ve hit a flat walk through a valley. But then we climb again and, god bless these guys, they slow down for my sake. This feels like an enormous accomplishment, getting most of the troop to slow down, and now I’m enjoying it so much more. Lovely moments listening to nearby birds of paradise, and stopping to greet people coming down
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from their gardens. The porters are all predictably forty-five minutes to an hour ahead, so they get long breaks sitting and smoking as they wait for us--- and jump up to begin as we arrive.
At one point we reach a vine bridge crossing a narrow, fast running river and we see on the other side, obscured by the bush, a family camped on the hillside mulching, milking and sedimenting flour from felled sago palms. Making sago flour. It’s a familiar sight in PNG and makes me feel at home for the moment.
Olfiet calculated the day's walk to be four to five hours, and it’s been eight, with only a short pause for a lunch of bananas, peanut butter and cigarettes. Paulius has become disagreeable to Olfiet today, sick of being bossed around by the Indonesian. He occasionally offers a wanky to me though. "Bad man I think," he shakes his head.
One day, after we’ve probably climbed and descended four mountains, Olfiet spots our destination--the Membaham aid post, up near the summit of the next mountain as we stand in a valley clearing. "Just up there."
But it’s a cruel illusion that we’re anywhere near. We climb endlessly, and Olfiet stops every ten or fifteen minutes to point to the apparition above. Three hours later and very near tears, I stumble to the aid post door, nearly mad from the pain in my left leg. We camp in the aid post under tattered posters of medical lexicons and in the loving care of a kind woman who apparently is married to the absent aid post worker. The five room building is perched on a small cliffside landing, it’s back to the bush, with a lovely waterfall spilling down only a few paces away. I hobble to the far side of the waterfall to wash before my legs seize up, then return just as Olfiet’s gotten hot compresses and tea ready.
There’s no real pattern to how these places receive tourists. Olfiet’s brought tourists here before, and they’re as kind as can be. Delambela, on the other hand, would be more remote, and they reacted a little coolly when we first arrived. But then, we’re walking through areas where people still fear their neighbors and live on ridge tops for a reason. I have recurrent dreams of falling off a mountainside. The kind of dreams where you’re aware you’re dreaming but you can’t help falling anyway, which is like a juggernaut that gains momentum and yet never ends.
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The next day, just before finally descending into Angguruk, we all rest at a precipice with a 270 degree view of the valley below. It’s a windy extreme place to sit, and it doesn’t take much to imagine being blown off. This is where the porters--at Paulius' nod--go on strike. They want a full day’s pay for the first and last days, both half days, and for a fourth man who attached himself to us along the way. I sit silent as Olfiet and Paulius argue in Indonesian and the porters, Judas scowling, all look on. The charming old man now becomes snarly in his claims of having personally helped me over every mountaintop. I tell Olfiet to tell him to stuff it, he wasn’t asked to come in the first place. He’s come along on an errand to Angguruk anyway, I know, and got free meals along the way.
Our sullen mob now descends into town. We walk to the hospital, which treats people from villages all over the region, with a doctor who is Timorese, like Olfiet. But I dislike him instantly. With a gang of snotty assistants he blithely reports that tomorrow's plane will fly from here to Welarek to pick up passengers, making it full for the leg too Wamena. Too bad, they all shrug. But Friday (four days from now) a tourist charter is expected and I can no doubt charter is back. Olfiet makes noises about my international connection, but this man literally turns his back on him. He is keeper of the radio and can’t be alienated, but it’s also possible for them to get on the radio and consult MAF with a little stroking. Olfiet shakes his head. I ask him to ask them to ask the doctor if he can radio Wamena
please. Olfiet smiles nervously at the doctor's refusal and explains to me in English that he’s a "joker."
What?
"I think he is making a joke."
And I think I’ll be walking back to Wamena.
"We come back."
Angguruk is pleasant. The entire town is embraced by steep mountain walls with gardens climbing up to the top; and there are cows grazing on the airstrip. Across the airfield there are neat wooden abandoned mission houses with slightly overgrown gardens behind them. The mission left two years ago, I’m told, but these houses tell a poignant story. We explore one of them which has
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wormy books in the glass cases and a big cast iron stove that must have been hellish to transport. There are three large bedrooms with adjoining baths. Ghosts everywhere, people who didn’t pack everything when they left. We make our way across the strip to the guest house, which is really a string of bare wooden rooms off a raised walkway, like a motel. We crowd into one and slump to the floor to settle accounts with Paulius and his gang of merry men. Soap, biscuits, instant coffee changes hands. As each man receives his
rupiahs from Olfiet, he slithers off to the porch with barely a nod in my direction. In weakness, I hand the old man a cigarette, for which he says nothing and walks away.
At midafternoon we return to the kindly doctor, who appears to be organizing a hugely expensive charter in my behalf. Or, we can walk to Welarek tomorrow and jump the flight from there. Come back tomorrow.
In the yard behind the guest house the schoolteacher, his brother, and their families come to see the photos of PNG they’ve heard about. More people arrive, and soon fifty or more men, women and kids are passing around my stack of snapshots and an Air Niugini in-flight magazine with shots of Papua new Guineans in traditional and western dress. The school teacher raises the photos of heavily decorated highlanders at the Goroka Show and they all ooooo and aahhhh as he explains in local language. Kids jump up and down to see the images, some of them wandering off on their own when they get one to intently study the big head-dresses, the body paint, the faces of these people who are so much like them, but not.
The teacher holds up and extreme close up shot of William, a Huli from Ambua lodge, wearing his traditional hair wig with daisies and yellow face paint. The crowd roars. He turns the page and there’s Willie in Huli dress next to two bikini-clad girls on the beach in Australia, on a trip to a cultural show there. The kids reach and throw fingers at Willie's pig tusk necklace, his ass grass and fiber apron, asking urgent questions to the schoolteacher that I can’t understand. Clearly they’re oblivious to the girls in bikinis.
Then the teacher opens to the magazine's central map showing the PNG side of the country with barely an inch of Irian Jaya over the western border. He points to the space not illustrated and
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indicates where Wamena and Jayapura and Angguruk would be. Everyone stares or exclaims politely, as though they haven’t seen a map before. I wonder how many of these kids, all in penis gourds and grass skirts, go to school. The older people stand for long minutes holding a snapshot near their face, or they open the magazine and stop at the masthead where a small square picture shows a Papua New Guinean in shirtsleeves and tie, the Minister of Civil Aviation. This may be the most awesome of all contrasts between their colonized and undeveloped existence and that of a free PNG.
The next day Olfiet and I get on the MAF Beechcraft back to Wamena. Turns out the doctor was pulling our legs all the time, and our seats have all the while been secure. He tells Olfiet he just wanted to see my face when he mentioned the cost of a charter. Asshole.
I watch this tough little Cessna touch down with delicacy and then drop its full weight to the nosewheel. You can feel it sigh before the engine revs loudly and the plane shudders up the graded grass strip. Such incredible machines, single engine planes. They’re so fluttery and frail moving through these enormous gorges, so hollow and exhausted when they land on isolated hilltops. High altitude single engine flying is as risky as it gets.
Almost as though the plane knows this, it always seems to catch its own breath before take off. There’s always that hesitation, that pause when the plane squares up at the edge of the runway and turns to go, that second thought, the slight window of opportunity during the final checks, before pulling the throttle and racing down the straightaway in a vibrating defiance of gravity. You’re whole body is thrust back by the force of inevitability, shoulders pinned to the seat, then jolted up in a miraculous lift--when you’re stomach falls and your bowels loosen, and then your heart races with a compressed feeling of ascension. For thirty seconds or so the body is as exalted as the little machine wrapped around you, it’s slicing through turbulence to a calmer space in the sky. The descent into Wamena is beautiful, soaring low over gardens and kunai thatch homes with their feathery plumes of smoke. Streams that oxbow across valley floors, fields of mounded sweet potatoes hung from the sky at eighty five degree angles.
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We touch down with a bounce in Wamena, at about nine thirty AM. Just as I’m descending the plane a young Dani boy comes running onto the tarmac with a note in hand.
"Nassisoolivin! Nassisoolivin!"
"Me?"
It’s a note from Tony and Tara. Folded inside is one of Tara's Polaroid’s: of a tall Bokondini man in wide penis gourd, red sash around his waist, cassowary feather head-dress and beard, standing against a blue sailcloth, his eyes closed and head tilted, and his arms are crossed tenderly hugging his neck--the posture of New Guineans who emerge from their huts into the cold morning air. The image is only 2x2" and in its preciousness it makes my heart sink, suddenly missing my friends. The note is in Tara's hand. From the Baliem Cottages hotel, dated this very morning:
Querida Nancy,
As you can see we’ve yet to leave the valley. The day we got back from Kosarek we positively decided to push on to Karubaga...We decided to scrap our plans and stay on till the 9th in Wamena to do some more portraits (one example included). This morning as fate would have it, we found ourselves basking In the unseasonably warm sun on the airport tarmac eagerly awaiting the arrival of a MAF plane from Angguruk. My heart would beat like crazy in anticipation of the arrival of a certain passenger I thought (stupidly) I was fated to meet again. Alas, it was not to be...During our wait we photographed the cockpit crew if a Merpati Twin Otter bound for Ewer (Asmat) and ensuing conversation afterwards yielded a surprising reward--a quick (& free) flight to Ewer and back with a brief walkabout--about 25 minutes around the boundaries of the fabled Asmat land. That should make my client happy, plus I got some astounding aerials thanks to the crew. The fact that we were the only two passengers aboard helped too, I think. WHERE WERE YOU NANCY? This may sound fucking ridiculous to you now, but I must admit I’m just plain smitten. I realize this can be attributed to a variety of well known (classical)
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causes of which elaboration would be no less than redundant, but as you must have deduced by now, I’m all the time sucker of circumstance. The incurable romantic--how cliché can you get right? Anyway...as I recall you were having trouble deciding what to do with the empty space in your schedule (between Wamena and Jayapura). You could always stay on in Wamena till two days before your flight back home--a perfectly pleasant thing to do--cool weather, frontier town, naked buttocks, exaggerated gourds (or maybe they aren’t), or you could lock in on someone else’s schedule--some one who is dying for your company & possibly book yourself on a series of flights not too unsimilar to the following: (He lists an itinerary that meets him in Jayapuri and continues on to Manokwari in the Bird’s Head of Irian Jaya with him.) Check into the Sentani Inn, near the airport if you fly out on the 9th (Tues). There you will be greeted by a Javanese song and dance duo of unparalleled talent. The Javanese duo will arrange for your accommodation (lodge and board) Our party will overnight to comfortable lodging in the big city, or wherever suits your unquestionable preference. The Javense duo will proceed to Sorong, then onwards to countless exotic and decidedly unerotic destinations in the Molluca islands and Bali...It’ll break this Javanese boy’s heart if you choose to shiver alone in Wamena, but don’t let me try to overly influence you. Ha! My eyes are starting to water already. Seriously though...I thank you for your wonderful warmth and company!
Abrazos, T
P.S. Any out of the way expenditures incurred are refundable through the Javanese duo.
I'm washed (no small feat), packed and at the Merpati desk in half an hour. When the plane touches down in Jayapura I can see the two standing at the edge of the field. I know my being here is consent to share an adventure with Tara, and I’m nervous-- but game, very game. The next day
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we’re all in Manokwari, a surprisingly unlovely seaport. But it’s TNT again, and by the snapshots I have of that trip, we’re happier than students on holiday. Tara shoots sunset at a Japanese War Memorial above town, with the two Indonesian drivers gawking unpleasantly at me. I register at the cinderblock
losmen as Tara’s wife, and, as snapshots of the time indicate, it’s more fun that students on holiday. Tara never pouts, argues, sulks, or bullies me; and Tony is always performing the funniest impersonations. I’ve forgotten how much fun it can be. At night we walk the market where kids giggle and trail behind the very tall Tara. How handsome he is, with big white teeth in an easy smile. In one stall I find pressed butterflies to send to a friend, and Tara is delighted to find a working old Polaroid for his collection. We feast on nail fish at a seaside restaurant where, at about eight o’ clock, the lights go down, the music goes up and young couples start necking all around us. The balcony is strung with colored lights and we sit outside with our feet up on a small table, making puerile comments as Tara and Tony get drunk, me not far behind. The next day we fly on to Sorong, an oil town with no real photo ops. We walk through the market stalls near the bus depot and sit for beef innard soup and sate. Between the stalls of foodstuffs, pots, pans, rainbow bags, herbal remedies and thongs, there are a couple of merchants touting aphrodisiacs over portable microphones--at least that’s what Tara says, and I’d be hard pressed to imagine what else would invoke such snickering crowds and melodramatic hucksterism: "Give this to a married woman--not a virgin, and if you don’t believe me give it to a bitch and she will howl for it and rub herself raw on a post if she cant get it!" Someone holds up dusty laminated photos, including an old ad of Natasia Kinski wrapped in a boa constrictor, which are said to reveal the full range of human sexual tastes and their bizarre outcomes, including half-human/half-ape offspring and three legged men. Someone else barks: "We Indonesians are weak because we play with ourselves in the toilet--the five-finger game!"
Tara and I linger in our choice of snake oils, laughing so hard that we both get a stitch and have to walk around for a minute before coming back. We buy something that enhances performance and prevents the conception of Siamese twins. The next day we all go for a boat ride with some airline employee friends of Tony (whose gift has been revealed to be personal friendships
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everywhere we go), out to the bigger of two airports here. It’s a run down place, but what’s nice is, sitting in a coffee shop outside, we meet yet another friend of Tony's, actually a famous name in expeditions I’m told, Herman Lantang. He’s a founding member of the University of Indonesia Explorer's Club, and an oil exploration executive now. Charming and jovial, he speaks English for my sake, and shows photos from his wallet of his wife and kids standing on the highest peak in Indonesia. More interesting yet are old black and white shots of himself as a young anthropologist in the Baliem Valley twenty years ago. He was in the South Baliem gorge, southwest of Tangma, in 1968 or 9. Here he is in a courting ceremony and then again posed in penis gourd and a hairnet (traditional dress) with his arm around a Dani man. I feel like I’ve opened a great cupboard of new information, and I long to rummage around awhile, but Herman has to dash, he stands and graciously bows goodbye.
Now we bump into another friend of Tony’s, a pot-smoking chopper pilot sitting in the coffee shop. He works for a timber company and will take Tare and Tony for aerial shots this afternoon. The airline manager comes by and invites us all to a big seafood lunch feast: sates, grilled fish, prawns, watercress and a dry mint of some sort. All the familiarity and kindness, and Tony’s broad social net, makes Indonesia, not to mention Irian Jaya, seem like one village. Everyone’s a school chum, a cousin, in-law or business associate. At night we all get roaring drunk at a cavernous seaside restaurant near the hotel. Me on two beers, Tony and Tara on shots of whiskey; we can’t even finish our food, and end up giggling about the prostitutes swarming around as if I were invisible. Back at the hotel I retch in the toilet bowl, and afterwards, Tara sets the timer and takes shots of us posing half naked and bleary eyed. He’s handsome, I’m half alive. Parting shots. In the morning I reluctantly see Tony and Tara off. The instant they’re gone I miss them desperately, miss the good company and fun of it all. At the airport, two airline friends of Tony take pity and treat me to breakfast with grilled fish in jackroot sauce, then, god bless them, strain for over an hour to entertain me in English.
Suddenly I feel more abandoned than ever before, fully aware that there’s no road forward for Tara and myself. For some time afterward, though, we do stay in touch, and there are scratchy
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radio-phone calls from Jakarta to me in Hagen. Could we meet in Singapore for New Year’s? Maybe I could move to Hong Kong? But the calls fade away.
Three years on, I’m sitting at a big table in a New Jersey diner with several girlfriends from Manhattan. I’ve brought them out for the day for joyrides while I practice flying at a small airport. They’ve just survived a hairy spin with an old man in a WWII-era twin-engine (not unlike the first plane I flew from Vanimo to Irian Jaya) who hijacked them while I was flying practice patterns in my Cessna. I’ve been back in the States finishing my PhD coursework, holed up in rural New Jersey with a young Dutch flight instructor, Mark, and now this phase is over. Sandy, Corinne, Michelle, and my soon-to-be-ex, Mark, and I are having lunch at the diner near the airfield and laughing about the old man who mistook my friends for models and set off to impress them but forgot to wear his headphones. Meanwhile, I’m zooming around in the practice pattern, when the wind shifts, and the tower tells me to reverse my course and land on the opposite end of the field now. The fields in these little airports are two ends of the same strip, and planes take off and land in one or another direction according to the wind pattern. No problem: but I’m still a novice and my focus is all hands, instruments, horizon and little else. What I fail to see is this big moose of a plane pitching down to land at the other end of the airstrip just as I begin to descend. No headphone, the old goon hasn’t been told to switch directions, so, quickly, I zoom the engine and pitch up and right, into a fly-by that takes me close enough to see the terror on my friends’ faces just before I’m airborne. I fly around again and see the old plane has landed safely. But when I arrive at the tower ready to bark at the pilot for risking everyone’s life, he smiles broadly and says, "Well Nance, it’s a good thing you knew your emergency procedures."
"What emergency procedures??"
So we’re drinking vanilla sundaes and eating sloppy tuna fish sandwiches, remembering all this, when Sandy remembers something. She’s a photo editor with a big photo archive in New York and always has good stories. Once she was caught in an elevator with Claudia Schiffer and explained how perfect the woman’s skin was, absolutely exquisite. "I met the most interesting Indonesian man last week. Tall, funny. A good photographer, too. He had some New Guinea photos, I think
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from the other side, what’s that? Irian Jaya. But mostly news shots. Cool guy, he was in town for the weekend and came to the office. Tara something."
"Tara? Tara Sosowardoyo?"
"Maybe. Do you know him? Could be something like that."
"Tara!? Tara’s the man from Irian Jaya—I told you about him—the Javanese duo! Where is he? Is he here—in New York?"---Could he be near? Could he return just in time to make me forget Mark and want to be in New Guinea again?
"Oh, Nance, I think he’s gone. Sorry about that. "
But it’s enough to be reminded. The angst over my flight instructor, over my leaving the little cabin in the woods and the temporary comfort of the States gradually dissolves. A weightlessness comes over me: Tara, the big world outside, other lives. It is a perceptible shift in gears, almost an epistemological change, and now I’m anxious to be back in PNG.
It’s four years before I get back to Irian Jaya. I’m living in PNG and have been hired to guide an American tour group through the Baliem Valley, where it’s thrilling to just stand in the wide open landscape again. But first there’s a flight to Wewak where I overnight at the Windjammer Hotel and meet a salty dog at the bar named Paul, who entertains me with stories. He’s skinny, with a bum eye and a big hole in his face from skin cancer. He’s up from Brisbane and tells me he makes a circuit through PNG regularly, selling machine parts. But as the evening evolves, I discover he’s really prospecting for gold, and will go bush with two national partners in the morning, flying to Vanimo first, and then off by road somewhere. One more mystery, one more loose end wandering this country looking for the next big break. He loves PNG and shouts me beers as we stand outside the diningroom looking across the big bay at a Malaysian fishing boat that’s well within national waters. It’s a free for all, I think. No way to monitor the major infractions, no interest in monitoring the little ones. I realize how rare it was to know someone like Peter, in Hagen, who was ever-driven to ‘do the right thing.’ Would that every expat here shared the objective.
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In the morning, Paul’s there at the airport waiting to catch his twin-prop flight before mine. It’s raining and a lot of people are milling about, making the linoleum floors wet and muddy, as the plane touches down and a handful of passengers disembark. The pilot dashes into the back of the terminal and waits. And we all wait and wait in the driving rain now. He comes out to run his preflight checks, then dashes back inside and waits. A ticket counter commotion erupts, and the flight is announced. People file up to board, and I wave sincere good luck to Paul and his Vanimo mate. The plane takes off without hitch, and only then does the sun begin to break out.
An Australian sits on the bench near me and begins a monologue about his rough and ready life with Ok Tedi mine in Tabubil, Western Province. He often goes to Jayapura, just to shop, but Air Niugini, he says, is absolutely hopeless, a right joke of an airline. I look away, but he keeps talking at me. Finally, my tourists arrive in transit, and we all board for Jayapura, where our guide Sitepu meets us at the airport and conveys us to a hotel downtown. That’s where I meet the two Borneo men who will accompany us on a ‘fam’, or familiarization, tour from the company that’s hired me. Bambang and Pungkao. And they’ve not only brought each of us a t-shirt, but they present me with a Swiss Army knife engraved in my name. I’m touched nearly to tears. They’re here on a historic visit, which begins after our trek, when they’ll climb Irian Jaya’s tallest mountain in commemoration of Pungkao’s father’s climb, some forty years before, when he was amongst the first Dayak tribesman to scale its snowcapped peak, as part of a Dutch expedition at that time. This was the Anton Colijn Expedition of 1936, which scaled the snowcapped Cartensz Peak, and although it wasn’t the first time a Dayak came along as a carrier, it was the first time one of these Dayak ‘sherpas’ to the Dutch explorers’ summitted the island’s tallest peak. The Cartensz lies on the southern half of the Irian Jaya mainland, as the western extension of a mountain cordillera running east-west across Papua New Guinea. It’s because the entire New Guinea island is slightly tipped southeastward that this mountain line runs through the northern part of the eastern side and then the southern end of its western side. But the Cartensz is estimated to be 5050 metres high, making it the tallest peak on the entire island, and with its glaciers and icy peaks, unquestionably its most dramatic and improbably beautiful sights in all the tropics. The Colijn expedition brought eight
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Dayak carriers along, most of whom were picked up at the coastal town of Babo, on the Bird’s Head, where these migrants from Borneo were working for a Dutch oil exploration company. There are photos from the expedition that show these young Dayak men in their bowl haircuts and knee socks, standing beside the slighter Amungme tribesmen in penis gourds and cane belts; and then beside the taller Dutchmen in their long white trousers and crisp shirts.
4
4
See Ballard, Chris, Steven Vink and Anton Ploeg, 2001, Race to the Snow, Photography and the exploration of Dutch New Guinea, 1907-1936. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, pp.73 ff.
The group is an interesting mix. There are Katie and Lil, a cheerful middle aged lesbian couple from Minneapolis, and the Bernsteins, a sharp and funny couple from Colorado, he’s in the music business. Then there’s Maureen, who is frightfully anxious about her preparedness, and yet, throughout the trip, will recount her adventures on cattle drives and ice breakers, when it seems Herculean that’s she’s managed to even leave her Boston co-op. And there’s Ron, who seems tetchy and uncooperative at first: Don’t they want to speak English? Don’t they feel shamed by our talk about penis gourds? Have they just taken their shirts off for us? Didn’t I tell him the opposite thing yesterday? And yet, for all his niggling, he is also the first say, in a lull, "Isn’t this lovely?" and "I really love this."
In Wamena we’re joined by Pini, our Torajaland guide, and check into the Baliem Palace Hotel. This is what the frontier town of Wamena calls upmarket, and it’s very new, with a central courtyard and grotto-like bathrooms with skylights. Partially owned by Sam Chandra, I discover later. Sam and Wamena have both come up a bit in the world. Outside the hotel, there’s a permanent audience of semi-naked would-be porters, waiting for work and artifacts sales; inside, lounging on the vestibule sofas, are the neatly dressed Indonesian guides, with a few Dani, in safari vests and jeans. There’s always an assimilation period for visitors, when they accommodate themselves to the terms of their basic comfort: to realize there are towels, flush toilets for tonight, buckets of water rather than a shower, and about forty percent of claims to be on the menu. When we order a Coke, a small kid is sent across the road to fetch one at a trade store. Katie and Lil have read books and seen videos, so they’re attention is fixed on the trek, not their accommodation
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tonight. But because I haven’t anticipated the uneven quality of our rooms, or the damp chill that descends by late afternoon, this is my most difficult time, putting all my chicks to bed without crises. When Lil unexpectedly needs a tampon, despite hormone replacement, I drag her through every Javanese shop in a bank of dry good shops across from the market--both of us struggling in absurd Bahasian gestures to make our need known. When Lil finally gestures inserting something in the vagina, and laughter breaks out all around, I know this is going to be a fun trip.
Still, these are Americans. Ron is the first to be upset to find Pini giving cigarettes to young kids. He’s on a quest for the real thing, the genuine article, first-contact experience where naked is not staged; and he shopped for this from a brochure. But there is nothing really tourist-tableau about Irian Jaya, even as it’s experienced thousands of mainly Dutch trekkers thus far. Americans find it hardest to believe their presence doesn’t corrupt the natives, or inspire traumatic envy. For one thing, tourism is so small an industry here that none of the villages are dedicated to it. Our first trek is a day-trip around Wamena, and at the end of it, I press Pini to take us to Sioroba, to see the mountain wall of Peter Matthiessen’s book. Maureen is raveling with a copy of it. We walk through a drizzle into the village, across log bridges and tracks of mud beneath pandanas trees, where Pungkau, tenderly holding Maureen’s hand, demonstrates the Dayak headhunting call. And when we come upon the guest cottages for Sioroba, we see a clutch of Dutch tourists we saw earlier in Jayapura. Then we follow a path familiar to me, to enter the central compound where I’ve seen Pue kill, singe and cook pigs for his guests a number of times. A young girl walks past and I stop to ask her, Pini translating, Where’s Pue? She looks up and they both ask, You know Pue? Yes, of course, I say. The girl says nothing. Pini says he died last year. Ohmygod. Was it a fight? Oh no, not a fight. He died of shortness of breath, some respiratory infection they suppose. How could that be? The little girl says something, and Pini agrees, without translating. But as we exit the compound, from behind, Pini says, "He was an old man anyway I think. He died of old age." Pue was 37. My age.
We set off in buses to Sugokmo the next morning, with sixteen Dani attendants in little more than penis gourds piled on the mound of our gear in a dump truck. From Sugokmo we assemble day packs and hand out heavy gear to these handsome and friendly young men, some wearing
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those familiar red Bokondini sashes. It’s great to be back. Great to see the place has so little changed in ways that count. We cross a rope bridge, this one secured by steel cable and hanging next to the poured cement pylons of its replacement under construction. Pini tells me how a Japanese tourist and his guide were swept away from this bridge the year before, and he points to a concrete marker with Japanese inscriptions on the shore. I look down to the rough clip of whitewater below us. "Forgodsake Pini, don’t tell the tourists."
At one village I come pulling up the rear, and pass the open door of a teacher’s house on the hillside, through which I see Maureen and Pungkau, who’s been kindly helping her, sitting with the teacher, having a chat. I descend to the school, meet up with Ron, Pini and the rest, and we walk on. Not much later I’ve already forgotten about Maureen and Pungkau when we pull uphill and away from the valley village. I look back and they’re nowhere to be seen, so I send Pini back to the teacher’s house. But Pini runs back saying he can’t find either of them, they’re nowhere. The Bernsteins are way ahead of us now, across the river and cresting the next ridge top, were I assume they’ll join Katie and Lil. This time I send a porter back, and we trudge forward toward Kurima, where we plan to stop for lunch. Waiting there, as the porters and I organize noodles and cheese sandwiches for lunch, patience ebbs away and this Maureen and Pungkau disappearance takes on the proportions of an emergency. Ron is getting stroppy. What if she’s fallen off a ledge? What if they’re lost and wandering off somewhere? Unlike PNG, where rascal gangs are a worry in the bush, this is a Police State with virtually no crime against trekkers. Hot water is ready, here’s the peanut butter and crackers, Pini helping me now with more natural hospitality than I will ever muster. The Bernsteins offer to walk back after lunch. And finally Pungkau and Maureen saunter in, having never seen Pini or the porter sent to muster them. They’ve had a really wonderful time with the schoolteacher and been shown around the entire village. Pungkau apologizes. Maureen stands above me now, slathered in sunscreen, hat tied at the chin, leaning on a walking stick and looking more refreshed than any of us.
"Really, you shouldn’t be such a worrywort, I can handle myself."
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That night we camp in the high and lovely village of Ibouroma. Most of us are on one huge new hut, and Katie and Lil beg for a second one because they claim to be dreadful snorers. This they don’t so much prove tonight, but a few nights later, when we’re all forced together in one hut, and the monotonous rolling bass of the two of them seem to make the walls heave, like in a cartoon. Pini miraculously pulls from his pack tinned garlic mussels for all of us to share, and then makes the most wonderful pot of peanut soup. Over the course of the trip he will make fried egg dishes, banana gelatins, and hand around mixed nuts periodically. I’m laughing with tears in my eye at how these guys are supposed to learn about tour guiding from me!
The porters all sit with us in Ibouroma and tell their stories, first explaining their names, ages and marital status. All so young--between 17 and 20—they agree that, yes, they have girlfriends, but are otherwise endearingly shy. One has a name meaning blanket, because he was the new blanket his mother received at his birth. I try to tell them this is a lover’s nickname in PNG, but it’s too hard to explain. Then they sing nonsense and love songs, in beautiful harmonies, beating their chests and thumping their thighs; one kid really gets rocking with his head shaking and hands beating in double-time. I take a picture of this moment that always reminds me of everything I love about Irian Jaya.
Ibouroma throws us a pig kill and mock-battle the next day, which are more fun than I’d have imagined. Curious about one albino boy whose skin is scabbed and red, Arnie and Polly Bernstein and I approach and send this lad into fits of terror, while no one else around seems bothered. In the afternoon, we head off to Tangma--the hardest leg of the trek. I’ve been dreading the sight Peter and I faced when he descended this mountain face years ago---of a near-ninety degree wall with narrow, barely perceptible, footpaths snaking down the ledge for 500 feet or more. This time, thankfully, the ledge is covered in brush and the view is slightly less vertiginous. I find myself able to clutch grass clumps as I pretty much slide down in a hunched position. Low-lying cloud fills the valley basin below us, one great cotton pillow thrown down a depression, and near the bottom I turn back to cheer everyone else on, just as Arnie’s coaching Polly not to fall. One by one, we make the bottom, hearts pounding and throats aching from thirst. Like an idiot, I chose this time to
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inform them they’ll be returning the same route tomorrow, which prompts the group to collectively slump to the ground. Then Ron realizes climbing is never as bad as descending. This seems to raise morale slightly, until a troop of barefoot six-year-olds comes running down the path behind us, light as air. "Rub it in," says Lil.
We’re good walkers, though, none of us real complainers. When one of the porters straddles a pig-fence to help Katie over, nothing but a penis gourd and a smile as he lifts her up, she turns back to the rest of us, deadpan.
"I’ve seen more scrotum on this trip than I have my entire adult life."
Pungkau teaches us the Dayak war cry, which scares no one but gives us great pleasure when one of us occasionally breaks into it. During one never-ending climb, we have to double over every few feet to keep from cramping. My lungs are wheezing and my calves ache. I’m with the last stragglers, bringing up the rear. The porters scramble ahead, and I’m ready to puke from exhaustion, one leg trembling now as I plant it uphill. Out of nowhere a porter scrambled back down to me and hands me a cool can of Coke. I look up to see Bambang waving at the top. He’s held this can in a freezer bag for days, just for such an occasion. The man is amazing.
"I asked for a Sprite." The porter smiles anyway.
Once I’ve reached the top, I find the entire crew’s been enjoying a break and a long smoke, and even Ron is relaxed, wanting to push off now. "Waaaiiiiiit!" I gasp. "Who’s missing?" First Katie crests the ridge, her head inching itself over the crest step by step, until we find it arrives with a big smile. We applaud. Then ten long minutes later we see the top of Lil’s head appear, then her full head, and two porter’s heads on either side. They’ve got hold of her elbows, and she’s shaking her head. "You have no idea what trouble I’ve had getting these kids up here."
Wanem is an administrative center, well landscaped and pretty, but also cramped, two rows of clapboard houses and a tall post with a speaker continuously playing one radio station. The village men are congregating in the school, which is the only public building and, as such, the place we hope to bed down tonight. So for now, we hang about outside watching the Dani listen obediently to a government appointed official from Wamena, whom everyone calls ‘chief.’ They’re planning
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the opening of a new aid post, we learn, which will involve donations of sweet potato and one pig from every family. Is this a health tax? Or just an honorarium? All the Dani squat on their haunches and share hand-rolled smokes, looking submissive to this young well-dressed Irian official who takes everyone’s name down on a list. There is no dissent or correction we can make out. It’s hard to know whether this official is Dani, or coastal, an actual ‘chief’ or an outsider. But its an interesting scene, not unlike a few I’ve seen n PNG, including elderly villagers paying absolute respect to some educated youth, maybe an Uncle Tom, maybe the next Independence leader. I can’t find the back story, which is what makes it so interesting. Is this the Wanem representative? Why so much ‘in kind’ contributions for an aid post? Will they have a feast? All these questions are left unanswered, reflecting so many veils dropped by language and familiarity that I might somehow raise, were we across the border.
Hours later we take possession of the building ourselves. This is our last night in the bush, tomorrow we’ll descend from here back to Wamena. So I must count out tips and pay for everyone. When the porters drift in to collect, Pini, perhaps flush with the officialdom of the day, establishes a forum with the young men for all of us to ask them questions. Once again, the Dani sit cross-legged on the floor, while the rest of us have plastic chairs, and a kerosene lamp keeps a descending darkness at bay. It’s a remarkably officious stage direction for what becomes a relaxed and good humored conversation. But it begins stiffly, with some of us asking meaningless questions, or questions mean nothing to these young men--Do they think about tourists as intruders? Do they feel humiliated by showing off their simple lives to us? No. And no. Ron isn’t buying this and mutters something about predictable responses. Polly just wants to know what it is about us that always makes them laugh? But this loses its punch in translation and just makes us laugh, which thereby reduces everyone to giggles. Ron turns to Polly and says if she’ll just calm down for a minute he can get his question across. But in the end we learn that most of the young men don’t speak Indonesian anyway, and it’s Pini who’s been formulating their answers.
Maureen and I turn into our bedrolls in the main room, while all the others get deluxe closets, Katie and Lil providing soundtrack. Maureen wakes at 5 AM for extended ablutions, and my nose
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wakes me to the earthy cookfire smells of every highlands village. Muscle by strained muscle I start to revive, obliquely watching Maureen, sitting at the end of her sleeping bag, studying a hand mirror. Don’t be a worry wort. I can handle myself. She evenly applies a liquid base coat, holding the mirror deftly enough to catch intruding daylight. Then the finer details of her eyes and lips. She mimics the concentration of singsing performers in PNG, backstage, as they finish the fussy lines of ochre and charcoal face paintings with orchid vine brushes. When the sun rises we assemble for a parting photo, everyone standing to the side of the school building on a ridgeline. What the photo doesn’t show is the scene behind, and below, where a cluster of round huts are emitting cookfire smoke and one enormous long pigsty appears to house all the children, women and swine together, most of them waving at us.
Our very last night in Irian Jaya is spent in Sentani, near the Jayapura airport. There’s a dwarf standing on a chair at the front desk and, like so many
losman, a family lounging behind him watching children sing pop songs on TV. The toilets are broken, milk is finished, and laundry will take overnight now, very sorry. That’s okay, we agree. We’re happy for sheets. And, despite the dead waterbugs in my bathroom, I’m relieved not to feel wind when I squat to pee. The best thing about our stay is the cold beer we take on a driving tour to McArthur’s base camp above town. The worst thing comes the following morning, when everyone receives their clean laundry but Ron, who seems to be missing socks and underwear. Where would they be? The dwarf is so sorry, and he checks out back where the laundry girls assure us everything’s come in from the line. Ron checks his room, but no, they’re not there. He calls for the Manager, who finds this implied theft hard to believe and, very apologetically, begins another search out back. We all check our own laundry piles, but to no avail. Then we break for lunch at a nearby restaurant where a loopy Mickey Mouse is painted on one wall and the clientele seem to be a mix of American missionaries and unshaven Vietnam vets with their child brides. Next door we find a big brightly lit supermarket where, as if in a dream, we find Dove ice cream bars for dessert. But back at the hotel, Ron’s laundry hasn’t materialized. He’s angry now, and a row starts between the dwarf, in his fractured English, and Ron in his over-articulated condescension. Our guides Sitepu, Cornelius and Andreas don’t defuse it by 75
stepping in to defend the beleaguered receptionist, although the level of ironic courtesy in all of this is really comic.
"He is telling you, Sir, how very sorry he is, Sir, but the laundry, Sir, he says, is not here."
"And I am telling you, kid, that I am sorry but I will not leave this desk until it reappears."
"We are sorry Sir for your trouble Sir."
"Fine, thank you, now what’re you going to do about it?"
"The laundry Sir, is not to be found. We look everywhere."
I ask what the socks and underwear might be worth, thinking this might be solved by my petty cash. Sixty dollars, Ron tells me, although the solution is unsatisfying, as he is sure someone’s lifted his clean white articles.
"It is their responsibility and I expect them to do something about it."
"Well, they’re not likely to have that kind of money, I’d guess," knowing this is roughly the price of three rooms for a night. Sitepu and the staff look mortified. "Why don’t I just reimburse you."
Lil says from her spot at a card game that Ron should just calm down and be grateful he has underwear. "It’s not the worst that can happen, after all."
"It won’t be, believe me!" Ron returns to his room.
The rest of us play Twentyone and Hearts, until the power goes out. So we light candles and open the French doors to see that the whole town’s now lying in darkness. In the trill of birds and electric cicadas we can also hear three howling cats who must be competing for a female in heat somewhere. Eventually Ron returns, sheepish, to tell us that, while repacking, the missing laundry’s tumbled out in neatly folded piles. He apologizes to the reception and to anyone who’ll listen. Lil tells him he’s got a lot more courage than she does, "I’d probably just lie about it at this point myself." We all laugh, finally a group again.
At the airport, over coffee, Arnie and Polly tell us the story of a terrible bicycle accident Polly had that fractured everything in her face. Even with the best cranial surgeons--including one of the best in the world, of whom I actually from an Oprah segment I think--they were not at all sure
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she’d ever look, well, okay again. They took bone from her skull to build up her cheeks and chin, and of course all kinds of stitches gave her a virtually bespoke facelift. And all her teeth are new. But to look at her now, you’d be hard pressed to say she’s even had a peel; the skin is ruddy, and natural, the shape of her face balanced and elegant; she’s so attractive. We’re stupefied. Not one of us has something comparable to say. I broke my wrist once. Polly says she misses her naturally high cheekbones. Arnie says the whole experience terrified him more than her. People are never what they seem…I have new-found respect for plastic surgery and a sliver of hope that, were I dropped on my face from a tall building, I might, so to speak, rebound. Now we shuffle past immigration and into the pre-board lounge. Just when our plane arrives, and before people stand to board, I jet to the ladies room one last time. The stall has a floor to ceiling door, which is unusual, but I imagine it affords more privacy for those squatting over the ceramic hole in the floor. But when I’m ready to leave, I find the latch is broken, locked. I’m all alone in the place while the speakers announces boarding for our flight. I shake the door, unable to get a grip anywhere. The hinge pins look rusted, they’ll be a nightmare to get out. Climbing over can’t be done--the door has barely six inches to the ceiling. So I call out, "Help me! Someone please help!" to the sound of passengers mingling and the repeat call to board. My head is on fire and tears are welling in my eyes. Get me out of here---get me home to PNG, to my privacy, my comfort zone, tok Pisin, backwards Australians and all---to my life! I give the door one great shove and it bursts open.