Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (14 page)

 

 

We spent the next day just mooching about and buying gifts for the villagers we would be visiting. Keen to find out a little more about the private security, Claudio and I went on a brief tour of the rain-soaked streets with a guy called Norbert Belele, who worked for Bitamu Security Services. He took us to meet one of the guys on foot patrol and explained that his men carried only a radio and a baton. They were not allowed to carry firearms, although many of the burglars did. I asked Norbert what happened if they came across someone with a gun and he told me his men would not confront them. Often just the fact that the would-be burglar had been spotted was enough - even an armed man would scuttle away and the security guys would call the police. I wasn’t sure how that worked, given he’d already told me the police only work in the daytime. Anyway, we had someone outside our house all night and, according to Nancy, the private firms were the only way to guarantee any kind of security.

Nancy had suggested we should buy machetes or files as presents for the villagers. They used machetes to cut back the grass from around their homes and needed files to keep them sharp, so we bought a stack of both as well as balloons for the kids.

‘What are they like, the people in - what did you call the village - Gapun, was it?’ Nancy nodded. ‘Are they head hunters . . . cannibals? I mean, I didn’t think any of those stories were true, but then I didn’t think that women breastfed piglets either so . . .’

‘Charley,’ she said. ‘There are no cannibals, not any more.’

‘Were there ever?’

‘Oh yes, of course there were. Back in the 1970s there was a tribe in the eastern highlands that ate human brains.’

‘You’re joking!’

‘No, no, the women ate them during mortuary ceremonies.’

I was staring at her.

‘You see, the women in particular didn’t get a lot of protein and the men allowed them to eat the brains of their relatives when they were laying out the bodies. They’d chip off the back of the skull and take the brains out anyway, so it was just another step to cook and eat them. There is plenty of protein in the brain and it was one way of getting what they needed.’

I wasn’t sure if she was pulling my leg, and I shot a glance at Claudio. He nodded.

‘The interesting thing was the kids,’ Nancy went on. ‘Most of the women performing the ceremony would have a two-year-old on their knee and to keep them quiet they’d be fed some of the brains. Now thirty years later, some of those grown-up children have developed a kind of human mad cow disease.’

That night over dinner Nancy gave us the full anthropological tour. From the women who ate brains we moved on to discussing various tribes and tribal customs - grisly-sounding initiations where the men tried to distance themselves from their mother’s blood and horrendous rites of passage including circumcision for boys in their late teens (with details of the various ways of cutting a foreskin that made us squirm in our seats). Then there was something altogether different, where the men rammed canes down their throats and scraped the inside till it bled. She told how the men in some tribes had a fear of the menstrual cycle, and once a month the women were banished to a separate house.

 

 

The next day there had been no more word from Milson the boatman. Nancy’s assurances that he would show were beginning to look a little optimistic and even she was getting concerned that he hadn’t turned up. The problem was that he was not just the boatman; he was supposed to bring down a van for us to travel up to Bogia.

None of us were overly worried, mind you. This was Papua New Guinea, after all, and what we were told one minute generally changed the next. We were confident that not only would we get a bus, but a boat as well - whether it was Milson’s or not.

‘Charley,’ Nancy said, ‘I think this will be quite a day. You’re going to need the resourcefulness of the Papua New Guinean. I’ve arranged for Arthur and Dixon to go with you, they’re friends of mine - local boys who travel between here and Bogia all the time. And Emmanuel is coming too, so you couldn’t have better security.’

That was fine by me, the more local knowledge we had the better, and I already knew how valuable security was. We had the team all right . . . we just didn’t have a means of getting where we wanted to go.

Nancy took us into town to try to find a PMV - or Public Motor Vehicle - a little bus, a bit like the dolmus I’d driven in Turkey. They’re privately owned and the operator waits until the last seat is taken before he goes anywhere. We had been told various different stories about how long it would take to get up the coast to Bogia - some people said two hours, others three, others still said four. There were plenty of PMVs in the market area, a vast and dusty space between rows of ramshackle buildings, but most of them wouldn’t be leaving until that afternoon. People came into town in the morning, did their shopping, and left again after lunch. So that was the timetable the PMV drivers liked to keep to.

Not to be deterred, Sam set about trying to locate a bus that would get us to Bogia in time to get on a boat. Meanwhile, Nancy pointed out a young man in the crowd that had, as usual, gathered around us. His name was Herbert and he was Tari, a tribe from the most remote region of the central highlands. It was one of the areas where the men were afraid of women’s blood, and Nancy being Nancy, she slipped her arm around his shoulders and quietly told him she was menstruating. I have never seen anyone’s face fall quite so far quite so quickly! He looked terrified, backing away from under her arm until she told him she was joking.

After that he and his mates could not stop talking. They were holding court for the camera, jabbering away nineteen to the dozen while the local men from Madang just looked on in a kind of laid-back silence. I asked Herbert about initiation rites and he told me that all the boys in his tribe did was grow their hair. It sounded pretty tame. He assured me it was meaningful, though, and when a man was deemed a man, women were no longer allowed to touch it.

‘Not touch your hair? But, Herbert,’ I said, ‘what about when you make love? You know . . .’

He stared at me for a moment then proceeded to assure me that when he was making love the women did not need to touch his hair - the rest of him was all the man they could want.

According to Nancy, the Madang men had no such hang-ups or initiation rites. The lowlanders were beach guys, and like beach guys the world over, they just liked to hang out and make love under the stars.

 

 

After much negotiation on Sam’s part, we finally found what we thought was our way of getting to Bogia. Given that most of the regular PMVs weren’t going anywhere until later, he arranged to hire one. The driver struck a deal, then jumped behind the wheel to go and tell the owner. We never saw him again.

It was getting later and later, and in the end Emmanuel suggested that he go and get his truck and we’d all pile into that. I liked and trusted Emmanuel. He did what he said he would do, and he’d survived the bridge crossing yesterday. Given that the road to Bogia was where Milson had been shot at, being driven by a guy like Emmanuel made perfect sense to me.

We finally had a plan of action in place. Then, lo and behold, Arthur got a call from Milson. Our boat guy. He was on his way after all, and he would be with us in twenty minutes.

‘What happened, Arthur?’ I asked. ‘Why is he coming now, all of a sudden?’

Arthur shrugged. ‘He was always coming.’

‘You mean we got our wires crossed, we made a mistake?’

He nodded. ‘It’s not his van,’ he explained. ‘He’s in a PMV bringing stuff from Bogia and they made a lot of stops on the way.’

Ah well. All that mattered now was that we got moving soon because we still had a full day of travelling ahead of us. Don, the linguistic anthropologist, was expecting us tonight and there was no way of contacting him - the village was a good distance up the Sepik and even if he had a mobile phone there would be no signal.

We had hoped to be on the road by 8 a.m. but it was almost noon by the time Milson arrived. He was a taciturn, capable-looking guy. Loading our gear into the PMV, we quickly said our goodbyes to Nancy.

‘Do you think Charley will be OK?’ Claudio asked her. ‘I mean, the coast road is where the shooting took place, and even if we make it to the river, he’s useless in a boat.’

‘Actually, I think it will be an absolute disaster,’ she told him. ‘That’s it, Claudio, the end of the programme, we’re sending him off into the abyss . . .’

Joking or not (and I hoped she was joking), I had that little gem ringing in my ears as we set off towards Bogia and the bridge where Milson and his mates had been ambushed. The coast road alternated between spectacular views of the sea and thick, soaking jungle. To begin with the road was pretty good, albeit single lane with no markings, but a couple of hours from Madang it narrowed into a thick grove of palms at a river crossing. The bridge was solid enough, but there was room for only one vehicle. Asking the driver to stop, Milson and I got out. This was where the shooting had happened.

‘We were in a car,’ he said, pointing towards the bridge. ‘We come up here and two men are in front of the bridge.’ Gesturing now, he pointed beyond the bus. ‘Two more back there behind the car. They just stepped out of the trees.’ He went on to tell me how the guys in front fired two shots to make them stop and the guys behind fired a couple more. Then they took all their money.

It was incredible. Highway robbery right where I was standing. I walked across the bridge, the river swirling in mud-coloured eddies under my feet. I could see betel-nut stains where the bandits had spat the juice.

Back in the bus we motored on and the road remained reasonable until we got close to Bogia. There it fell apart - the forest was really dense and the tarmac became dirt and stones. We slowed to a snail’s pace at a series of brimming potholes. They spread the width of the road and were deep enough to beach the front of the van if we weren’t very careful.

We made it, though, the only misadventure when I asked the driver to stop so I could take a pee and they took off without me.

It turned out that Milson ran a pretty slick operation. His boat was docked at a little place called Boroi, deep in the jungle and accessed from a pitted track blocked by a bamboo pole that we had to lift to get the van through. Beyond it the track snaked through the trees before opening on to the inlet and the sea. There were two large houses made of grass and built on stilts at the edge of the inlet, and just beyond them I could see Milson’s boat, an open dinghy with a pretty new-looking 60 hp outboard. I began to think that this might actually work.

It was the middle of the afternoon and I doubted we would make Gapun before it got dark, but the river was before us and I was seized by a sudden sense of adventure. We could do this, we could make it unscathed, if only the Boorman boat curse didn’t strike again.

I couldn’t quite believe that we’d be that lucky. But as it turned out we were. The trip up the inlet to the mouth of the Sepik was uneventful, if you can call being in an open boat with your mates in the middle of absolutely nowhere uneventful. It was wonderful. We zipped along, the water calm and the breeze keeping us fairly cool. As the sun set gradually behind the trees, the sky became a haze of purple and blue, one of the most spectacular sunsets I think I’ve ever seen. All along the banks people came out of grass huts to wave at us.

At the mouth of the Sepik we had to stop - the tide was low and we had to wait for it to rise again so we could make it up the section of river where we would disembark for Gapun. Milson knew the area but he didn’t know every individual waterway and the Sepik is littered with forks and tributaries. The village was not right on the water either so we wouldn’t be able to spot any lights from the boat. We needed a local guide to take us to not only the right tributary, but the landing point.

It was quite dark now, the canopies of trees lit up by millions of fireflies. I wondered how we would negotiate the rest of the journey in the pitch dark. Milson seemed pretty relaxed, though, and his sense of calm inspired confidence. Of course, the local villagers had come out and were trying to persuade us to stay the night with them instead of pressing on in the darkness, but we were eager to reach our destination.

The tide came in, our guide arrived and we were back in the boat for the final leg. It was hot now and humid, the surface of the water buzzing with insects and a cacophony of cicadas lifting from the trees. We entered the narrow inlet with palms close to the water on either side. This was crocodile country. Keeping our hands out of harm’s way, we scanned the darkness for points of light glinting in the deep.

Milson was steering and the engine was on really low revs now. The guide was in the bow using a pole to make sure we were avoiding the shallow stretches. Clearly he knew what he was doing and half an hour later we came to the jetty and unloaded. I was feeling pretty exhausted now, but we still had to hike through swamp and jungle to the village. It was pitch black, the only light what we could muster from head torches. I set off across the forest floor with my pack strapped on my back and another bag hung around my neck. We seemed to walk for hours, through thick bush and damp palms, over log bridges and into the swamp. Much of the way I was knee deep in black and muddy water. ‘How deep does it have to be for a crocodile?’ I asked nobody in particular.

No one answered.

 

 

 

We made it. No crocs, no snakes and nobody drowning in the swamp. I had no idea where we were or what anything looked like. I had no idea how far we had come or where the river was, but suddenly a torch was shining in my face and a slim guy with sandy hair and glasses was peering at me.

‘Charley?’

‘Don?’