Jungle cheesecake: rebounding in the highlands of New Guinea

Nancy Sullivan

My first stop is Wamena, where I stop in for noodles at Sam Chandra’s shop. Sam’s a

middle-age Moluccan Indonesian with a golf cap and great charm. He is gracious as usual

and tells me about a Hong Kong feature film called ‘Stone Age Warrior’ which shot a

segment here last year. Sam was asked to round up hundreds of Dugum Dani extras and

kit them out with props. Prices varied for a man with a pig on his shoulder and a woman

with a net bag of sweet potato, that sort of thing.

“Who set the price?” I want to know.

“The Dani did!”

There was some confusion in the big battle scene, even though the production

crew supplied these men with blunted spears and arrows. They failed to mix the clans on

both sides, and so the actors coalesced into enemy camps, and when the first arrows fell,

all hell broke loose. The Chinese loved it and just kept rolling.

Sam laughs. “No dead,’ he’s quick to add---“just wounded.”

Sam is a transmigraci from the Moluccas, relocated to this Papuan Province

decades ago and now a formidable presence in this small frontier town. He owns the

noodle shop and the town’s only teletype machine. We stand together at the open gate to

his small establishment and I begin to hear the unmistakable sound of American English.

“We’ll walk you back if you like.”

This from a tall handsome Indonesian walking up to us. Behind him is a smaller

one. They’re a team of professional photographers, and Teo, the tall one, is the son of a

diplomat who spent his teens in New York City, so his English is American, and, as I am

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to learn, all his film, TV and musical references are my own. Tony, his photo assistant,

is from Sulawesi, and mostly smiles and giggles; we all three walk back to Anggrek

Losmen and I learn they’re flying to Kosarek in the Star Mountains tomorrow on an MAF

cessna. This is interesting insofar as Sam has been trying to pitch that very flight to me as

an exclusive charter. That Sam, we laugh, always hustling. I tell them the story of how,

last year, I brought Sam with me to conduct some TV interviews with the survivors of

Robert Gardner’s 1965 film, Dead Birds, the documentary from the Harvard-Peabody

Expedition to the Dugum Dani that Michael Rockefeller joined as still photographer

before setting off to the Asmat and disappearing, reportedly drowned or killed by

villagers. Sam and I sat down with the old warrior Weaklekek, who brought out the

8x10” Rockefeller photo of his first wife, now long deceased, and cried over the image of

her digging sweet potatoes with half her fingers lopped off from mortuary rites so many

years ago. I formulate just the right question to elicit his memory and an opinion of the

filming experience, Sam would then translate to Bahasa, Wewaklekek’s son would turn

this to Dani, then Wewaklekek would brighten up and return a three minute monologue

on his experience with Gardner, Rockeller, Karl Heider and Peter Matthiesson. I’d look to

Sam, who would then say, “He enjoyed his time very much.”

Can I come along tomorrow? Sure, why not. Teo has an advertising gig for one of

the national airlines, and the whole of Indonesia is his location. My plan is to take off

from Kosarek for a weeklong walk to Angguruk, and then fly back to Wamena from

there.

When I get to the MAF hangar the next day they say they want to put a training

pilot on the flight, and bump me. It’s only a six-seater cessna. I am reconciled, but then

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Teo suggests he drop his guide and bring me instead. Sam Chandra throws a wobbly

because the guide is his, and he’ll lose the commission; instead he suggests I take a walk

with another guide for the day.

Teo looks at him from twice his height. “No, I don’t think so.”

My hero. The pilot relents, they drop the trainee, and I jump aboard after all.

The shocking thing about Kosarek is that, so far away and perched on a

spectacularly narrow ridge top, it actually does have a grass strip, a loony missionary

couple in residence, and hundreds of kids constantly begging for smokes. The plane taxis

up the steep gradient to turn around for its take-off (over a sheer cliff), and a toe-headed

mission kid come running up with a letter for the pilot. His folks have a nice clapboard

home right by the strip, and there’s a visiting missionary cabin up the hill where we can

stay (for a price). Naked kids are swarming now, hands outstretched. “Smoke! Smoke!”

Someone even barks “Winfield Blue!” as if he prefers menthol. Clusters of teenage girls

in short reed skirts stand around laughing at me for what seems hours.

Okay, but I’m not that funny.

The Yali men wear dog bones in their septums and a few cockatoo and cassowary

feathers in their hair--accessories are really played down in favor of the main article: tens

of rattan hoops around their waist, widening like an inverted cone or one of those stacked

donut toys, down to their knees, where a meter-long penis gourd is held by string at a

forty-five degree from their chest, and keeps the hoops from spilling to the ground. It’s so

Rodgers and Hammerstein, something only Edith Head could put together for one of

those girls getting dressed Oklahoma scenes, everyone in hoopskirt undies and rag

curlers. Just that these men aren’t singing (yet).

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Inside our cabin, an old man squats on his haunches, his hoops hiked up around

his hips and his long skinny penis gourd resting on his shoulder. He’s poring over my

photos of Papua New Guinea, nodding and smiling. Everyone in Irian Jaya asks about

PNG, is desperate for shots of their doppelganger in the independent developing State

next door. One of the kids steals a shot and never brings it back. Some go after him at

first but then give up.

Higher mountain ranges surrounding us have ridge tops thatch homes emitting

smoky tendrils that waft into clouds, and we’re dying to walk to them. We hear singing

from one of them. In the late afternoon clouds float onto the clearing outside the hut and

fill the valley off it’s edge. It’s a wholly unexpected danger to think of walking off the

smoke machine filled stage and into oblivion. It looks like a shortcut to the other side of

the valley, but then maybe the hoop skirts help you fly.

In the village school a Biak island man in a Bali batik shirt is the Headmaster. Teo

takes very handsome portraits as he perches on a school desk and explains the local

courtship practice whereby girls and boys together from various villages come together

for a night of singing that, he declares, winds up in one big orgy. So it is Oklahoma after

all.

At night we eat by candlelight while a sea or dirty noses are pressed against the

louvered window panes. Even when we unroll our bags to sleep, hanging towels over the

glass, the whites of eyes are still there in the cracks. Teo plays someone's guitar, all of us

sitting around at the timber table. Teo, Tony, Olfiet their guide, Judas the porter (whose

name shall serve him well), a young Kosarek boy, and the old man who’s already been a

portrait model several times over. Teo sings Indonesian pop songs, Paul Simon, James

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Taylor, and Tracy Chapman in a strong voice, under pounding rain, and I am, as usual,

immensely impressed by someone who can remember lyrics along with a melody. My

heart swells with contentment as I watch Teo, and think about us all here in candlelight,

in the midst of the Star Mountains, barely strangers just two days ago. I look over at

Tony, Olfiet, the deadpan old man, and the young boy who reaches his hand to me.

“Smoke.”

The next day our Bible translating hosts show up, a German couple with two

Gerber-faced kids, plus an Australian woman. The Aussie woman in friendly, but the

others as a little Teutonic for me, Mr and Mrs both preferring to speak to Teo rather than

me---because he’s Indonesian, or a man, or tell? I can’t figure out. The man tells us all

this begging for smokes is fairly recent, since last year when the first backpackers came

through. [Are they blaming us---me?]. They’ve been here five years and may need at least

five more to finish their work in the clapboard three bedroom house with water tanks,

solar panels, cheery curtains, CB radio and video player. The kids are home schooled, and

we are told they speak better Yali than Mom and Dad. The housegirl is helping them with

Corinthians right now.

At Walsatek, a hamlet perched an another precarious ridge across the valley, Teo

and Tony take rolls of astonishing, truly breathtaking shots. The ridge is so narrow that

the village is barely one footpath wide, all the huts spilling off down the sides. No one

seems particularly aghast to see us space travelers on their section of the moon, but I

think they’re just cowed by T and T, who, as Indonesians, represent the police state.

People can be pretty guarded when they’re used to strangers carrying AK-47s. But not

always compliant.

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The next day we walk to Welarek where Tony organizes handsome young men to

sit for portraits. There are reflectors and fill in flashes and all manner of interesting

gadgets for these people who’ve barely seen cameras before. One man is most elegant

and patient as Tony fusses and tilts him about like a bored supermodel. “Sau wali,” says

Tony--Excellent. After about fifteen minutes he’s dismissed and paid; he stares at the

useless paper notes, then at the polaroid he’s been handed, figures he’s been cheated, and

stomps off. “Tough crowd,” Teo says.

“He’ll go start a union now,” I say.

The next night we’re all tucked into sleeping bags when Tony, Teo and Olfiet

wake to footsteps and scraping in the cook house behind. They’re all in one room and, in

deference to Olfiet who’s a Timorese kid with a gold cross, I’m in another. But they come

wake me now and insist I bring my bag in with them, to tuck into the bunker. I’m a little

scared, it’s true, if only because I’m familiar with the dangers to women in the highlands

of PNG.

“Maybe it’s that disgruntled Welarek model,” Teo says, then corrects himself.

“More likely his agent.”

We tell ghost stories to get to sleep, some of which are creepier left untranslated.

Teo tells the ghost story of our shared American youth, the one where two parked lovers

keep hearing scratching at the driver’s door and it turns out to be a friend left for dead. I

keep trying to imagine Teo as a New York City teenager. We wake in the morning to find

small tufts of fur between the planks of the cook house wall. Not the agent after all, just

that three-legged cur who stole our stash of jerky.

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Nohomas is an hour’s walk from Kosarek by a route that opens to huge views

across the valley and the jungle below. As we round the final bend in a path hugging the

mountainside, there’s a terrifying mob on the ridge above us--forty or more hoop-skirted

men cassowary headdresses in full paint and pig tusk necklaces and nose ornaments,

yodeling and bobbing with spears. Their hoops wobble in waves from chest to knees and

make them some kind of militant Michellene man mob. Someone sent word two

photographers were coming and the whole village has kitted out in full fight regalia;

they’ve even made us a mumu of sweet potatoes. We crest the ridge to find seventy or

eighty men and women dancing and whooping in concentric circles: a tight centre circle

of men chanting and stomping, counterclockwise, and women running clockwise outside,

clutching their breasts and hoop-hooping at full throttle. An older man brings us to the

mumu mound and lights it, so we hand him a clutch of twist tobacco to distribute, and the

kids are everywhere begging for smokes. This dancing is wild and exuberant and incites

Teo to lie down with his camera in the centre of the circle as people hop over him. The

whole scene, the whole village of us is balanced on a long narrow ridge top with 360

degree views of surrounding valleys like a Lilliputin platter of stemmed glasses raised

from the valley floor. Some of us are even wearing paper umbrellas and twisted straws.

As the singsing dies down we hear faintly harmonious singing from across the

valley, where men have just finished clearing a garden. They’re singing for themselves,

without even trying to please. When the dancing stops and the mumu has been opened,

after a brief rainfall that sends one and all to the thatched huts eaves (lest headdresses get

wet), everyone assembles in three rows for a group portrait. It’s a class picture, and Teo

sets a timer and tries several times to run from camera to front row while people keep

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spilling out with infectious laughter. Finally, the real rains come. A crash of thunder and

great balls of rain start falling (again very Lilliputin). All the rakish Yali men head for

shelter, and women scatter for the space under the eaves while the kids slide down the

muddy paths screaming with silliness. A fog slips over the ridge like a quilted sleeve,

hiding all the mountains around us, so that now we are very much alone on this platter in

a fluffy cloud, all sated and happy and danced to exhaustion. It’s time to walk back.

Paulius, a young Yali, joins us for dinner and explains that knowledge, not

wealth, is what makes a man important here. Nowadays that includes traditional

knowledge as well as knowledge of the Indonesian language and bureaucracy. Now that

things have opened up with pacification in the past ten years, men can seek wives from

distant places. If a Yali marries a Dani woman, from the next valley, he will move down

there rather than vice versa. Paulius himself plans to go with another kid to Angguruk, a

mission station in the Star Mountains, for some aid post training. He hasn’t yet got

enough pigs for a wife, even though he says most men marry at 16 here, and girls by 14. It

was during his father’s youth, some thirty years ago, that missionaries first introduced

chits to the village for buying goods at their stores. By now the Yali are firmly locked into

the cash economy for salt, sugar, biscuits, rice, and the ubiquitous (if ephemeral) smokes.

Tony does a great Sam Chandra imitation, stroking his chin, strutting, tipping his

golf hat. Then he tells a story about an old man who accompanied us from Nohomas

today, stroking his balls all the way, then bending to inspect a bit of pig dung on the path;

he helped Olfiet make the potato fritters tonight.

The Nohomas people show up early next morning, all dressed for a photo shoot.

Women with white clay dots and red noses, men with spears and cuscus and cassowary

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and lesser bird of paradise feathers in their hair. Paulius mediates, Tony and Olfiet

negotiate, and it’s decided each person will get roughly two dollars for the morning's

work. Olfiet’s a smooth and pretty Timorese boy who wears immodestly short cutoffs and

smokes incessantly. He argues that the potential benefits in tourism call for their coming

down to fifty cents a day, but Teo agrees to the better rate. The airline’s paying anyway.

Teo shoots with a Hasselblad, but he takes polaroids to see what he’s got before

taking the shot, so he hands these back to the delight of his subjects everywhere. This

morning he sets up his tripod and reflectors facing the outside side wall of the cabin.

Groups of two, four, sometimes one, stand, kneel and sit, one after another, on a little

proscenium of banana leaves. Very stagy shots that will make their way to a large photo

exhibition in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur later. Nothing candid or would-be candid about

this, and so truly different from the sea of documentary images every photojournalist and

his sister bring home from New Guinea. Simple, frank poses, but unabashed posing

poses. A couple of disarming shots of young girls sitting side-saddle peering over their

shoulders. One favorite model is Teo's greatest and giggliest admirer, a young girl named

Marta, and she also poses for him against a red door inside the house, with a reflector to

bouncing light off the wall to warm her skin. She is beautiful, preteen, topless, and

without guile. Somehow the shots Teo takes bypass the realm of exploitation and bring

her sincerity to something even lovelier. These will be centerpieces of Teo’s show.

We take Robert Mapplethorpe shots of me and the old man with the three legged

dog, back to back, medium close. Young white skinned blond against a wizened black

man. He’s in hoops and penis gourd, I’m in a sarong over my breasts. The old man turns

around and snuggles his nose into my hair and everyone laughs.

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It’s the day before I’m supposed to go off on my own to Angguruk and now I’m

scared of being caught in the rain, cold and miserable. The old man wants to be a porter,

but Paulius and Judas have told him he’s not needed, and he’s become very huffy. Teo

wants to shoot him again but he turns on his heel saying he’s not being paid enough. Now

the rain comes. We sit inside, chilled, as it hammers overhead and Tony shuffles a deck

of cards. A youthful arm reaches in through the louvered window. ‘Smoke.’

I say my reluctant goodbyes to Tony and Teo the next morning. An MAF plane

will fly them to Wamena and westwarad, the next leg of their junket. I’ll miss the hand

puppets, the match-lit farts, the burping armpits, and Tony’s brilliant imitations: even the

one of me he’s doing in the cessna as they taxi away. Herr Bible comes out with mail for

the pilot, waves the two off, and pulls a puckering face when Teo bends to kiss my cheek.

I beam up, happy to sin, wondering if I’ll be punished when the plane has gone. How I

wish I were leaving with them right now. Could this be yet another lost chance? Could I

jump aboard? Tony calls us TNT, TeoNancyTony, a romantic comedy with

asexual/comic/less-attractive male sidekick. But in fact I’m rebounding from a break up

in Papua New Guinea, and Teo is married, if feebly. (He will be divorced by next year

when I get calls from Jakarta to the highlands of PNG suggesting possibilities that first

occurred to me standing here in Kosarek, just as they lift off the edge and climb over the

wide open valley).

Olfiet is coming with me to Aggurruk, as is Judas, the unsmiling porter. And the

old man decides to come along after all. He and his absurdly long penis gourd and three

legged runt of a dog. Accessories, of sorts, for what is a walk in the park for this guy,

while I will always consider the trek one of my most life affirming accomplishments.

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This first afternoon we reach Sarkasi, on top of the next mountain away. The track

is impossibly steep and the last leg almost kills me. I stop for a breather every few

minutes to gulp for oxygen, while the porters all ask for a smoke. The old man apparently

never smiles. But Olfiet organizes camp in a timber home filled with women at the

doorway and men in the front room. It’s the local Yali pastor’s house. A blue-eyed albino

baby gurgles in one woman’s arms. Kids are crowding in on me, in my face, and I’m

exhausted trying to entertain them. Plus, I’ve given away all my pens. We’re only two

hours from Kosarek and I’m nearly dead, already missing Tony and Teo like babies torn

from my own arms.

I step outside. We’re at the highest point in this narrow ridge top strip of a village.

It’s such a magnificent view (breathtaking) with two, and faintly three, mountain ranges

below us, crosscut by layers of dense white cloud. Tall poinsettias and croton surround

the house. I finally catch my breath in time for a wash in the stream, then sit for a plate of

instant noodles and finally, ever so eagerly, crawl into my sleeping bag.

Next day we reach Delambela, another hilltop village. We climb and climb, then

descend forever through dense rainforest, hacking at vines or sliding down logs. The main

mountain we’ve scaled is Mt. Timike, but scores of impossible foothills surround it. Here

and there the garden paths give way to raw wet bush and getting a grip is very hard. My

left leg has gone sore from all the steep descents, but I find some solace, actually humour,

followed by more yearning for T and T, from discovering that the tap-tap-tapping on my

left shoulder is not, as I imagine, the old man trying to get my attention, but the tip of his

penis gourd team-tagging me as we descend the mountain.

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We’re now squatting on the dirt floor of the church with crowds of people at front

and back door and more watching through the wood slats. It’s a far walk to the river, so

Olfiet, Paulius and the porters (the original two having mysteriously become four) borrow

many pots for water, and I go down with them for a wash. But then they all stop for a

smoke in the men's house, or honai, of a settlement just below, leaving me barefoot and

useless outside for over an hour. Welcome to the double standard. You can be the solo

female trekker in West Papua but you’ll never get into the honai. My leg has seized up

and I’m pissed off, so three little girls show me down to the river by shortcut. We all

jump in together, laughing, and they lather up with my soap, reaching under our shorts

and laplaps.

I wish there were a province filled exclusively with New Guinea women, all as

gracious and cheerful as they are here and now. They would have photos of their male

relatives dressed in those wonderful penis gourds and cassowary head-dresses, but would

explain ruefully how they’ve moved away or been killed off, not one of them to found

anymore. We would rule the entire resource-rich island without big men or corrupt

politicians, and banish all school fees, all dietary taboos, all string bags filled with

firewood strung from women’s brows. No more menstrual huts, no more marrying

strangers, no more starving so our brothers can eat. Tony once worked for Dea Suderman,

the Japanese ethnographic filmmaker, who’s done a few 16mm films of Irian Jaya for

Japanese TV. At one time, Tony claims, he and a pre production crew canoed the rivers

close to Jayapura, searching for a mythical ‘Amazon’ tribe said to abduct men for

insemination and then kill their male babies. They found traces of broken camps, and huts

where they once lived, Tony says. But now the woman are assimilated into other tribes.

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Of course Teo and Tony are old Amazonia hands, they say, both married to matriarchal

women from South Sumatra, they love to be bossed around.

By late afternoon everyone’s come back from the gardens and crowded in to see

us. Thirty people watch as I write this diary note. Olfiet has boiled water to put hot towel

compresses around my left calf, which is now throbbing like a pounded drum. Most of the

walk today has been in cloud, which was pleasantly cool and disorienting, but for a while

we climbed under the canopy of one mountainside, in a wonderfully muffled quiet. The

moss and knotty surface roots slowed our feet, and lawyer and liana vines had to be

chopped back to let us through. When we stopped for lunch in a clearing a hunting party

with bows wandered through our party and sat for a smoke. One sold us his cooked sweet

potatoes which we shared around, the men telling jokes in local language (no doubt about

me). This walking is so tough that I have to remember to look around, to enjoy it, which

increasingly irritates my fleet companions. These guys race up killer steep and slippery

slopes in the drizzling rain. Even the scrawny three legged cur pities me. We’re pressing

ourselves to reach Angguruk by Monday, because an MAF flight comes in Tuesday and

can fly me to Wamena. Where I shall take a bath.

And now the clouds lift off the summit to reveal a panoramic view, just as the sun

sets into deep violet. Our camp is in one corner of the big empty church, and after dinner

the kids--tens of them--come in and sit down around us with lit candles before them. It’s

blackness all around, each face bending into a pool of amber light. As a young boy strums

a ukulele, they sing a couple of local songs in perfect harmony. Some murmuring and

preparation, and they begin the Papua New Guinea anthem which they’ve memorized

from radio in Pidgin. It’s clear and strong and uninhibited enough to bring stinging tears

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to my eyes. They are so close to the border, where self-rule is out of their grasp, but

they’re brave enough to put on this subversive performance for a complete stranger who

claims to be from PNG. As the second verse begins, Paulius picks up a guitar and starts

strumming discordant tunes. We stop for a minute to hear his Kosarek song. But then as

the kids began again, he persists in his crude strumming against their a capello voices.

“Olfiet, can you get him to stop?”

“You want to play the guitar?”

“No, want to hear the children.”

“But cannot stop him.”

We set out from Delambela just after nine this morning while it’s still raining.

Olfiet stops someone strolling by with a live chicken, buys it, then ties its feet together

and carries it under his arms. My leg really hurts now that it’s all downhill, each step

reverberating through my teeth, but I can’t stop for fear of not starting again. By midday,

I’m overjoyed that we’ve hit a flat walk through a valley. But then we climb again and,

god bless these guys, they slow down for my sake. This is itself an enormous

accomplishment, getting the troops to slow down, and now I’m enjoying it so much more.

Lovely moments pass listening to nearby birds of paradise, and stopping to greet people

coming down from their gardens. The porters are all forty-five minutes to an hour ahead

of us on their broad flat feet, so they get long breaks and two smokes in before we ever

show up---when they jump ready to go again.

At one point we reach a vine bridge across a narrow, fast running river and on the

other side disturb a small family on the hillside processing sago flour: pounding, milking

and straining the palm mulch into a food they will bake and boil for food.

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Olfiet calculated this day's walk to be four to five hours, and it’s been eight so far,

with only a short pause for a lunch of bananas, peanut butter and the ubiquitous smokes.

Paulius has become disagreeable to Olfiet today, sick of being bossed around by an

Indonesian. He sometimes smiles a really wanky smile at me though.

“Bad man I think,” Olfiet shakes his head.

We’ve probably climbed and descended four mountains today. Finally Olfiet spots

the aid post of the village of Membaham near the summit of the next mountain. “Just up

there.” But it’s a cruel illusion. We climb endlessly, and Olfiet stops every ten or fifteen

minutes to point again to the apparition somewhere above. Three hours later and very

near tears, I stumble to its door. I’m nearly mad from the pain in my leg. We camp in the

aid post under tattered posters of medical lexicons and in the loving care of a kind woman

who apparently is married to the aid post worker, although he’s on patrol. The five room

building is perched on a small cliff side landing, it’s back to the bush, with a lovely

waterfall spilling down only a few paces away. I hobble to the far side of the waterfall to

wash before my legs seize up, then return just as Olfiet’s gotten hot compresses and tea

ready for me.

There’s no real pattern to how these places receive tourists. Olfiet’s brought

tourists here before, and they’re as kind as can be. Delambela, on the other hand, was

more remote, and they reacted a little coolly when we first arrived. But then, we’re

walking through areas where people still fear their neighbors and live on ridge tops for a

reason. I have recurrent dreams of falling off the mountainside. Rolling over and into

freefall The kind of dreams where you’re aware you’re dreaming but you can’t stop it, it’s

a juggernaut gaining momentum until you hit the next REM phase.

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The next day, just before finally descending into Angguruk, we all rest at a

precipice with a 270 degree view of the valley below. It’s a windy extreme place to sit,

and it doesn’t take much to imagine being blown off. This is where the porters--at

Paulius' nod--go on strike. They want a full day’s pay for the first and last days, originally

negotiated as half days, and full pay for a fourth man who attached himself to us along the

way. I sit silent as Olfiet and Paulius argue in Bahasa and the porters, Judas presenting

and terrific scowl, all look on. The old man now becomes snarly and claims to have

personally helped me over every mountaintop, so I tell Olfiet to tell him to stuff it, he

wasn’t asked to come in the first place (although I have to concede the downhill shoulder

tapping always lightened my day). He came along on an errand to Angguruk anyway, I

know, carried nothing but his own string bag and got free meals along the way. In the

end, and in the spirit of labour movements everywhere, they win a better rate for all.

Our sullen mob descends into town. We walk to the hospital, where a Timorese

doctor treats people from all over the region. He’s a ‘friend’ of Olfiet, our Timorese, and

they share a lukewarm greeting in Timorese. But I dislike him instantly. With a gang of

snotty Indonesian assistants he blithely reports that tomorrow's plane will fly from here to

Welarek to pick up passengers, and will be too full for the leg too Wamena. No seat for

me. Too bad, they all shrug. But Friday (four days from now) a tourist charter is expected

and I can no doubt pay charter rates to take it on to Wamena. Olfiet makes noises about

my international connection, but this man literally turns his back. As keeper of the radio

he can’t be alienated, so we stand like goons for a minute knowing it’s also possible for

him to get on the radio and stroke MAF a little for my sake. Olfiet shakes his head. I ask

him to ask them to ask the doctor if he can radio Wamena please. Olfiet grimaces

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nervously at the doctor's flat refusal and explains to me in English that his friend here is a

“joker.”

What?

“I think he is making a joke.”

And I think I’ll be walking back to Wamena.

“We come back.”

Yes, we come back. Before I hit the man.

Angguruk is a sweet small town, entirely embraced by steep mountain palisades

with gardens climbing up to their tops; and there are cows grazing on the airstrip. Across

the airfield sits two abandoned mission houses with slightly overgrown gardens behind

them. The missionaries left two years ago, I’m told, but these houses tell a poignant story.

One of them still has wormy books in the glass cases and a big cast iron stove that must

have been hellish to transport. There are three large bedrooms with adjoining baths.

Ghosts everywhere, of people who left before they finished packing.

We make our way across the strip to the guest house, which is really a string of

bare wooden rooms off a raised walkway, like a motel. All of us crowd into one room,

slump to the floor, and settle accounts with Paulius and his gang of merry men. Soap,

biscuits, instant coffee all quickly change hands. As each man receives his rupiahs from

Olfiet and slithers off to the porch with barely a nod in my direction. In weakness, I hand

the old man a cigarette, extra thanks, for which he says nothing and walks away.

At mid-afternoon we return to the kindly doctor, who appears to be organizing an

outrageously expensive charter in my behalf. Or, we can walk to Welarek tomorrow and

jump the flight from there.

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This is really not funny, I tell Olfiet.

We come back tomorrow, he suggests, proffering one more strained smile.

In the yard behind the guest house, the schoolteacher, his brother, and their

extended families come to see the photos of PNG they’ve heard about. Within twenty

minutes the crowd swells to fifty or more men, women and children passing around my

snapshots of friends and Western Highlands tribesmen, along with one lone Air Niugini

in-flight magazine that contains the rosetta stone images of Papua New Guineans in

tshirts, school uniforms and even suits and ties. Women have straightened hair and

lipstick; coastal and islands faces smile cheek to cheek. A blue-black Bougainvillean in

an orange jumpsuit stands under the wing of an Airbus. The school teacher raises the

photos of heavily decorated highlanders at the Goroka Show and they loudly coooo and

aahhhh as he explains the people live just across the border. Kids jump up and down to

see, very politely; when a snapshot reaches them a few wander off alone to contemplate

the big head-dresses, the body paint, the bright string bags on people who look just like

them but are worlds away and afloat on a separate geopolitical plate. It’s fifteen years

since PNG got its Independence from Australia, and twenty five years since West Papua

was cheated of theirs in a forced referendum that evicted Dutch administrators and

installed Javanese policemen with their checkpoints and AK47s. I wonder if the departed

missionaries were Ducth.

The teacher holds up a close up of a Huli tribesman from Ambua Lodge in the

Southern Highlands, wearing his traditional toreador-shaped wig with marigold borders

and yellow face paint. The crowd roars. William is the most photographed Papua New

Guinean, his face beams from all the travel brochures and trade show posters. When the

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page turns we see Willie in Huli dress next to two bikini-clad girls on a beach in

Australia. More cheers, and now the kids reach and throw fingers at Willie's pig tusk

necklace, his ass grass and fiber apron, asking urgent questions in local language. They

giggle, all wide eyes and covered mouths, so I follow their eye lines and discover they’re

not even looking at the girls in bikinis.

Then the teacher opens to the magazine's center map showing the PNG side of the

country with barely an inch of Irian Jaya over the western border. He points to the space

not illustrated and indicates where Wamena and Jayapura and Angguruk would be.

Everyone stares or exclaims politely, as though they haven’t seen a map before. I wonder

how many of these kids, all in penis gourds and grass skirts, even go to school. The older

people stand for long minutes holding a snapshot near their face, or they open the

magazine and stop at the masthead where a small square picture shows a Papua New

Guinean Minister of Civil Aviation. It is more powerful than any religious icon.

The next day Olfiet and I get on the MAF Beechcraft back to Wamena. Turns out

the doctor was pulling our legs all the time, and our seats have always been secure. He

tells Olfiet he just wanted to see my face when he mentioned the cost of a charter.

Asshole.

The tough little Cessna touches down with delicacy and then drop its full weight

to the nose wheel. You can feel it sigh before the engine revs loudly and the plane

shudders up the graded grass strip. Such incredible machines, single engine planes.

They’re so fluttery and frail moving through these enormous gorges, so hollow and

exhausted when they land on isolated hilltops. High altitude single engine flying is as

risky as it gets. As though the plane knows this, it always seems to catch its own breath

20

before take off. There’s that hesitation, that pause when the plane squares up at the edge

of the runway and turns to go, a second thought, the slight window of opportunity during

final checks, that last chance to turn back, before pulling the throttle and racing down the

straightaway in a vibrating defiance of gravity. You’re whole body is thrust back by the

force of inevitability, shoulders pinned to the seat, then jolted up in a miraculous lift--

when you’re stomach falls and your bowels loosen, and then your heart races with a

compressed feeling of ascension. All this for taking a dare. Your body is momentarily

exalted as the little machine wrapped around you slices through turbulence to a calmer

place in the sky. I love flying. My own single engine license has long lapsed from the

price of fuel and the limits of my amateurism in these mountains. I’m an idiot, but I’m not

that stupid. The descent into Wamena is beautiful, soaring low over gardens and kunai

thatch homes with their feathery plumes of smoke. Streams that oxbow across valley

floors, fields of mounded sweet potatoes hung from the sky at eighty five degree angles.

We touch down with a bounce in Wamena, at about nine thirty AM. That hour-long trip

will have to suffice me for thrill seeking and breathelessness, I know, for the time being.

Descending the plane a young Dani boy comes running onto the tarmac calling

and waving an envelope, "Nancy Sullivan! Nancy Sullivan!"

I don’t understand. “Me?”

It’s a note from Tony and Teo. Folded inside is one of Teo's Polaroid’s: of a tall

Bokondini man in wide penis gourd, red sash around his waist, cassowary feather head-

dress and beard, standing against a blue sailcloth, his eyes closed and head tilted, and his

arms are crossed tenderly hugging his neck--the posture of New Guineans who emerge

from their huts into the cold morning air. The image is only 2x2” and its precision makes

21

my heart sink. My own religious icon. The note is in Teo's hand. From the Baliem

Cottages hotel, dated this very morning:

Querida Nancy,

As you can see we’ve yet to leave the valley. The day we got back from Kosarek

we positively decided to push on to Karubaga...We decided to scrap our plans and

stay on till the 9th in Wamena to do some more portraits (one example included).

This morning as fate would have it, we found ourselves basking in the

unseasonably warm sun on the airport tarmac eagerly awaiting the arrival of a

MAF plane from Angguruk. My heart would beat like crazy in anticipation of the

arrival of a certain passenger I thought (stupidly) I was fated to meet again. Alas,

it was not to be...During our wait we photographed the cockpit crew if a Merpati

Twin Otter bound for Ewer (Asmat) and ensuing conversation afterwards yielded

a surprising reward--a quick (& free) flight to Ewer and back with a brief

walkabout--about 25 minutes around the boundaries of the fabled Asmat land.

That should make my client happy, plus I got some astounding aerials thanks to

the crew. The fact that we were the only two passengers aboard helped too, I

think. WHERE WERE YOU NANCY? This may sound fucking ridiculous to you

now, but I must admit I’m just plain smitten. I realize this can be attributed to a

variety of well known (classical) causes of which elaboration would be no less

than redundant, but as you must have deduced by now, I’m all the time sucker of

circumstance. The incurable romantic--how cliché can you get, right?

Anyway...as I recall you were having trouble deciding what to do with the empty

space in your schedule (between Wamena and Jayapura). You could always stay

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on in Wamena till two days before your flight back home--a perfectly pleasant

thing to do--cool weather, frontier town, naked buttocks, exaggerated gourds (or

maybe they aren’t), or you could lock in on someone else’s schedule--some one

who is dying for your company & possibly book yourself on a series of flights not

too unsimilar to the following: [He lists Merpati flights to Jayapura and onward

to the Bird’s Head.] Check into the Sentani Inn, near the airport if you fly out on

the 9th (Tues). There you will be greeted by a Javanese song and dance duo of

unparalleled talent. Our party will overnight to comfortable lodging in the big

city, or wherever suits your unquestionable preference. The Javenese duo will

proceed to Sorong, then onwards to countless exotic and decidedly unerotic

destinations in the Molluca islands and Bali...It’ll break this Javanese boy’s heart

if you choose to shiver alone in Wamena, but don’t let me try to overly influence

you. Ha! My eyes are starting to water already. Seriously though...I thank you for

your wonderful warmth and company!

Abrazos, T

I'm at the Merpati desk within the hour.