Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (15 page)

‘We thought you weren’t coming.’

‘I know it’s late but we got held up in Madang. Look, I’m sorry, but we thought we’d try and make it rather than wait till tomorrow.’ I looked him up and down: neat shorts, clean shirt and immaculate hair. ‘I must say, Don, you look very chic for a man who just stepped out of the jungle.’

Don showed us to the house where he was staying. He had been to Gapun on four occasions since his first trip back in the 1980s, but this time he was staying for ‘an extended visit’. He described the village as an ‘isolate’, one of hundreds in Papua New Guinea. The Gapun people, roughly two hundred of them, have their own language, which is different from anything else that’s spoken anywhere in the country. In the old days the Gapuns learned the languages of some of the other villages, but nobody learned theirs - apparently it was too difficult - and because of that it was dying. It was what Don called an ‘undescribed’ language, and his task was to attempt to describe it.

There are some three million people in Papua New Guinea and over a thousand different languages; not dialects but actual languages. They are as different as Basque is from Russian. Don told us that if you walk an hour or so in any direction you’ll come to a village where the people speak a completely different language from the people you just left. His mission was to document the Gapun language, to write it down before it was lost. Even the young children were no longer learning it; they spoke the national language. Samson, the leader of the village, was conscious that they lived in the modern world and had to become part of it.

Gapun was an idyllic place, a strip of land cut out of the rainforest in the middle of a swamp, where palms grew along with betel-nut trees and the spiky sago that gave them most of their food. We spent the night in Don’s hut - Claudio finding a place for his hammock, and me on the floor in my sleeping bag. I was pretty knackered and fell asleep straight away. By seven the following morning I was up and about, taking a stroll along the thoroughfare that separated the houses.

It was amazing. I’ve never seen anywhere quite like it. There were some thirty houses, all the same, all on stilts and lining each side of this grassy road that the villagers called ‘the highway’. When Don first came here the houses were individual and snuggled in among betel-nut and palm trees, and it remained that way until 2007. Then they decided they wanted the place to look more like a town so they cleared the highway of trees and built new houses, all of which were the same.

The thatched houses had walls made from dried and woven palm leaves. Inside each there was a single wooden floor divided into sections for dining, cooking and sleeping. The way the village was laid out - with each house the same, the gardens immaculate, saplings in the middle of the highway with fencing around their trunks - it looked like a slice of suburbia in the middle of the rainforest.

‘They want to be modern,’ Don explained. He broke off to point out where a woman with a shovel was picking up pig shit from the square of grass around her house, muttering irritably as she did so. I saw her toss it into the bush.

‘The women have to do that every morning,’ Don said. ‘Their first job, and they hate it, especially if they don’t have any pigs or dogs, because that means it was someone else’s animal that shat on their property. It can cause all sorts of arguments - you know, the neighbour-to-neighbour altercations that occur over the world. Just yesterday I woke to one woman yelling about the people in the house next to mine.’

‘So it’s normal life here then,’ I said. ‘Just like anywhere else.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘But how come there are so many languages?’

‘It’s a good question,’ he said. ‘Originally anthropologists thought it was because the people were isolated, nobody coming into contact with anyone else. I suppose you could argue that that might have been the case in the highlands, but down here on the Sepik people moved about in canoes and have always come into contact with other villages.’

‘So why then?’

‘We think it’s basically because Papua New Guineans like to be different. They’re pragmatic, practical people and they like to be perceived as different. One very demonstrative way of being different, of course, is to speak another language.’

He explained that these days the people saw a common language as progress. The white people speak a different language altogether and villagers believe that if they can speak the white people’s language, then the wealth of the Western world might be opened to them.

‘It’s not just the language, though; it’s religion,’ Don went on. ‘The New Guineans believe that the whites have a better god than them, which is why they are richer. And some of the missionaries are not at all bashful about stoking that fire. They will lie openly to the people and promise them that if they become Christian they will get the cargo that goes with it.’ He smiled then. ‘Like I said, New Guineans are pragmatic. If they think something new will be beneficial to them, they’ll try it. That goes for religion along with anything else. They might become Catholics for a while and when that doesn’t work they become Seventh Day Adventists or one of the fundamentalist groups that have a foothold here.’

 

 

We ate a massive breakfast of sago, vegetables and pork. Sago, made from a particular kind of palm, is a staple of the Papuan diet. The men spend all day in the bush cutting and transporting the stuff back to the village. They cross swampy inlets on log bridges then walk barefoot to get to it. The plant looks like a giant, skinny cactus - the outer skin covered with razor-sharp spines. They cut it down, skin it, cut out the flesh then load it into cylindrical hods they cut from the trunks. At the end of the day the men will bring back eighty kilos of sago slung over their shoulder.

Then it’s down to the women to take the flesh and pulverise it for hours and hours until the starch separates. It congeals into what looks like a log stripped of its bark. The gloopy stuff that we ate is produced by crumbling a chunk and mixing it with boiling water. They serve it in great basins and I have to say it looks and tastes like wallpaper paste. If you swallow without chewing you can just about avoid gagging on it.

All the time he is in Gapun, Don is 100 per cent dependent on the villagers. They feed and house him and in return he records their language. He loves what he does and sees the anthropologist as someone who’s there to listen and observe. Unlike a missionary or journalist, he has no agenda. He’s fascinated by what these people do and how they live, but mostly by what they talk about. He is determined to keep the language alive. He asked the people to bring him plants and animals so he can describe them in the vernacular. While I was there one man brought him a bat, but he’s had all sorts of insects, a baby crocodile, a massive spider, snakes, rats, everything.

We had met Samson the moment we arrived - as the village leader that was customary. His vision is to bring cars here. Back in 2007 he had wanted a town for his people rather than the old village. He wants a water supply and a power supply and vehicles to take them to the landing point where we had left the boat. It was an example of what Don had been saying about pragmatism. These people wanted what other New Guineans had, and Samson was an enthusiastic leader determined to get it. Historically they had sold sago, but that brought in paltry sums. Now they were producing and selling small amounts of cocoa, which after only three months was worth triple the annual return they got for the sago.

They sought to be modern and yet they had their own very particular customs. Don showed us a couple of what he termed ‘maternity huts’ on the periphery of the village. He explained that women go into the bush to give birth; indeed, one woman had done so last night. When the baby is born they take them to the maternity huts where other women bring them food and the men are not permitted to see them. They consider blood to be ‘hot’, or powerful, and a woman who has just given birth is too ‘powerful’ to come home right away. She stays in the maternity hut, unseen by her husband or the rest of her family, because she could hurt or even kill a man just by being in his presence.

‘How long do they have to stay in the maternity huts?’ I asked him.

‘They stay until their baby can laugh, Charley.’

‘Laugh?’

‘That’s right . . . a couple of months generally. They say that when a baby is strong enough to survive it will laugh, and that’s when its mother brings it home.’

Don likes to give something back to the villagers in return for their hospitality. He brings medicine to treat a contagious disease that affects the children’s skin. There is a particular fungus that grows on some of the palms here, which creates a skin condition a bit like ringworm. The children’s bodies become covered in a scaly irritation that is really inhibiting. It’s easily treatable but the medicine is expensive, so whenever he comes to the village, Don makes sure he brings enough to treat them.

‘They’re a tactile people,’ he explained. ‘If you watch they’re always touching one another; children are hugged and caressed all the time. They’re never kissed, mind you, they don’t kiss here - it’s considered disgusting. But they hold the children all the time and a child with the “alligator” disease, as they call it, never gets any physical affection. Nobody wants to hold a child with scaly skin.’

With that he grabbed a bongo drum from a shelf, and outside on the steps he summoned the children to his surgery by beating it.

WE ONLY HAD a couple of days left in Papua New Guinea, and I was determined to make the most of them. Today - our twenty-fifth day out of Sydney - we were aiming for Vanimo, a town on the border with West Papua. It was here that we would learn whether we would be able to cross into the Indonesian-occupied territory. It didn’t look promising, but it was sure to be an interesting journey anyway - travelling by canoe then a couple of PMVs and finally an open dinghy.

We rose early, eager to get going. The walk back to the river was much easier in daylight, of course. On our way in we had been dead tired, knee deep in the swamp in the pitch black with no idea where we were going. This time we could see the walkways and log bridges and we had half the village accompanying us. Kids were running around and everyone was singing. It only took twenty minutes through the forest and it was a beautiful walk - a highlight of the journey so far and one I’ll never forget.

A local man called Melchio and his wife Margaret were waiting with a couple of canoes, one a long and narrow dugout canoe, another fitted with an outboard motor. We loaded our bags into the boats and said goodbye to Don and Samson. I wished the village leader all the best with his plans for the future. It had been a fantastic couple of days but I was looking forward to the next three days of travelling.

It was turning into a beautiful day - the water calm and flat, the sun shining. Melchio took us back down the narrow tributary to the inlet, the canoe zipping along merrily with its big motor. We were heading for the town of Angoram, where we hoped to take another PMV to a coastal town called Wewak. I’d heard it had the most amazing beach, but I was most looking forward to the fact that, after a week of being on people’s floors, I would be sleeping in a bed tonight.

Crossing the width of the inlet, Melchio guided the canoe through a tiny gap in the trees and cut through the swamp back to the main body of the Sepik. No wonder this part of the world is still so remote. I could have sailed up and down that inlet and never found my way through.

At Angoram we had to wait for the PMV. The guy in charge told me they left in the morning and returned at around one, maybe two o’clock. This was Papua New Guinea time, of course. But it did eventually arrive, after a couple of hours, and we had our ride to Wewak.

The truck was flat-fronted with a canvas tarpaulin and was not only carrying lots of people, but tinned food, corn, potatoes and rice. Once everything had been taken off, fresh goods from Angoram were loaded before we could find a place to sit. It was smoked fish mostly, a local delicacy that tasted of very little but smelled to high heaven. It was packed in large wicker baskets that took up lots of room.

I’ll be completely honest - it was not a great journey. We were sitting against the back of the cab and as time went on more and more people got aboard until we were squashed up and bounced around to the point where my bum was red raw.

The beach at Wewak more than made up for it, though. As the sun went down Claudio and I took a walk along the sand and stopped for a beer at a beach house belonging to an English guy and his wife. They had been with VSO for a couple of years but stayed on when their stint was over. Twelve years on and they wake to the sound of the waves every morning and fall asleep to them every night.

 

 

I woke to the sound of birds screeching, my head filled with thoughts of West Papua. The five Australians were still being held, and given Claudio’s background with the rebels, the chances of us being allowed in were looking rather less than slim. The Indonesians are very sensitive and the politics extends far beyond their government. American mining companies have a significant foothold in the country, logging companies too. There is a lot of foreign influence. In fact, you could say the place is one great open-cast mine - the land is rich in minerals and there is a lot of interest from many different places. Not a straightforward place to visit.