Ottawa, October 19, 2015
The
Ugly: Papua New Guinea
On July 21st,
2014, I flew from Honiara after eleven expensive but interesting days in the
Solomon Islands. My destination was Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New
Guinea. PNG would be my 117th
country, and I was looking forward to it, although it was clear from reading my
Lonely Planet that it was also going to be an expensive experience. The LP also talked about what a dangerous,
menacing city Port Moresby is, so I had already bought a connecting ticket to
head on to Madang, on the north coast, later the same day.
When I got
off the airplane in Port Moresby , I headed to join the visa-on-arrival queue. I was one of only two people in the line,
while the adjacent queue, for foreigners already possessing a residence permit,
consisted of two planeloads of Aussies headed to work in mines and a giant
natural gas development in the interior.
They were a menacing-looking group, hard-faced men with bulging biceps,
tattoos and shaven heads; I wouldn’t have wanted to run into any of them on a
dark night outside a pub. PNG is full of
expats, mostly Aussies, running the extractive resource sector; PNG was an
Aussie protectorate for decades before independence in 1975 and Australia still
dominates its former colony economically, as well as giving $500 million a year
in foreign aid in return for PNG housing boat people who try to reach Australia
in a notorious internment facility on Manus island. A number of top civil servants in PNG have
been Australians over the years, although lately relations have cooled
noticeably.
As I sat
waiting for my flight to Madang, I listened in on a conversation between two
Aussie miners and a newly-arrived rookie colleague. They were headed up to the highlands, to Mt.
Hagen, and the veterans were telling blood-curdling stories about how dangerous
conditions are for Western expats there.
“If you want to go to the shop to buy cigarettes or groceries, you tell
your supervisor and he’ll arrange a vehicle with security guards to take
you. You don’t walk to the shops alone
unless you want to end up dead!”
Ordinarily I tend to discount such stories in most countries as
exaggerating the dangers, but PNG really is one of the most violent countries
on earth, with a staggering murder rate, a tradition of blood feuds and
vengeance killings and a culture of raskols
(rascals, Pidgin for “gangsters”) who seem to operate with the sort of impunity
and gratuitous violence that rival the notorious street gangs of Central
America. I had just listened to a BBC
radio documentary about violence in PNG a few weeks earlier, and even PNG
cabinet ministers admitted that over the past two decades the levels of
violence have gone through the roof.
I caught
my flight to Madang, over the steep mountainous interior that has prevented the
country from linking together its various provinces with roads. With few exceptions, long distance travel in
PNG is by air as the various provinces are rarely connected by land. When I landed, passengers rapidly dispersed
into various Toyota Land Cruisers, usually with metal screens protecting the
windows, and I was left alone. The
airport staff (all six of them; it’s a pretty small airport) became concerned
and asked me where I was staying and who was picking me up. I hadn’t reserved a room, and I had thought I
would either catch a bus or a taxi into the city, but there were none to be
seen anywhere. The airport staff were
keen to lock up and get home while it was still light, and they directed me to
a phone to call the Madang Lodge to come and collect me. It took them a while to arrive, and the staff
were getting noticeably edgy about their personal safety, so they asked someone
to give me a lift. He was a minister in
a local church who had come to pick up another church member who hadn’t shown
up. We drove partway into town in his
tank-like Land Cruiser before the Madang Lodge minibus showed up and I got
transferred. I don’t think I have ever
been in an airport where the locals were so concerned about my personal
security, and the LP lists Madang as being the most laid-back, safest city in
the entire country.
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| The waves pounding against the seawall at Madang Resort |
The Madang
Lodge was listed as the only budget accommodation in Madang, and it did have
some rooms for as little as 130 kina (PGK; PGK 130 was about US$ 55 at the
time). Hardly a thunderous bargain, but
a lot better than the 400 or 500 kina that some other places were charging as
their cheapest rates. The hotel was
located on the seaside, and huge waves were pummeling the headland near the
restaurant, making it impossible to sit outside on that side of the hotel. It was already getting dark, so I took
advantage of the gym facilities and the pool to get some much-needed exercise,
had some overpriced and under-tasty food in the restaurant and went to bed,
where I was kept awake by the short space allocated to the bed, and by a
herculean coughing fit by the man in the room next door starting at 4 am.
I had
chosen Madang as my first destination as I had heard that PNG’s diving is some
of the best in the world. I was a bit
concerned by the pounding seas, but the diving takes place inside the barrier
reef that encloses the harbour and some offshore islands. I was dropped off by the Madang Lodge minivan
and wandered into the very fancy (and very expensive) Madang Resort
grounds. I found the dive shop, paid up
my PGK 400 (about US$ 160) for two dives, got my equipment and met my fellow
divers, mostly a group of professors from a university in Lae, a city just down
the coast from Madang. The diving was
pretty underwhelming, with a very lax and casual divemaster, some pretty
inexperienced and unconfident fellow divers, not particularly great visibility and
coral that was in pretty poor shape. The
dives were short, too, as we dove in one group and a couple of people ran out
of air quite quickly, bringing the rest of us up early with lots of air left
over. There wasn’t much to see in terms
of fish, either, with no turtles or sharks or rays to brighten the
experience. The divemaster stood on the
coral, picked stuff up and generally didn’t set much of an example for his
divers. For the price I was paying, I
thought it was incredibly poor value.
I hadn’t
booked onward travel, as I had left open the possibility of subsequent days of
diving, but the first day of diving was enough to dissuade me from that. I had an SP Export beer at the resort while
contemplating the utter amazement of the local Papuan woman who ran the counter
at the dive shop. “What are you DOING
here in PNG?” she asked when I said that I wasn’t working here. She found it inconceivable that any sane
person would come to her country just to visit.
It was true that I hadn’t seen another tourist yet; the numerous white
faces I had seen around town or in the hotels were all working here for foreign
aid, NGOs, universities or mining outfits.
I added to
my image of the Crazy White Tourist by walking into town to use an ATM (my
supply of kina just kept evaporating), talked to Air Niugini about flights to
Wewak, my next destination, then tried to find the ferry lines that supposedly
ran along the north shore of PNG, Star Shipping and Lutheran Shipping. As it turned out, the latter was bankrupt and
didn’t operate anymore, while Star Shipping’s next ferry wasn’t for another 3
weeks. This decided the issue: I bought a flight to Wewak for the 24th
(there were no flights before then) and made a tentative booking from Wewak to
Vanimo for the 25th, in case my tentative plan to go up the Sepik
River came to naught. Pleased with my
logistical successes, I walked to the stand for PMVs (public motor vehicles,
the most common public transport in PNG) that would take me back to the Madang
Lodge. It was located just outside a
Chinese-run supermarket (as in the Solomon Islands, almost all shops in PNG are
owned by Chinese businessmen), and as I stood there, the shutters started
coming down on the shop and two local employees started sweeping the sidewalk
outside in a pretty lacklustre fashion.
The Chinese owner walked out and started hitting them with a stick; he
wasn’t hitting them very hard, but it still evoked looks of poisonous contempt
from all the locals gathered around the market.
At this
point I made a serious strategic blunder.
My Teva sandals had been falling apart for weeks, with the soles coming
loose from the rest of the sandals. I
saw a guy doing shoe repair and asked him if he could fix my sandals. The strategic error was not making sure of
the price beforehand. I should know better;
on my first trip to India in 1997 I had run into an identical situation in
which the cobbler had demanded a huge sum afterwards. I was busy chatting with the local men who
were selling various things in the market; they were pleasantly surprised to see
a white guy walking anywhere, rather than being driven around in a 4WD. The conversation was going well; we were
talking about the highlands and banditry on the buses that lead from Madang to
Mount Hagen, and having a bit of a laugh, when the shoe repair guy
finished. He handed back the sandals,
neatly stitched, and asked me for 100 kina (about US$ 40). For 20 minutes of work, this was an
outrageous amount, and I felt like an idiot.
I tried to bargain, but he wasn’t having any of it, and suddenly the atmosphere
in the market changed; everyone was looking at me as the rich guy who wasn’t
going to pay a poor local worker a fair price for his services. I decided that with the afternoon waning and
people starting to vacate the downtown area, it wasn’t a good time to get into
an ill-tempered argument with a bunch of pretty burly guys in a country known
for casual violence. I paid the money,
cursed my rookie error and got onto a PMV back to the hotel.
I had
another day to spend in my little cell, which passed with lots of reading,
juggling, Sudoku and an hour of internet on a horrible connection that cost PGK
20 (over US$ 8), the most expensive internet I had paid for in a long
time. I was starting to feel that PNG really
wasn’t worth the tremendous expense. A
bit of working out in the gym, a beer in the hotel restaurant and that was it
for the day.
I was glad
to see the back of Madang the next day.
At the airport I asked whether I could get American Airlines frequent
flyer points, since Air Niugini is partners with Qantas, and American Airlines
partners Qantas. The clerks got a bit
confused, thought that I was a Qantas premium member and escorted me out of the
crowded waiting room to a premium lounge where I contentedly sat reading my
Kindle, sipping tea and juice and munching on sandwiches. The flight to Wewak didn’t take very long,
and soon enough I was walking out of the Wewak airport. This time nobody warned me of my impending
demise, and anyway the hotels I was interested in were directly across the road
from the terminal. The Airport Lodge was
full, and the upmarket Talio was insanely expensive, with PGK 520 (US$ 220) for
a room made out of a shipping container.
The third hotel I tried, the Surfsite, was truly hideous, with a new
building being built directly over the low-rise motel. PGK 130, the same price as I had paid in
Madang, got me a peeling, mouldy concrete box with a decaying ceiling and a
broken door. I asked why the door didn’t
lock and was told that they had had to open a door when a customer left town
with his key. Aside from wondering why
they didn’t have a duplicate key, I also wondered when this had happened. “Last year,” I was told. Not the most dynamic of motel staff, then….
 |
| Wewak Beach--the highlight of my PNG experience |
I left my
hovel behind and caught a PMV the several kilometres into downtown Wewak in
search of possible tours up the Sepik, an ATM to replace my constantly
hemorrhaging supply of kina, and a decent lunch. Downtown was a dusty, depressing area, with a
45-minute queue at each of the two functioning ATMs in town and a third bank
whose ATM was closed---for the next week.
I stood in line with an Aussie ex-diplomat working for Oxfam who told me
stories of how hard it was to work in PNG, and how much money was necessarily wasted
on astronomically expensive hotel rooms, flights and meals, along with security
guards and new Land Cruisers. I asked
about Sepik tours and was given prices that were so high that I didn’t know
whether to laugh or cry. The cheapest
offer I got was 3000 kina (over US$ 1000) for a 3-day trip up the river to
various longhouses, but only if I could find three other people to share the
trip; if not, it would be 5000 kina. I
decided that, interesting as lowland Papuan culture must be, it wasn’t worth that
kind of money. I went by the Air Niugini
office to pay for my reservation to Vanimo for the next day, and then wandered
in a vain search for a restaurant or bar that was open. Everything was closed, so I found a shop
selling postcards and bought three. I
went to buy stamps, and even there I found a PNG sting in the tail, as each
postcard cost PGK 8.70, or over US$3.50, one of the most expensive postcard
tariffs in the world. I caught another
PMV back to my hovel, went for a run along the beach, did some decent
body-surfing and ate at Talio (the 520-kina-a-night place) and retired early to
my room, with luggage and furniture piled against the door, as there was a
dubious-looking crowd drinking beer outside the hotel.
 |
| Peanut vendor in Vanimo |
July 25th,
only four days after my arrival in PNG, I woke up early, went for a long run
along the beach, had breakfast at the Talio while writing postcards, went into
town to mail the cards at the post office, then walked across the road to the
airport. In the waiting room I ran into
the first backpackers I had seen in PNG, a Slovenian couple who had planned to
be in the country for 3 weeks but who were bolting for the border after only 10
days. They had spent most of their time
up in the highlands, and talking to them I was glad that I hadn’t gone with my
first plan to go there. It had been
miserably expensive, hard to get around and far more menacing in terms of
street security than the coast. I also
heard a horrifying story about the husband’s former boss coming to Port Moresby
for work, getting harassed in a bar by a belligerent local guy and waking up
the next morning to find his harasser’s severed head impaled on a stake outside
his guesthouse with a sign attached saying “This fellow will not bother you
again”.
Vanimo is
the end of the line for the north coast of PNG, with the Indonesian border only
50 or so kilometres away and a road extending right to the border post. As soon as I arrived at Vanimo airport, I
walked out into downtown (the airport is right in the centre of town) and asked
around for local transport. The
Slovenian couple had to go try to get an Indonesian visa, making me glad that I
was on a year-long multiple-entry Indonesian visa so that I didn’t have to
spend another expensive day in PNG. I
wasn’t sure if the border was open in the afternoon (it was about 1 pm), and
was assured that it was open until sundown.
We waited for a good long while, gathering passengers to cram into the
PMV, and rolled off around 2 pm. I was
premature in thinking that this would be the last 20 kina that I would spend in
the country, though. We got to the PNG
border gate and I got stamped out of the country, but the official told me that
the Indonesians had closed their border gate early. Apparently tension was high on the Indonesian
side since a gun battle a few weeks before between the Indonesians and
guerrillas from the OPM, the pro-independence movement that contests
Indonesia’s hold on the western half of New Guinea and whose fighters shelter
on the PNG side of the border.
I thought
that I would have to go back to Vanimo, but the driver and the PNG border
official both told me that I could take a boat around the border and get an
entry stamp in Jayapura. We drove to a
nearby cove where a few boats and a few Papuan travellers were sitting in the
shade. A bit of conversation revealed
that for 100 kina (a bit more than US$ 40) I could get a lift to Jayapura. With seven passengers in the boat, the
captain was doing pretty well for an hour and a half’s voyage! As in the Solomon Islands, there are no poor
boat owners in PNG. The voyage was
pretty straightforward, as the big waves that had pounded Madang were nowhere
to be seen. The biggest hazard came as a
byproduct of the fact that a big Malaysian logging company has a timber
concession in the hills inland from Vanimo and is energetically stripping out
the forests as quickly as they can. The
water offshore is littered with floating and almost-submerged logs, and it was
a tricky half hour of steering, with one of the passengers in the bow spotting
for logs. I was very, very relieved to
step out of the boat in Jayapura late in the afternoon.
 |
| So long PNG! On the boat to Jayapura |
There were
still two expensive surprises in store for me courtesy of PNG. The harbour where we put ashore was about
five kilometres from the centre of Jayapura, but was where the immigration
officer was to be found to stamp my passport.
The office was already closed when I arrived, so I was told to come back
the next day. Then it was time to find
transport into town. One of the Papuans
who was hanging around at the dock offered to get me a cab, as there were none
to be seen anywhere. When it pulled up,
he and several friends piled into the cab and I was immediately suspicious of a
scam. We stopped off at a little
moneychanger for me to change my leftover kina into rupiah, and then headed to
the hotel. I checked in, wondering how
much the taxi guy would ask for, and was not surprised when he asked for
400,000 rupiah (about US$40). While that
might be not outrageous in PNG, in Indonesia that is truly ridiculous for a
ten-minute ride. I knew that a one-hour
ride to Jayapura airport was only 250,000 rupiah, so I offered the driver
100,000 rupiah. There was immediately a
great chorus of protest, but I had the advantage of being already in the
hotel. I headed to my room and unpacked,
leaving them fuming in the lobby, and about ten minutes later the front desk
called to say that they were still there and very unhappy. I strolled back downstairs and put on some
theatre, offering them Rp 100,000 or nothing (still far too much, but a bit of
face-saving for the taxi driver), and after vehement refusals, I crumpled up
the money and threw it at them and went back to my room. An hour later they were gone and I was free
in the streets of Jayapura. It was a
relief to be back to the far more reasonable prices and vibrant street life of
Indonesia; I walked out after dark and bought food from a street stall,
something that would have been absolutely unthinkable on the other side of the
border.
The next
morning I caught a rickshaw back to the port where I had arrived (it cost only
25,000 rupiah this time) and discovered that while PNG citizens can be stamped
into Indonesia there, Westerners cannot.
I had to backtrack all the way to the Indonesian border post to get that
all-important entry stamp. There was (of
course) no public transport to the border, and I was being asked for 750,000
rupiah by Jayapura taxi drivers to do the roundtrip. I decided that it could be done more cheaply,
so I caught public transport (three of the bemos
that are such a staple of Indonesian travel) as far east as I could, then
negotiated with an ojek (motorcycle
taxi) driver to take me to the border.
Everything went smoothly at the border, I was back in Jayapura by
mid-afternoon and it only cost Rp 250,000, still an annoying sum, but at least
I was finally free of the hand of PNG.
Writing
this and re-reading my diary, I remember how intensely I disliked my travel
experience in PNG. I don’t often hate
everything about my experience in a country, and I’ve been to countries like
Bangladesh, Djibouti, Somaliland, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus that have
reputations of not being a barrel of laughs for visitors. I can honestly say that nothing that happened
to me during those five long, hideously expensive days in the country was
really positive. I shudder to think how
much money I spent to have so little fun.
It’s not just me, the cheapskate backpacker, who doesn’t have much fun
in PNG. The expats to whom I talk all
have the same stories of crazy prices, personal danger, dysfunctional
government, corruption, violence and difficult relations with their Papuan
counterparts. I think that if you were
really, really rich and didn’t care how much money you were spending, you might
be able to experience PNG in a way that would be positive and memorable. The country should be an eco-tourism mecca,
with mountains, beaches, diving and more cultural diversity than almost any
other country, but until it becomes significantly cheaper, significantly safer
and a lot more organized, there will continue to be only a handful of
(misguided) backpackers visiting the country, and tourism will continue to be
the province of well-heeled miners and oil workers along with rich Aussies
willing to drop US$ 3000 to walk the Kokoda Track (site of famous fighting in
World War Two involving Australian soldiers).
Having been there once, I am in absolutely no hurry ever to go back,
even to work.
The Good: Hiking in the Baliem Valley
Once I had
gotten my all-important surat jalan
(travel permit) for West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of the
island of New Guinea) for a Rp 100,000 “administrative fee”, I had exhausted
the entertainment possibilities of Jayapura and it was time to move on via a
short flight to Wamena, the administrative centre of the Baliem Valley up in
the central highlands. I arrived and
promptly spent two very frustrating days trying to find a guide willing to take
me on a trek into the highlands east of Wamena.
It was a futile quest, as the guides I could track down were either
sick/dying, out of town or no longer doing guiding. It was supposedly high season for tourism in
the Baliem Valley, and yet I could hardly see any tourists around, aside from
one big German group. I looked into
visiting a high-altitude lake (Habbema) but was put off by the crazy price tag
associated with it (US$200 for a one-way motorcycle taxi ride from
Jayapura). Eventually I decided that
trying to find a guide was useless and that, as in Nepal, it would be easier to
trek completely on my own. I went to a
supermarket, bought some supplies, left all non-essential gear behind at my
hotel and caught a bemo to the end of
the road at Sugokno, where I shouldered my pack, consulted the Lonely Planet
and set off into the mountains that rise on either side of the Yatna River.
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| Hernius' family in Seima |
The Baliem
Valley is the best-known of the valleys in the central mountains of New Guinea,
an area of high peaks which soar to a maximum height of 4884 metres above sea
level (higher than any peak in the Rockies or Alps) and which are cut off from
the coast by impenetrable swamps and dense bush. It was only in the 1920s that colonial
officials, who all lived on the coast, even became aware that there was a
densely-populated society farming in the mountains, largely using Stone Age
technology. Anthropologists were
immediately drawn to study the languages and cultures of the people of the
highlands, and the Baliem Valley was the site of a major Harvard expedition in
1961-62 that Peter Matthiessen wrote about in Under The Valley Wall. The anthropologists documented the life of
the Dani people, describing a culture of incessant small-scale warfare,
raiding, kidnapping and ever-shifting alliances. The Indonesian government has supposedly
stamped out the warfare, but the people of the highlands are still a distinct
group, farming their terraces yam fields, raising their pigs and still dressing
(some of the older men, anyway) in nothing but a penis gourd. I passed a few men in traditional Dani
attire, but most of them, along with all the women, were in Western dress,
although almost everyone was wearing a traditional string bag slung over their
head to carry things.
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| Smoke percolating through the thatch of a roof, Seima |
I was
headed towards the village of Kurima, where I knew there was a small village
lodge, but since I had only set out at 3:40, I realized that I probably didn’t
have enough daylight to make it that far.
I fell into conversation (in my terrible Indonesian) with a guy named
Hernius who was walking my way. He
suggested that I come home to his place rather than racing the dark, and I was
glad to accept. In the village of Seima,
located at 1650 metres of elevation, Hernius had a traditional circular adobe
hut with a thatch roof, but next door he had built a four-room wooden cottage
equipped with solar panels. I ate dinner
with Hernius and his wife and children:
rice and greens, a roasted corn cob and a yam (the staple food of the
highlands). Historians believe that the
New Guinea highlands was one of the few places on earth where agriculture arose
without outside influence, and that people have been farming these steep
mountainsides for millennia. After
dinner I sat around drinking tea with Hernius, his wife, two young sons, his
older brother, his nephew and his mother.
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| Hernius and two of his children, Seima |
I wished that I spoke better Indonesian, as I was only able to
communicate in very primitive sentences.
I fell asleep in my own room in the cottage, content with finally being
out of Wamena and into the mountains.
This is the sort of random encounter with people that I love in
travelling; as a result of a casual meeting on the path, I became part of
Hernius’ family for the night.
The next
morning I arose to a cold and misty village, drenched by heavy overnight rain. Breakfast was another yam and tea. I paid Hernius Rp 200,000 for bed, dinner and
breakfast (probably above the odds, but so much cheaper than PNG that I wasn’t
going to argue the point) and he walked with me down through the village centre
where he turned over the money to the village headman, some sort of relative of
his. I couldn’t tell whether he was
repaying an old debt, or whether tourism income had to be handed over to the
village authorities. I said goodbye and
dropped steeply down to a bridge over the Yatna River (at about 1550 m) to
Kurima. On the other side I encountered
pavement and ojeks, suggesting that the road I had left the day before
continued in some form from Sugokno to Kurima, a new development since the
Lonely Planet had been updated. On the
way out of Kurima, I passed a group of three Italian trekkers, their
Sulawesi-born guide and five or six porters carrying supplies. They had spent the night in Kurima (where I
had planned to sleep the night before) and I chatted with Lucia, Gianfranco and
Fabio a bit over the next few hours as we hiked.
 |
| High up above the village of Wamarek on day two |
The trail
climbed fairly steeply up to 1880 m. I
had walked ahead of the Italians, but managed to take a wrong turn. Luckily the guide saw me and shouted across
to me to set me right. The correct trail
was a very steep descent, made very slippery by the night’s rain and the
worn-out state of my hiking boot soles.
Eventually I reached another bridge over the river, now known as the
Baliem, at about 1200 m. I crossed the
river and was rewarded with a 500-metre climb steeply uphill to get to
Wesagalep village, perched picturesquely on a steep-sided village between two
waterfalls. Not having done much hiking that
year, especially not with a pack, I arrived with my legs running on empty,
drenched in sweat and covered in mud.
 |
| Wesagalep village |
I was
housed in the village hall, in a slightly ramshackle room used for
storage. It was dry, but I was glad that
I was carrying a ThermaRest as the bed was the wooden floor. The village kids, excited at a departure from
routine, were pestiferous, constantly peeking in the windows, howling with
laughter and really annoying when I wandered out to try to do some
birdwatching. I felt dehydrated; I had
drunk at least 4 litres of water en route, but in the heat and humidity, it
wasn’t enough. I asked for tea and got a
couple of litres to rehydrate. I was fed
a huge amount of rice and greens and a yam which I didn’t manage to eat as I
got full of rice. The old man who was in
charge of me sat and watched me as I ate and drank, smoking hand-rolled
cigarettes and playing Papuan pop music on his smartphone. I sat in my room as it got dark, reading and
trying to figure out what birds I had seen during the day. I was reading Jared Diamond’s book The World
Until Yesterday about traditional societies around the world, and a big part of
it was (naturally, for any book by Jared Diamond) set in New Guinea, which
seemed appropriate given my surroundings.
I fell asleep to the sound of rhythmic (and highly amplified) chanting
somewhere in the village, which was either a traditional ceremony or (more
likely) an evangelical church meeting.
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| Day three scenery: finally some sun! |
I was up
the next morning by 5:30, and after stretching and drinking cold leftover tea,
I left Rp 100,000 (US$ 10) for the old man (who was nowhere to be found) and
headed off in lovely morning light, the first time in three days that I was
walking under clear skies. It was a
steep climb out of town, and after 45 minutes the old man came scampering
uphill, anxious to be paid. I told him
where I had left the money, and he raced back to collect it. I think he wanted more money, but he didn’t
want it enough to chase me down a second time, and Rp 100,000 was all the
accommodation and food was really worth.
After 300 metres of climbing, the path levelled off and I came out on a
steep field that dropped a long way downhill.
I had loved the peace and quiet of walking in the early morning,
surrounded by birdsong and butterflies and lots of primary forest, but the
downside was that there was nobody to ask directions.
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| Extensive views to the high peaks to the south |
I followed the path downhill through neatly
tended garden plots until the path suddenly began to peter out. I was suspicious that I had taken a wrong
turn, and was reluctant to go too much further downhill before I was sure where
I was. I sat and breakfasted on crackers
and leftover yam and waited to see if anyone might wander by. Sure enough, a farmer from Wesagalep village
showed up after a while, recognized me from the village and gestured that I
should come back uphill. With a mixture
of my bad Indonesian and lots of sign language, I realized that I had gone
wrong quite a long way back and that I needed to be up on the top of the ridge
above the field. He reached into his string bag and gave me a cooked yam for the road. I accepted it gratefully, grunted back uphill,
halfway back to Wesagalep, found the right path (a barely discernible break in
dense vegetation; no wonder I had missed it) and finally joined an obviously
main path in the right direction.
Finally, at an elevation of 2140 m, I popped out on top of the ridge, in
sight of where I had had breakfast, having lost an hour with my inept
navigation. I was glad that I had set
out so early.
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| A wonderful stone axe, but there's no way I was going to buy it! |
From then
on route-finding was much simpler. I was
walking a lot on open ridges with expansive views and a nice cooling
breeze. I took one more short wrong turn
past a hut where an old man tried to sell me an old polished stone ceremonial
axe that must have weighed 15 kilograms; I can’t imagine anything I would less
want to carry around for days in my backpack.
By noon I had dropped off the ridge down a pretty muddy track to an
idyllic bathing spot where I ate lunch, had a good rinse and soak, and then
cleaned the mud out of my socks before settling in for more Jared Diamond. From that point on, the trail got drier and
easier. I popped over a ridge, went down
a surprisingly dry descent and tried to find Wusalem. As it turned out, the name applied to a huge
area, and every time I came to a village, I would ask “Wusalem?” and be told
yes, but then realize that there was no place to stay there, so I must need
another village. Eventually I got to the
last place named Wusalem and was told that it was much too far to make it to
Syokosimo. I thought this couldn’t be
true, and took a chance on going there anyway.
It wasn’t that far, but it was supernaturally muddy, and I got there in
plenty of time (by 4:30) but completely covered in mud. I felt like an extra from Monty Python and
the Holy Grail. I found a proper
guesthouse run by a pleasant old lady who cooked me good food and gave me
endless supplies of boiled water to make tea and instant noodles to
rehydrate. Conditions were positively
sybaritic, with a soft sleeping mat on top of carpets, a proper mosquito net
and even a real WC. I managed to wash my
body and my truly revolting clothes and then ate enormous quantities of food
and slept more soundly than I had for several nights. I was down in a valley, and although the
altitude (1530 m) wasn't much lower than the previous nights, it was much less chilly at night and in the early morning.
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| Young women of Syokosimo village |
The next
day, August the 1st, I harboured faint hopes that I might make it
back to Wamena that day, but those were scuppered by my tardiness in getting
away in the morning. I only left at 8
am, much later than I had been doing recently, and I was starting to feel a bit
lazy after three days of pretty full-on hiking.
I climbed up to almost 1900m through a beautiful, bird-filled forest
that gave me lots of excuses to stop and birdwatch or to take pictures of flowers.
 |
| Typical highland hut |
I picked up an irritating would-be guide who
took a long time to shake off, and then a group of irritating small children at
the next village. It took tellings-off
by two groups of adults to make the kids finally stop plaguing me.
The
walking for the rest of the day deteriorated sharply, with the path petering
out into a narrow, overgrown, muddy track through abandoned farm fields. I realized afterwards that I could have (and
should have) taken a track down to the river to a bridge not mentioned in the
LP, cutting out this section of the trail.
I kept slipping and falling in the mud, cursing and swearing at the
horrible track conditions. Finally I
slithered down a final descent to Yuarina, slipping on ice-like black mud on
newly plowed fields. I somehow managed
to miss the bridge entirely at the bottom, and only after wandering upstream
for five minutes did I look back downstream to see the bridge, completely made
of wood and lianas, and head back to cross the river. I stopped just out of town beside the river
to eat lunch, watch birds and recover mentally from the horror of the descent.
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| The bridge at Yuarima: all natural fibres |
The rest
of the day was comparatively easy, through cultivated fields and fallow patches
with essentially no real forest. The
views were tremendous, looking south towards the highest mountains of the range. There was quite a bit of foot traffic, locals
coming back from Wamena via the fastest route.
I was feeling pretty tired by the time I got to Hitegi, so I slowed down
and ambled the last stretch into Ugem village, stopping for a quick rinse off
in a stream just outside town to try to remove the mud.
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| The descent to the road from Ugem |
I had a look at my boots as I was cleaning
them and realized that their soles were worn down to almost nothing; no wonder
I couldn’t stay on my feet on the muddy slopes!
In Ugem, I found a tidy village full of big tin-roofed buildings and a
gargantuan church. The village looked
more prosperous and tidier than most places I’d seen on the hike, probably
because their proximity to the road means that more money flows into the
community. I stayed in a newly built
village guesthouse, very well-equipped but plagued by annoying kids with a very
low boredom threshold.
The next
morning I strolled out of town quite early in the morning and was down in
Kurima (the village I had passed through three days previously) in an hour and
a half, accompanied by the oldest son of the family that run the
guesthouse. I was pleased by his ability
to show me the right track to Kurima, but less happy about him taking potshots
at birds with his slingshot. In Kurima
an ojek driver offered to drive me right to my hotel for Rp 100,000 and I
figured this was a good deal. The ride
to Sugokno was adventurous, with me clinging to the luggage carrier for dear
life as we crossed streams and ravines, and I had to get off and walk from time
to time, but 40 minutes after leaving Kurima, and only 2 hours after walking
out of my lodging in Ugem, I was climbing into the shower in my room at the
Rannu Jaya II Hotel in Jayapura and trying to wash mud out of my hair and my
skin. My trekking clothes were such a
muddy catastrophe that I brought them to a commercial laundry service. The rest of the day was spent eating and
trying (unsuccessfully) to arrange flights for the next morning, which were all
booked solid. I knew, however, that
there was an active same-day resale business in plane tickets outside the
airport, so I decided that the next morning I would try my luck.
The Wonderful (Part One): Birds of Paradise in the Arfak Mountains
I had been
reading my Lonely Planet attentively and knew that Indonesian New Guinea had a
number of wonderful natural attractions, and it was a matter of choosing between
a number of good options. I eventually
decided that I would go birdwatching in the Arfak Mountains, just outside the
town of Manokwari, and then go diving and snorkelling in the Raja Ampat
archipelago off the western tip of the island.
I had been reading Alfred Russel Wallace’s book The Malay Archipelago
recently, and the culmination of his years of collecting birds, animals,
insects and plants in Southeast Asia were his expeditions to New Guinea in search
of birds of paradise. I am not a
committed birdwatcher, but I find that birds are easier to spot than big
wildlife, and make a great thing to do while hiking or cycle touring. I had seen enough great nature documentaries
to know that birds of paradise are some of the most amazing birds in the world,
so the chance of seeing them up close and personal was too good to pass up.
It was a
bit of an adventure trying to get from Wamena to Manokwari in one day. I got to Wamena airport early in the morning
hoping for a last-minute standby ticket.
By 6:20 am the airport was heaving with people waiting for one of the
several early morning flights. The
airlines themselves resell returned tickets at more or less face value, so
within minutes I had a ticket in hand.
Flights were delayed, and the first three departing flights were all cargo
flights, so the crowd was getting pretty restless, but by 8:30 I was on my
short hop back to Jayapura. Amazingly,
the flight, which had been sold out the previous afternoon when I tried to buy
a ticket, was half empty. The views over
the forested mountains and impenetrable lowland swamps were amazing in the
early-morning light. I was in Sentani
airport (the airport for Jayapura, located an hour outside the city) by 9:30,
just in time to buy an onward ticket to Manokwari for 11:30. I was there by 12:30, having spent the flight
talking to my seatmate, an Indonesian woman working for a bank who was being
transferred to Manokwari for the next three years.
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| Less heavily loaded than usual: Manokwari motorcycle |
Manokwari
is a fairly tidy, peaceful little town surrounded by jungle-clad hills. I found a great place to stay, Losmen Kagum,
run by a pleasant family, and spent the afternoon buying a few groceries,
finding the best internet I had seen in almost a month, and walking in the
hills up to a Japanese war memorial (a bizarrely unimpressive structure that
resembled a half-build public urinal). I
ran into a Hungarian couple back at the hotel who were travelling at a
leisurely pace through Indonesia, extending their visa every month, well into
their seventh month in the country.
The next
morning found me gobbling down a breakfast left for me on a tray the night
before and heading off by 6:15 on an ojek
to the Wosi bus terminal.
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| Don't put all your eggs on one motorcycle: Manokwari |
It was a
case of hurry-up-and-wait, as it took 3 long hours of waiting to assemble the
10 passengers required to fill a 4WD pickup truck for the 2-hour drive to
Syobri village. The drive was an hour of
peaceful cruising along asphalt roads, followed by an hour of hair-raising muddy
trail-bashing. I was relieved to get out
of the truck and find my way up to Zeth Wonggor’s birdwatching lodge.
Zeth is a
legend in this area, having shown birds of paradise to countless film crews
including David Attenborough’s team. His
lodge is basic but functional, and very friendly. The place was deserted when I arrived, but
soon enough a full crew of birdwatchers appeared from their morning in the
forest, ravenous for lunch.
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| Feline owlet-nightjar, Syobri |
They were a
group of 10 people travelling together under the auspices of Wild Borneo, whose
founder and boss was the trip leader.
Many of them were professional biologists of one description or another,
united by an enthusiasm for pitcher plants, although they were interested in
anything that was alive. I joined two
French birders that afternoon in one of Zeth’s hides, constructed near one of
the leks where male magnificent birds
of paradise dance and display for females in the hopes of convincing them to
mate. Sort of like a nightclub on
Saturday nights, then. It was not a productive
afternoon, as we huddled uncomfortably for 2 hours inside this tiny structure
of wooden posts and tarpaulins, listening intently and peering out, for exactly
one second of face time with the bird, who showed up, looked around and flew
off after calling from nearby trees for half an hour beforehand. I went back to the lodge dispirited, only to
hear that two other groups had had far more luck with the magnificent bird of
paradise and with the western parotia at two of Zeth’s other hides.
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| Magnificent bird of paradise (note the tail "wires") |
That evening
I cooked up some food and then sat around eating and socializing with the Wild
Borneo team, who were full of great stories of their trip, and of previous
Southeast Asian expeditions together. At
8 pm, I joined them as they trooped out with powerful headlamps in search of
nocturnal animals. We had a lot of fun,
as we spotted three cuscuses (shy, pretty nocturnal mammals a bit like small
brown raccoons), 2 sugar gliders (smaller gliding mammals) a nectar-eating
opossum and a very beautiful small frog.
We also had a spectacular mishap as Chien, the Wild Borneo owner, fell
out of a tree where he was trying to capture a cuscus. There was a great crashing of branches and
tumbling of humans, but nobody was hurt and the cuscus escaped to safety.
 |
| Magnificent bird of paradise |
The next
morning I went back to the same hide by myself and was rewarded by wonderful
and repeated views of the magnificent, as the male danced, fluffed himself up,
leaned from one side to another, spread one wing and then the other and
generally showed off. His long, curving
tail feathers looked absurd, an example (like the peacock’s tail) of sexual
selection of a functionally useless feature.
That afternoon I hiked up with a couple of birders from Wild Borneo to a
different hide, high above the village in spectacular primary forest, in search
of the western parotia. Unfortunately,
this was an almost exact replay of the previous afternoon, with lots of calls,
lots of sitting around huddled in great bodily discomfort, and only three
2-second appearances by the male, who didn’t display and disappeared
immediately. At least the walk there was
very pretty, with huge liana-draped trees and dramatic tumbling streams.
Despite
only seeing one of the two species of birds of paradise that were possible
there, I really enjoyed getting out into the mountainous rainforest and seeing
Zeth and his team working hard for the preservation of the birds and the
forest. He had started his working life
as a hunter, but had been recruited by a BBC film crew to show them birds and
was amazed that Westerners would pay him far more to show them live birds than
to bring them dead birds. It changed his
life, and now he searches for new leks, moves his hides around as birds change
their preferred spots and works with other villagers to preserve large tracts
of primary forest.
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| Cuscus |
I moved
efficiently the next morning, hiking out early towards the main road before
being picked up by a driver with a very offbeat sense of humour transporting
people and a mountain of vegetables to Manokwari. I paid the same as on the outward leg, Rp
100,000, which, given the beating the vehicles take over the jeep tracks, is
probably a fair price. I picked up the
luggage I had left behind at the Losmen, bought an afternoon flight to Sorong
and was walking out of the airport in Sorong by 4 pm. I took an expensive room at the JE Meridien
(not far from the Marriat Hotel) and went to bed watching Roger Federer play
tennis halfway around the world.
The Wonderful (Part Two): Diving Raja Ampat
The next
day, August 8th, I was a blur of activity, buying my Raja Ampat
National Park diving badge, buying a ticket to Jakarta for August 20th,
trying to find a place to stay out in the Raja Ampat archipelago, texting them
to see if I could get picked up that day, and trying to reserve a place at a
posher dive lodge for my last few days.
I caught a lift to the ferry port, bought a ticket to Waisai and cruised
rapidly over the sea for a couple of hours, leaving the main island of New
Guinea behind. Raja Ampat (literally “Four
Kings”) is a remoted and lightly populated area of small offshore limestone
islands that has become famous for its great diving. Years ago, when I first heard of Raja Ampat,
the only real options were incredibly expensive liveaboard dive boats. Now there are a dozen or so dive lodges
scattered around the various islands, most with inexpensive homestays located
nearby to provide a range of accommodation prices. I knew that I wanted to finish my trip at
BioDiversity Dive Lodge, but I couldn’t really afford to stay there for the
entire 10 days. I found a much cheaper
homestay, Yenkoranu, on Pulau Kri, that offered diving and which only cost Rp
250,000 a day (US$ 25) for my own room and three meals a day (diving was
extra). I settled in for six days of
serious relaxation.
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| Yenkoranu Homestay, Pulau Kri, Raja Ampat |
Although
Yenkoranu certainly could have been better run (their diving logistics were
occasionally a bit slipshod in terms of when they were going out), the location
was perfect, on a sandy beach surrounded by dense jungle, with a long wooden
pier providing access to the water on the outside of the lagoon and a breezy
shaded deck out over the water that was perfect for watching the spectacular
sunsets.
 |
| The pier at Yenkoranu |
The group of Western travellers
that had gathered there was an eclectic mix, with quite a few old Indonesia
hands who had either lived in Indonesia or who had visited the country many
times. Raja Ampat is not as well known
as places like Bali, Lombok, Java and Sumatra, and so first-time visitors to
Indonesia rarely end up there. There
were interesting discussions and lots of great stories told over breakfast or
dinner in the communal dining room. The
food was simple but delicious, and the rooms were equally simple but completely
functional. Walking along the beach at
low tide made for perfect beachcombing, particularly at the far end of the
island, when low tide exposed huge areas of white sand. It was a picture-perfect tropical paradise.
The diving
season in Raja Ampat is really from October to April, so I was in the lowest of
low seasons, with all the liveaboard dive boats having moved for the season to the
new diving hotspot of Komodo for a few months.
The sea was perhaps a bit rougher than it would be in the high season,
but I found the diving really good once you got under the water. There are lots of sharks, including the
strange-looking bottom-crawling wobbegong, frogfish, barracuda and
snappers. I spotted a lovely pygmy
seahorse (I had seen them before at Bunaken Island, but this was by far the
clearest view I had ever had) and saw lots of colourful nudibranchs. The coral was in excellent condition, and
currents weren’t too strong. The only
disappointment was not seeing any manta rays; we went out to Manta Sandy, but
there were none to be seen, so we aborted the dive and went elsewhere (if there
are no mantas there, there is essentially nothing to see on the featureless
sandy bottom). I didn’t dive non-stop; I
picked and chose among the sites, and was very pleased with what I saw. My fellow divers were pretty experienced and
made great companions, and the dive guides were knowledgeable and great at
spotting stuff.
When I
wasn’t in my wetsuit, I took the chance to relax a lot. I did yoga on the deck over the water,
juggled on the beach, went birdwatching in the forest, swam lengths off the
pier (wearing a mask and snorkel so I could watch the sharks and fish and turtles
and coral below me) and read a lot, finishing off a number of books on my
Kindle, including Thomas Piketty’s tome Capital in the 21st
Century. The most impressive sights to
remember were seeing another cuscus up close one night, and watching a shark
feeding frenzy off the end of the pier as the kitchen staff gutted that night’s
supper and tossed the remains into the water.
All the sharks I have ever seen while diving have been either patrolling
or sleeping; I had never seen sharks hunting and attacking fish successfully
until then. I have to say that I
sheltered behind the pilings of the pier to watch the action, not wanting to
become collateral damage.
 |
| Sittin' on the dock of the bay, BioDiversity Lodge |
By the
time I caught a boat across to BioDiversity, on the other side of the channel
on larger Pulau Gam, I was feeling pretty relaxed. BioDiversity, a fairly new upscale resort run
by a Spanish couple, made me even more relaxed.
There are only six cottages, lovingly maintained and very tastefully
furnished, with very little around them.
The beach and pier are pretty, and the food is excellent. There weren’t many other divers there, and it
was a truly lovely way to finish my summer of travel. The diving was excellent, although we visited
a number of the sites that I had dived much more cheaply with Yenkoranu. Blue Magic was my favourite site, full of big
silvery fish and sharks, although I loved the Frewin Wall as well, a long
vertical granite wall underwater. The
last afternoon I went out with 5 Singaporean fellow guests to look for the red
bird of paradise. This was easily the
best bird of paradise encounter that I had all summer, with 5 or 6 males
dancing and displaying for at least 2 females, with successful mating at the
end. We had great views of the action,
although it was essentially hopeless to try to take photos given the low light
and high contrast.
 |
| BioDiversity Pier |
And then,
suddenly, it was time to head back to Leysin for another year of teaching, my
fifth and final one. It was hard to tear
myself away from the beaches, the diving, the jungles, the food and the
tropical ambience of Indonesia. It was
my fifth trip to this sprawling, diverse country, and will likely not be my
last given the existence of Terri’s place on Bali. I really enjoyed the Indonesian side of New
Guinea, infinitely more than my Papua New Guinea experience. I had always wanted to trek in the Baliem
Valley, and diving Raja Ampat had been on my radar for a decade or more. I am already lazily sketching out a bicycle
itinerary running east from Bali to Timor, exploring the islands of Nusa
Tenggara, and I could certainly see going back to Raja Ampat someday to do more
diving.
 |
| Chilled out at the end of a great summer of diving |
As I took
my long flight back to Jakarta and on to Amsterdam and Geneva, I was already
contemplating my next trips. Travel is
like a drug; once you’ve done some, you want to do more, and it consumes your
thoughts, your time and your money. It’s
probably a lot healthier than most drugs, though, so I see no reason to curtail
my addiction anytime soon.
 |
| Yenkoranu sunset |
The summer vacation was spent in the highest mountain ranges of the world. Terri and I flew to India and trekked through the magical mountains and plateaux of Ladakh for a memorable month. Again Terri had an earlier work deadline than I did, so I flew off to Kyrgyzstan to indulge my Reinhold Messner-inspired fantasies of mountain climbing. I had had my eye on Peak Lenin and Muztagh Ata for years, so it seemed like a good time to try my luck. My luck wasn't in on either peak, with terrible weather, heavy snowfall and poor conditions. I decided that really high mountains weren't really my thing and flew back to Leysin to start my third academic year.
We spent the rest of the year in Indonesia, doing a lot of scuba diving and (in my case) learning how to take underwater photographs of the strange and wonderful creatures that live on tropical reefs. I was also hard at work finishing the manuscript of my Silk Road cycling book. In mid-November I crossed to the next island to the east, Lombok, and spent three weeks training to become a scuba instructor. It was an intense course, but I passed the exam and set off immediately with Terri for jobs in Raja Ampat, the legendary diving area off the western tip of Indonesian New Guinea. The job wasn't all it was cracked up to be, but it taught both of us a lot, and we got to dive almost every day with manta rays, which is a priceless experience. We said farewell to the year on tiny Arborek Island in Raja Ampat, after a whirlwind 365 days.
A very brief sojourn back in Bali, and then we were off again, flying to Namibia to pick up Stanley. We had had some serious problems with Namibian Customs about Stanley not having the right paperwork (we thought he did!!) and so we had to move him to storage in South Africa. We decided that we should explore Namibia in greater detail while we did, and we ended up spending six memorable weeks in the Namibian desert, camped out under the stars, looking for elephants and zebras and giraffes. Eventually we drove down to rainy Cape Town and put Stanley into storage there.
I had always enjoyed Georgia during my three previous trips to the country (2009, 2011 and 2015), so I was looking forward to living there full-time. Terri and I spent the late summer and autumn exploring the beautiful mountainous regions of Tusheti, Khevsureti and Mtiuleti, with fall break in the enchanting western region of Svaneti, then loaded up our expedition van (Douglas the Delica) as the Christmas break began and headed off on a three-week skiing roadtrip. We welcomed in the New Year in a small homestay in the frosty mountains of the Goderdzi Pass area.
I've just written a long blog post looking back on this year, so I will be brief about this year's travels. There were a number of (generally disappointing) ski weekends north of Tbilisi, a week in France skiing with my sister Saakje and her partner Henkka in March, some fun camping weekends in the spring and then a summer of mountain exploration in Kyrgyzstan and back here in Georgia. This fall we drove around Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh (now renamed Artsakh) and today (in a few hours) we are flying to Panama for a Christmas get-together with my mother, Saakje and Henkka.
