Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (12 page)

It soon became apparent that the CBR team are involved in a huge amount of work with the disabled. After we left Kevin, they took us to Mount Sion School for the Blind, a ‘Centre for the Disabled Persons’, run by Justin Wagma. It’s a vibrant, colourful place and we were greeted by a group of blind men playing keyboards and guitars and singing to us about how we should look beyond their disability.

‘We integrate disabled children with the other children,’ Justin explained. ‘That way those who have no physical impairment grow up around kids who have, so they understand that disability is a fact of life in any society. Hopefully some of those children might go on to be leaders in this country and future generations won’t suffer from the stigma that others have.’

I met a man called Martin - a confident, intelligent guy - who worked at the school but spent much of his time lobbying local politicians for funding and education for the disabled. Back in 1991 he had been blinded in an accident and in 1992 he was brought to the school, where he learned how to read and type Braille. He read me a passage of Braille, skirting his fingers over the raised dots as quickly as any sighted person might read from a book, and showed me a Braille typewriter. It was quite small, and Martin bashed out the alphabet with the speed of a trained secretary. With improvisation, an amazing attitude and a huge amount of work, he had overcome a life-shattering accident and in so doing had become an inspiration to everyone he met.

Improvise, adapt and overcome: it was a motto I’d heard from soldiers I’d taught to ride off road, and it was in my mind as I took a moment to reflect on what we’d seen. Visits like these really make an expedition; they’re the moments that make you pause and think, not just about your own life and how lucky you are, but about the fantastic ability people have for dealing with what life throws at them. The Aboriginal communities like Pormpuraaw, the people raising the flag in West Papua, remote, traditional communities like those we had seen here. They remind you of what can be achieved with relatively little and just how positive and adaptable people can be. It can be heartbreaking at times, but it can also be incredibly uplifting and inspiring.

 

 

Seventy years ago there had been so few white people in this region that when John Leahy’s father showed up, the tribes thought he was a ghost from the lowlands below. John runs a coffee factory - the Lahamenegu - established back in the 1930s. His father, who came over from Australia, was one of the very first explorers to visit these parts and he filmed his experiences in a documentary called
First Contact
, which is now part of the Australian television archive.

John is a solid-looking guy in his fifties with a thick grey beard and a typically hospitable Australian manner. His factory is close to Goroka and local farmers bring their coffee beans here to be processed and dried. John explained that coffee production is a major component of the Papuan economy.

‘Coffee is durable,’ he said. ‘And here in Papua with this climate and the lack of a real infrastructure, durability is very important. A dried bean has a shelf life of two to three years and a farmer can sit on his stock and sell what he wants when he wants. That’s why coffee trades so well on the futures market. It’s not all about this season, or this year’s harvest, and here in Papua it grows year round.’

The factory was a mass of silos, sheds, conveyor belts and enormous sifting bins. You could feel the heat from the furnaces. John explained that during the war Dutch farmers had produced quinine for the allied troops in this area. His dad got involved but there wasn’t a great deal of money in quinine and the Dutch had told him how they had cultivated coffee in Indonesia. The highlands around Goroka were perfect for growing coffee beans, so after the war, John’s father went into arabica. Now the operation looks after all the local farmers, including people like Koi and his fifteen hectares. At the plant they put the beans through a process to shed the husks, which are stored in the silos and used later as fuel for the furnaces that dry the coffee beans. Once a bean has been reduced to 11 per cent moisture content it’s classified as dry and, as John said, has an extended shelf life. What really impressed me, though, was the fact that the farmers were paid directly. There were no middle men, no government rake-off; they got the full, fair price for everything they grew.

It was strange to think that I was talking with the son of one of the very first Westerners to come to these mountains. I tried to imagine what must have gone through the tribespeople’s minds when they saw a white man for the first time.

 

 

Talking of white men, I met a few the following day. These genuinely were
ghostly
white, known as ‘mud men’, from the village of Komunive - a tribal group who daub themselves with mud just as their ancestors used to. These days it’s mostly put on as a show for the tourists. According to Andrew, who manages the displays, they get quite a few Brits, as well as Germans and Americans, travelling through here. The villagers cover their bodies in the white mud, then light great smoking fires and put on clay masks they’ve fired themselves, before pretending to hunt their enemies with longbows and poison-tipped arrows.

The masks were amazing - full heads shaped like gargoyles and demons, specifically designed to scare the shit out of the neighbouring tribes. Of course, they wanted me to get naked so they could plaster clay all over me. They really wanted to dress me up in a grass loincloth and put a mask on my head, as well. You can imagine how enthusiastic I was, but Claudio was adamant it would make good television.

So with the camera crew and the entire Komunive village gathered around me, I took off all my clothes. A couple of guys fitted me with the loincloth and covered me with clay.

‘People pay good money for this in England,’ I told them. ‘They go to health clubs and pay good money. Honestly, it’s considered a luxury.’

Here the practice began by accident. Andrew told us that his great-great-grandfather fell into a swamp one day and came out covered in mud. The other villagers saw him, thought he was a ghost and dropped their bows and spears before running away. That gave him an idea.

‘Hey, lads,’ he said, when they realised it was him. ‘We could do this, smear ourselves in mud, make some masks and raid the other tribes. We can carry off all their women and pigs.’

And according to Andrew that’s pretty much what they did. It worked too: they ended up with more wives (and pigs) than they knew what to do with. Pigs are like dogs in Papua, they’re really prized possessions, and wives - well, I suppose, the more the merrier.

 

 

I finished the day by beheading a live chicken for a mumu, a traditional Papuan feast organised by Marcel, Cecelia and Bill, back at the lodge in Goroka. They were preparing a real feast - in the old days it would have fed the entire village. I like to cook so I got involved not just with slaughtering the chicken, but with the guys as they heated some really big stones. When they were ready we covered them with a flat basin of palm leaves, which we filled with sweet potatoes and vegetables. We covered them with more leaves and then layered the meat on top. The next layer was peeled bananas and potatoes. Then more palm leaves, before the whole affair was soaked with water. The mound of food and stones was covered by a plastic tarp, which in turn they covered with earth. It sealed everything like an oven and an hour or so later it was uncovered. Faint with hunger, I tucked in. It may sound like an unusual collection of flavours, but God it tasted good. It was chucking it down with rain again, so we moved in from the garden and piled the food into bowls. I sat gazing about me in wonder, not quite believing I was really here. Papua is an amazing place, full of history and tradition - there was a strangeness about it I’d not come across elsewhere. I loved it, and tomorrow I would be in my element, riding a dirt bike right across the mountains.

 

 

I woke to overcast skies and a tropical chill in the air. I also woke with nerves in my stomach, a few of those old butterflies about the ride ahead. It’s always good to be a little nervous before you get on a motorbike; you never know what’s going to happen and it’s important to keep your wits about you and not get complacent.

Claudio and I were hooking up with a dirt bike club from Lae. We would be riding to a place called Betty’s Lodge on the slopes of Mount Wilhelm, which at almost 15,000 feet is the highest point in PNG. Betty’s Lodge is a sort of hostel-cum-hotel, run by a lady called Betty Higgins. We were supposed to be meeting up with Emmanuel, a bloke from Madang who would guide us along the Bundi Track, a stretch of really rough road, to a place called Bundi Junction. We had been told that the road was impassable, in places completely washed out, so that even in a 4×4 there was no way anyone would get through. Sam was going ahead in a 4×4 and Emmanuel was coming from the other direction in a 4×4, and right now the chances of making it back to the coast by that route did not look particularly hopeful. Having said that, it was a bit like the cyclone warnings we had been given south of Brisbane - some people were telling us horror stories while others said the road would be fine. And some even said that no one had used the Bundi Track in years.

Anyway, we would see how it was when we got to the lodge and discovered whether Emmanuel had made it. In the meantime there was a whole bunch of guys we were riding with. The bikes were full-on enduros, and Daniel, unofficial leader of the Lae club, had arranged a couple of Yamahas for Claudio and me.

I was itching to get going. We’d had a great couple of days here, but this was fantastic bike country and I wanted to be moving again. While I was getting kitted out with boots and body armour, Daniel had a word with Claudio. ‘I hope Charley’s going to lead,’ he said. ‘Show us how it’s done. He’s been around the world, done a few kilometres, so we ought to let him lead the way.’

Fine by me. I had no idea what level these guys were at and I didn’t know the way, but the Yamaha I was riding was so perfectly balanced the front wheel seemed to come up all by itself. I was feeling good, my stomach was healing nicely after my off in Australia, and I was really up for the ride. We were on tarmac to begin with and everywhere we went people came rushing out, yelling at us to pull wheelies. It would have been rude not to oblige, so I popped a couple of second-gear monsters that I managed to keep going for what felt like miles, but might have been seventy metres. It was brilliant fun, the most I’ve had on a bike for a long time. I had Claudio alongside me and a bunch of locals from Papua New Guinea following the pair of us. How cool is that?

The country was stunning - like the highlands in Ethiopia, only this was rainforest with water tumbling in runaway rivers and palm trees soaked by torrents that came down so hard whole tracts of land had been washed away. The mountain tops lay hidden in mist, and gazing across their flanks I thought about John Leahy’s dad and the mud men of Komunive.

We went from tarmac to dirt and from dirt to glassy mud and potholes - great troughs of water where the back end of my bike was skipping from side to side. Up on the foot pegs I slithered around ever-tightening bends, where we had to watch for villagers wandering on the road, some of them a little the worse for drink. We were mobbed whenever we stopped, and most people seemed really friendly. There was one guy who was so enthusiastic that he was shouting at the camera. He told us we were welcome in Papua New Guinea - we should feel welcome and be free. He told us that in all the years he had lived in the village, he had never seen so many motorbikes.

There were other places, though, where it was pretty nerve-racking. The crowds swamped us and a few people were more than a little hostile. As I rode through one town, this big guy stepped from the crowd and whacked me across the arm with a long stick. It hurt like hell, knocked me off balance and I almost crashed. I remembered how cautious Koi the truck driver had been: and yesterday, on the way to visit the mud men, we’d passed a market where a couple of women were tearing lumps out of each other. Before we got here we had heard all sorts of stories, of course, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.

I realised now that I didn’t want to be riding at night. After dark the drink would really be flowing and I had a feeling that’s when things could kick off.

 

 

As it turned out, it was pretty much dark by the time we arrived at Betty’s Lodge and found Sam waiting for us. We had stopped for fuel in a town a couple of hours down the road and it wasn’t obvious which way we should continue, even from Daniel’s map. We were trying to figure it out when this guy on a bike showed up, a local fellow with an old open-face helmet. He said he’d just come down from Betty’s Lodge and would show us the way. The road was incredibly slippery, and one or two of the local lads came off. Not me this time, thankfully. I had my confidence back and was having a great time. I was concentrating, mind you. There was the odd rank-looking barrier on the worst of the hairpins, but apart from that it was sheer and ragged cliffs, waterfalls tumbling to the valley below.

Claudio was right behind me and riding really well. Glancing back, I thought of the ground we had covered since we left Horn Island. I thought about this road and how challenging it was, and wondered what more the Bundi Track could hold in store.