Showing posts with label indonesia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indonesia. Show all posts

Friday, December 13, 2019

The 2010s: A decade to remember

Tbilisi, December 12, 2019

A mere 19 midnights separate me from the first day of 2020, the third decade of the 21st century.  (Yes, I know; the century should really start in 2001, but who really thinks that way emotionally?)  It is hard to believe that I have been blogging on this site intermittently for just over a decade now.  A few days ago I did my year-in-review post; now it's time for a decade in review.

One of the more terrifying aspects of getting older is that not just months and years pass by, but decades, without me being really aware of how long I've been alive.  This year was full of thirty-year anniversaries:  the Tien An Men massacre and the fall of the Berlin Wall were both pivotal moments in my conception of the world, with the gloom and menace of the Cold War suddenly replaced by an exuberant, giddy freedom in Eastern Europe, while the Chinese Communist party stamped on humanity's face with a jackboot.  I was barely 21 when those things happened; now I'm 51 and the optimism of December, 1989 has morphed into the dystopian ethnonationalism of Hungary, Poland and the United States, while the Chinese state's relentless authoritarianism has plumbed new depths in the repression in Xinjiang.

So I think that the spinning of the decades counter on our calendar is a good time to take stock of what I have been up to for the past ten years, mostly from the point of view of travel.  I don't have much time to write this, so it will necessarily be a cursory summary of a lot of travelling!

2010--The post-Silk Road Travels

I welcomed in the 2010s in Malta, That same morning I hopped over to Italy and rented a car to explore Sicily, a fabulous corner of the world, before making my way up Italy with a stopover of a few days in Naples, once one of the richest cities in Europe and now a poster child for urban decay, although blessed with Pompeii, Herculaneum and smaller amazing Roman ruins.  I then headed into Venice on my bicycle for the symbolic final ride into the city that Marco Polo returned to in 1295.  

After a brief skiing and job-hunting trip to Switzerland, where my sister Audie was living (and still lives), I hopped a flight to Ethiopia in early February for a cycle tour.  I spent two and a half months exploring Ethiopia's mountainous landscape and ancient culture, and dodging incessant rockthrowing by a substantial fraction of the youth of the country.  I also crossed (by public transport) into Somaliland and Djibouti before looping back to Ethiopia after my hopes of getting a Yemeni visa were shot down.

In late April I flew with my bicycle back to Canada to find a job offer from a school in Switzerland waiting for me.  My mother had taught at Leysin American School from 2001 to 2003, and now I was about to follow in her professional footsteps for the second time (after my miserable first international high school teaching experience in Egypt in 2004.)  After a few months of relaxation in Canada, including a car trip out to Newfoundland for my mother's 70th birthday, I flew off to Switzerland in early August.

2010-2015--The Leysin Years

I ended up spending five years teaching in Leysin.  It wasn't a fabulous school (despite the eye-watering tuition fees) but it was a wonderful place for an outdoors enthusiast like myself to be based.  I lived in a century-old building that was once a tuberculosis sanatorium for the wealthy of Europe (Stravinsky and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia both visited in the glory days), with an unbeatable view out across the Rhone valley to the Dents de Midi and (on clear days) a tiny sliver of the peak of Mont Blanc.  The skiing in Leysin was decidedly sub-par most weeks of most years, but there were always places to explore via ski touring.  The cross-country skiing was excellent, and in the fall and spring the road riding on a racing bicycle was incredible.  There were tennis and squash courts, and great hiking to be had.  It was a busy schedule, with teachers worked absolutely to the bone, but I generally always had energy for adventures whenever I could fit them in.  I ran the pub quiz in our village pub for almost the entire 5 years, which was great fun and an intellectual break from trying to hammer physics and mathematics into my students.

That first fall I mostly explored around Switzerland, by bicycle and on foot.  I stayed in Switzerland for the Christmas break and tried to ski (although it was the beginning of an epic months-long snow drought).  I also ran into a sporty New Zealand woman named Terri who turned out to be a wonderful partner in exploring the mountains and the world, and who is still with me nine and a half years later here in Tbilisi

2010 new countries:  Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somaliland (or Somalia, if you don't regard Somaliland as de facto independent).  

2010 year-end country count:  93


2011
I prowled around Switzerland all winter in a fruitless search for decent snow.  Eventually my supplications to Ullr the snow god were answered and enough snow fell for two weeks of excellent ski touring cabin-to-cabin in the mountains with some of my similarly skiing-obsessed colleagues.  



That summer I spent the entire break cycling from Tbilisi, Georgia (where I am typing this now) to Tallinn, Estonia, via as many of the ex-Soviet and Eastern European countries that I could.  I rode through magical Svaneti tragic occupied Abkhazia to Sochi in Russia, where Terri flew out to join me for a couple of weeks of hard cycling along the Black Sea coast, through Crimea (then part of Ukraine), Trans-Dniestria and Moldova.  Terri had to return to work, but I kept cycling across Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Ukraine again, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and finally Estonia.  I covered 5500 mostly flat kilometres and really fell in love with the countries I was crossing.
In the fall Terri and I got away hiking most weekends, all the way into early December since it didn't snow at all in the autumn.  When it started snowing, though, it didn't stop and we had a memorable ski season.  

At Christmas, I zipped off to the Persian Gulf to explore (very briefly and superficially) the UAE, Qatar and a tiny corner of Oman, before returning to Leysin for New Year's.

2011 new countries:  Denmark, Abkhazia, Russia, Ukraine, Trans-Dniestria, Moldova, Romania, Slovakia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, UAE, Oman, Qatar.

2011 year-end country count:  108

2012
The winter of 2011-12 was epic for skiing and ski touring, probably the best of my five winters in Leysin.  Spring break was spent doing more ski touring before finally retiring the skis and taking out the bicycle.



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.




That fall I finally made it to Slovenia, the one Balkan country that I had not yet properly visited.  At Christmas I decided that I needed a bicycle tour, so I flew down to Lome and spent three weeks cycling around Togo and Benin.  It was a good  bike trip, but I didn't really warm to the two countries as much as I would have liked.  It was my first taste of West Africa after several trips to the north and east of the continent, and I resolved to come back one day to explore in much greater depth.

2012 new countries:  Slovenia, Togo, Benin

2012 year-end country count:  111

2013
The 2012-13 winter was also fabulous for snowfall in the Leysin region, and I had a great winter of skiing, ski touring and cross-country skate skiing.  Terri and I had a March break that overlapped for once (we worked at different schools with very different schedules) and we had hoped to do a week of ski touring.  Instead it suddenly stopped snowing at the end of February, and after waiting with crossed fingers for a while, we eventually booked a last-minute trip to the Maldives instead.  It was slightly self-indulgent, but it was also a reintroduction to diving for Terri, which proved to be a great thing for our future travels together.

That summer we set off together for Iceland with our touring bicycles.  We had a wonderful time exploring this tiny gem of a country, even if Terri did find the steep hills on dirt roads a bit challenging and annoying.  Then Terri returned to work and I flew to Canada for the first time in three years, visiting my mother in Ottawa, my father in Thunder Bay, my sister in Jasper and my friend Greg over the border in Montana.  The summer vacation was not yet over (I loved my epic summer holidays in Leysin!) and I returned to Europe to try my hand at a new (for me) form of bike touring:  riding a racing bike, travelling ultra-light and sleeping indoors.  I cycled from Avignon back to Leysin over as many Tour de France cols as possible (Galibier, Izoard, Agnel, Iseran, etc), then returned to southern France with Terri for another week of cycling.



That fall, the start of my fourth year in Leysin, did not go well.  I was teaching five different fairly challenging IB science and math courses, and I burned out spectacularly from overwork.  Not long after a long weekend in Dublin with Terri, I ended up having a minor nervous breakdown in early November and being sent off on medical leave for a few months, during which I went exploring Gran Canaria by bicycle and Laos by motor scooter.  It was a sobering reminder of my own mortality and of how unsustainably hard I was working at LAS.

2013 new countries:  Maldives, Iceland, Ireland

2013 country count:  114

2014
I returned to work after Christmas on a reduced teaching load and had a reasonable time of it, although it was a miserable ski season.  A few skiing friends and I spent spring break skiing in the Dolomites in Italy which was an incredible time, although I couldn't ski the last few days because of an incredibly sore back.


That summer Terri and I decided to take it physically a bit easier than usual since we weren't sure how recovered I was from my breakdown.  I flew to Bali via a brief visit to sad, ruined East Timor, and then Terri and I spent a month diving our way around Indonesia, with visits to Bali, the Togean Islands and the amazing Derawan Archipelago and its manta rays.  Terri had bought a small house in northeast Bali a few years earlier, and it made for a perfect base for our expeditions. After Terri's inevitable return to work, I stayed on, exploring the Solomon Islands and expensive, dangerous and deeply unpleasant Papua New Guinea before crossing back into Indonesian New Guinea for a few weeks of birdwatching and diving. 


That fall was the start of my last year at LAS.  I had already decided that I was going to leave, but LAS' deeply autocratic First Family had decided that I needed to be forced out, which didn't make the final year much fun at work.  Luckily it was a charmed autumn with perfect weather almost every weekend and a never-ending series of hiking and biking weekends that lasted almost into December that left me with a permanent grin and indelible memories of the fall colours blanketing the Alps.

I flew off that Christmas with three colleagues to show them the Japanese powder that I had been pining for during the many snow droughts of my Leysin years.   

2014 new countries:  East Timor, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea

2014 year-end country count:  117

2015
After some epic skiing in Hokkaido, I returned to Leysin for my final ski season there.  The snow was miserable for most of the winter, and when it did snow, I nearly got myself killed in an avalanche that took away quite a bit of my skiing mojo.  During spring break Terri and I flew to Georgia for a few days of skiing which reminded me of how much I liked this small, historic country in the Caucasus.

2015-18:  Three Itinerant Years

Mid-June saw me say farewell with affection and great memories to my colleagues and friends in Leysin and to the outdoor playground of the Alps.  Terri and I headed off for a month of cycling down the Danube, followed (for me) by sailing and cycling in Finland and Norway while Terri finished up her 15th and final year at Kumon Leysin Academy.  When she was free, we abandoned the bicycles and set off on foot to trek in the Pyrenees and then the mythical GR20 hiking route in Corsica.  Terri flew back to Switzerland for her Swiss citizenship ceremony, and then we were off, both finally free of work and commitments for the foreseeable future.

We visited our families and then rendezvoused in Ushuaia, Argentina for the extravagant splurge of a lifetime, a trip to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula on the MV Ushuaia.  Despite a fire on board on the first night, and having to dodge between South Atlantic hurricanes on the return journey, it was an incredible, life-altering trip that always seemed to have a David Attenborough voice-over playing in our heads.


After that, we started cycling north through Patagonia, stopping to hike in places like Torres del Paine and El Chalten.  We said good-bye to 2015 in a little town along the Carretera Austral, the little-used dirt road linking the remote communities of southern Chile.

2015 new countries:  Finland, Sweden

2015 year-end country count:  119


2016
We kept cycling north in early 2016, finishing on the island of Chiloe.  After a few days visiting friends in Santiago from my year of working there in 1999, we took an interminable bus trip to Paraguay with our bicycle and spent a few weeks cycling there before ending our South American sojourn in the genteel urban settings of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

From here we switched continents.  We had talked for years about driving a 4-wheel-drive through Africa, and now it was time to put the dream into action.  We flew to Zambia where we spent several weeks working at Olive Tree Learning Centre, Terri's school that she helped establish in an impoverished shantytown in 2006 and which she has been supporting and growing ever since.  A group of Japanese students from Terri's former school flew down from Switzerland to meet us and do a service trip for which they had raised a large amount of much-needed funds, followed by a wildlife safari to incompable Chobe National Park across the Zambezi River in northern Botswana.

Afterwards we flew to Cape Town and started searching for vehicles, preferably already fitted out for overland exploration and camping.  Just as we were starting to despair, we got tipped off about a vehicle for sale in Johannesburg, and flew up to inspect it.  It was love at first sight, and so Stanley (as in Henry Morton Stanley) entered our lives.  

Most of the rest of 2016 was spent driving Stanley around southern Africa.  We explored Kruger National Park, then cruised through southern Mozambique before being turned around by civil conflict further north.  We drove back to South Africa, survived a potentially deadly car crash and then (after repairs) drove north into tragic but beautiful Zimbabwe for a month.  We popped out into Zambia and then turned east into Malawi before returning to Zambia, where we explored the north before heading down to Livingstone and spending more time at OTLC.  Finally we headed south across the wildlife paradise of Botswana before popping back into South Africa.

We took two-month break from Stanley from late October to mid-December, doing some tour guiding in Greece and some road-tripping through the Balkans before flying to Madagascar and its enchanting, endangered lemurs.

It wasn't until nearly Christmas that we were back in South Africa, picking up Stanley after some expert improvements had been made at Blinkgat, the camper manufacturer who had first put Stanley together a couple of years earlier.  We spun down through Swaziland and into KwaZulu-Natal, where we welcomed in 2017 in a wonderful wildlife refuge, Bushbaby Lodge.

2016 new countries:  Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Zambia, Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Madagascar, Swaziland.

2016 year-end country count:  130

2017
The year started with some of our favourite bits of Africa.  We drove south through KwaZulu-Natal and the Orange Free State and drove across the breathtaking mountainous country of Lesotho before getting tired of the rainy season and bolting north towards Namibia.  Namibia was incredible, and we had many unforgettable nights camped out in the depths of the Namib desert or the semi-desert just inland of it.  All good things must come to an end, though, and what ended this idyllic period was a summons home to Thunder Bay, where my father was trying to recover from aggressive thyroid cancer.  We drove across the Caprivi Strip for one last visit to OTLC in Livingstone, then bolted back to Windhoek to store Stanley until we could return.

The next few months for me were a blur, as my father's recovery stalled and then a terminal decline set in.  He died at the end of June, and most of July was spent cleaning out the house where he had lived for 46 years (and where I had grown up and returned to for three decades after leaving home).  At the end of July my mother and I drove to Ottawa with a U-Haul of family heirlooms, and I flew off to Bali to rejoin Terri.

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.

2017 new countries:  Lesotho, Namibia

2017 year-end country count:  132

2018
Terri and I said goodbye to Arborek early in January, glad for the experience but keen to move on.  We stopped off in Ambon for some memorable muck diving, then returned to Bali for a month of heavy rain and occasional diving.  I was still hard at work writing, and in early February I finished the first draft of my manuscript, just in time to fly to New Zealand for 2 months of exploring with Terri.  We covered much of the North Island of the country, more than a quarter century after my first visit there in 1992.  We hiked, biked, paddled and drove around many of the incredible natural sights of the country, and were amazed afterwards at how much we had seen.

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.

While we had been in New Zealand, I had accepted a job offer to teach in Tbilisi, so when we returned to Bali, I packed up my possessions and flew to Canada to visit my mother and then, at the end of July, on to Tbilisi.

2018-2019:  The Tbilisi Years

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.

2018 new countries:  none (first time since 2005!)

2018 year-end country count:  132

2019
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.

2019 new countries:  Panama

2019 year-end country count:  133

I hope that the 2020s will be just as active, if not more so, in terms of exploring new corners of the globe.  With a new and much longer-range installment of Stanley's Travels coming up starting in September, 2020, I hope to add a lot of the countries that are still missing from my collection.  I still have roughly 90 countries left to visit; I would love to have that total down closer to 30 when I'm writing the next installment of the decade-in-review.








Monday, April 30, 2018

Back In The Saddle: A Quick Bicycle Trip Around Bali

Lipah, May 1, 2018

Dozens of sails along the RollerCoastal
I got back to Bali about ten days before Terri at the beginning of April, and used some of that time to put right something that has been bothering me for months.  I hadn't gone on a bicycle trip in over two years, the longest such gap since 1994-97.  Terri and I rode our bicycles up the Carretera Austral in Chile, and around Paraguay, in 2015-16, and since then I have done lots of travel, but none of it on my trusty Rocky Mountain.  I decided that I should do a short jaunt around the eastern part of the island of Bali, and quickly charted out a 4-day itinerary to hit a few of the highlights that I had so far missed.  On April 8th I loaded up my bicycle very lightly (just two rear panniers, as I was going to be sleeping indoors every night and eating in restaurants) and set off to explore.


Eye candy along the RollerCoastal
Day 1:  April 8.  Lipah-Peneloka          91 km, 2660 vertical metres

The coast east of Lipah is very pretty indeed!
The first day was the hardest ride of the entire trip, with some 2660 vertical metres of climbing in some pretty intense heat.  I started off by riding the RollerCoastal, the back road to Amlapura, the biggest town in Karangasem Regency (in which Lipah is located).  I often ride part of this road as a fun morning outing, but I had never cycled all the way to Amlapura.  My nickname for the route tells you what you need to know about it:  lots of short, steep ups and downs.  The road climbs up and down over a series of sharp ridges coming down from the caldera of the extinct volcano that rises just behind Lipah.  Lempuyang and Seraya are the two highest surviving bits of a mountain that blasted itself to pieces sometime in the dim prehistoric past, but looking on a map you can see that there is a clear outline of what was once a much broader, higher volcanic cone.  It was a hot, challenging ride, with lots of it ridden in my lowest gear.  About two thirds of the way to Amlapura, the road finally became gentler, with better pavement and kinder grades.  It felt amazing to be back in the saddle, headed out for more than a couple of hours of riding.  I had missed the sensation of freedom and exploration that a bicycle tour always brings me.  The views along the RollerCoastal are sensational, with every headland bringing another vista of a black sand beach crowded with fishing boats, with the shimmering azure of the Bali Sea studded with sails beyond.  This stretch of coast has escaped tourist development, and the villages are devoted to fishing as they have been for generations.

Gunung Agung seen from Amlapura
After two and a half hours of tough riding, I got to the big city and had lunch in KFC so that I could use their free wi-fi; my SIM card had been locked by the government, and I was hoping to get it unlocked at the Telkomsel office in town, but I had forgotten that it was Sunday, and the office was closed.  I sat in the air conditioned restaurant, loaded up a Google Map route onto my phone and then set off northwest into the highlands under the fierce midday sun.

Lovely rice terraces on the way to Besakih
I had a wonderful view of Gunung Agung as I rode out of Amlapura.  The volcano has returned to its usual peaceful state after a few months of intense rumbling, shaking and puffing from September to January, and it looked magnificent in an almost cloudless sky.  I rode along the main road for a while until Google Maps directed me off onto a side road.  I am usually a huge fan of side roads, but in this case the side road was a tiny bit shorter by being a lot steeper, with a series of steep ups and downs through the spectacular rice terraces for which Bali is famous.  It was gruelling work, and when I finally re-emerged onto the busy main road, it was actually a bit of a relief to have gentler grades, despite the incessant noise of motorcycles and trucks and the standard Balinese maniacal driving style.  The road led around the western slopes of Gunung Agung, past the turnoff to Besakih, the main temple of the mountain and the starting point for climbing Agung.  I was definitely feeling all that vertical climbing when I finally reached the rim of the Gunung Batur caldera.  It was disappointing to discover that this was not the end of the uphill, as the road undulated, more up than down, for the next several kilometres until I got to the junction at Peneloka.  There a road plunges down to the shores of the lake, Danau Batur.  I was less than keen to lose all that hard-earned elevation, so I took a room at a hotel perched on the caldera rim, hoping for a fabulous sunrise view the next morning; it was already dusk by the time I climbed off my bicycle, legs weary but otherwise feeling pretty good.  A much-needed shower, a big meal and an early night completed the first day.

Day 2:  April 9.  Peneloka-Candikuning          65 km,  1510 vertical metres

Dawn over Batur
I was up in the predawn the next morning after the soul-satisfying deep sleep that comes after a big day of riding.  There was a pretty dawn light show in the eastern sky, but thin cloud led to rather flat, disappointing light on the new cinder cone of Gunung Batur.  I could see the headlights and camera flashes of hordes of trekkers near the summit; Batur is a popular climb for tourists, and has been sewn up by a local guiding association who make it remarkably expensive for a relatively short walk.  I felt no real need to climb the volcano, as there was plenty of exercise ahead, despite it being a significantly shorter and less vertical leg than the day before.  I took a few photos, stretched and juggled a bit to wake up, then climbed onto my bicycle.
Early morning light on Gunung Batur

Festival time
The road continued to climb, albeit fitfully, as I circled the caldera clockwise.  There was a lot of traffic on the road, as this is part of the main north-south route from Denpasar to Singaraja.  Luckily there was a festival at one of the temples along the route which closed the road to all but motorcycles and one lucky cyclists.  After 11 kilometres and some 350 metres of ascent, to just over 1600 metres above sea level, I was happy to turn away from the main road and start descending to the south.  I could see the mountains enclosing the day's destination, another volcanic lake called Danau Bratan, to the west, seemingly close enough to touch, but the jagged gash of a deep gorge means that there is no direct road between the two lakes.  Instead my route led me 25 km south to a crossing point, then another 25 km north again.  The southward leg was all downhill, making for an easy morning.  The scenery was appealing too, across volcanic highlands devoted to plantations of oranges, coffee and marigolds.  I had not breakfasted before leaving, so in the small village of Catur I stopped for a big helping of gado gado, one of my favourite Indonesian dishes, at a small roadside stall.  The woman running the place spoke exceptionally good English, and it turned out that she had worked abroad for over a decade in Turkey, the Maldives and Dubai.  She worked first as a masseuse, then as a massage instructor and supervisor, and had only returned to her native village to care for her aged parents a few months previously.  We chatted about travel, and it turned out that she, like me, is a big fan of Kyrgyzstan.  These sorts of serendipitous encounters with people along the way are one of my favourite aspects of bicycle journeys, and I pedalled off with my belly full and feeling good about being back cycle touring.

A well-travelled restaurateur in Catur

Volcanoes lining up from near Plaga
I lost altitude increasingly rapidly, eventually crossing one deep canyon and climbing into the small town of Plaga before dropping again to the main crossing over the Ayung River.  I was now less than 30 km north of Ubud and the landscape, all rice terraces and pretty ridge-top temples and villages, was very similar to the magical countryside that made Ubud famous (too famous, to judge by the appalling traffic that was choking the place the last time I visited, last September).  Now all that remained was 900 metres of regaining lost elevation.  It was a steep, hard grunt, but much of the way I was on a small side road without any traffic at all, so I had time to look around and appreciate my surroundings.  It was a bit grey and hazy, not so good for views but a welcome relief for a cyclist sweating his way uphill.  About 6 km short of my destination, I joined another major north-south road and resigned myself to more heavy traffic and obnoxious driving behaviour.  I finally got to the village of Candikuning around 1:30, found a cheap hotel, showered and then set off in search of sustenance, both physical and intellectual.
Highland plantations

Marigolds grown in the highlands
The former came in the form of mujair, the fish that is raised in fish farms in both Danau Bratan and Danau Batur; it was pleasant, but the sweet soy-based sauce was a bit strange.  I then wandered up the road to the Bali Botanical Gardens where I hoped to do some birdwatching.  I had read several accounts of birdwatchers who had seen a couple dozen species of highland birds in an afternoon there, but I was either incompetent or unlucky, or both.  I could hear birds calling high overhead in tall trees, but peer as I might through my binoculars, I couldn't spot anything.  It was a complete strikeout in terms of new species; at least I had a pleasant stroll through the gardens.  After a big dinner of nasi goreng, I was in bed early, feeling a bit tired.
Near Danau Bratan

Day 3:  April 10, Candikuning to Lovina        33 km  330 vertical metres

It was a good thing that I was in bed early, as I had not paid enough attention to the religious makeup of Candikuning.  Bali is mostly Hindu, but there are pockets of Muslims here and there, and Candikuning was almost exclusively Muslim.  I was sleeping with my earplugs in (Bali's obsession with roosters, along with its packs of feral dogs, make for noisy nights), but they were no match for the high-decibel call to prayer that shook my hotel at 4:30 am.  I eventually fell asleep again, but I was not a well-rested little cyclist when I crawled out of bed.

Overlooking Danau Buyan
The day's riding was amazingly short and easy.  I rode out of town along the shore of Lake Bratan, then along a level valley leading to two more lakes, Buyan and Tamblingan; all three are nestled under the caldera wall of another extinct volcano.  At Buyan the road climbed steeply up to the rim of the caldera and then continued fairly level, with expansive views of the lakes to the left and the ocean to the right.  I felt suspended in mid-air and it made for wonderful cycling, especially when the main torrent of traffic disappeared downhill towards Singaraja.  Not long afterwards I followed Google Maps down a very steep route to the tourist hotspot of Lovina Beach.  I had 1500 metres to lose over 15 km, an average gradient of 10%, but the first half was surprisingly level.  The second half, however, was precipitous, and my forearms were starting to cramp by the time I got to the bottom.  It was very pretty and there was next to no traffic, and I really enjoyed being so far off the beaten track.  At the bottom I was able to boil water from my bottles on my brake rotors; all that gravitational potential energy that I had gained the day before was converted into heat, a fact that pleased my physics-teaching brain.

I had stayed in Lovina one night back in November during a quick diving trip along the north coast, and I had been surprised at how tatty the village is.  I knew that lots of expats and retirees live in Lovina, and I was hard-put to figure out where.  This trip revealed another side of Lovina in the hills above the coast, where genteel villas have been constructed to catch the mountain breezes.  I stayed closer to the coast, in the cheapest hotel so far; 150,000 rupiah (about US$ 12) bought me a spacious room in a complex with a swimming pool and pleasant gardens.  I went out for a sizeable lunch, then ended up spending much of the afternoon catching up on my beauty sleep, undisturbed by any muezzins.  I went out for dinner that evening overlooking Lovina's rather underwhelming beach and listened to quite a good cover band before retiring to my room.
Danau Buyan






Day Four:  April 11, Lovina to Lipah         90 km, 740 vertical metres

The last day of the trip was a bit of an anticlimax.  After the mountains, climbs, descents and new scenery of the first three days, the final stage was a fairly flat, uneventful trundle along a road that I had travelled twice before in each direction on visa runs (Singaraja is the nearest visa extension office to Lipah).   I stopped in Singaraja and got my SIM card issue resolved, a process that took almost an hour as I was behind a line of Chinese visitors who had also been stymied by the government's obsession with having all SIM cards registered.  After Singaraja I was able to ride fast enough to generate some wind cooling in the heat of the day, and I made good time all the way to Tulamben, site of the USAT Liberty wreck and many more less well-known muck-diving sites that Terri and I have visited many times.  From there the road got a bit hillier, but I was still back in Lipah by 2:30, having taken less than four hours from Singaraja.  I was hungry and a bit sunburnt, but elated at having seen a few more corners of Bali by bicycle.  I can't wait to do more cycle touring (probably just weekend jaunts) when I move to Tbilisi in August!

















Monday, October 19, 2015

New Guinea: The ugly, the good and the wonderful (Retrospective from July and August, 2014)

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.
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.

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.
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.  
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.

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.  
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. 

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.
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.

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.  
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.

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.  
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.  
 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.
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.
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.
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