Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (16 page)

I’ve learned on my journeys that you can’t worry about these things. You certainly can’t plan for them. We would just have to see what happened when we got there. It was still a two-day jaunt to the border and the plan tonight was to make it as far as Aitape in the company of Ben Keri, the owner of a flatbed 1975 Toyota lorry. We were getting the lift for free, but Ben explained we would have to share the back of the lorry with the goods he was taking north.

Our bags loaded, we drove to the local hardware store where Ben bought everything from lengths of corrugated tin to tools and nails, planks of wood, all sorts of building materials. Sitting on the loo, contemplating my still-tender arse, a thought occurred to me. Maybe the hardware store sold some sort of foam? On a mission now, I hunted down four cushions, including a particularly garish pink one, and when I presented them to the boys, the back of the truck no longer seemed so unwelcoming.

Ben had a crew with him so he was able to alternate between the passenger seat and hanging out with us. It was hot today and the four of us had floppy hats to protect us from the sun. The bed of the truck was open, the sides protected by metal rails that extended behind the cab. I spent many hours standing there with the wind in my face, watching the road unfold ahead.

There was good tarmac to begin with, but it didn’t last long. Crossing a wooden bridge above a disturbingly swollen river, we hit dirt and that was as good as it got all the way to Aitape. We were in deep jungle again - surrounded by thick foliage, tall mountains and fast-flowing rivers. The truck was rolling along at thirty-five, sometimes forty. Thank God for the cushions - the suspension needed oiling and the four of us were bouncing around like crazy in the back. We forded maybe a dozen rivers before coming to one place where the road actually
was
the river. Turning downstream, we drove the shallows for a few miles before picking up the dirt again.

We had left Wewak much later than we had hoped, but then that had been the case all throughout our time in Papua New Guinea. The journey would take as long as it took and there was nothing we could do about it. Luckily Ben was good company and very knowledgeable. At one point we came across a sea of elephant grass and, rapping a fist on the roof of the cab, he got the driver to stop and we jumped down.

The elephant grass had overgrown what once had been an American airstrip, much like the one we had seen on Horn Island. We found a rusting engine from a P-47 and Ben explained that this spot was quite close to where the Japanese had surrendered to the Australian army.

 

 

Our thirteenth river crossing almost proved unlucky for us. A river too far. Back in the truck we drove until the dirt road descended into a gully of shale and sand with a fast-flowing river cutting across it. And I mean
really
fast flowing. There was a jeep on the bank, waiting to cross, the driver wandering barefoot up and down, ankle deep in the water. A couple of locals standing close by told us that three cars had tried to get across earlier only to be swept downstream. The drivers had been forced to swim for their lives.

I stared down at the wide, wild water. ‘So what do we do, Ben?’

‘We wait. There’s nothing else we can do.’

He was right, and the level of the river wasn’t going down any. In fact, it was getting higher and the current was incredibly strong. The water was riotous, brown and grey and swirling with mud and stones, bloated with rainfall from the mountains. Ben reckoned it would be a few hours at least before it started to drop. The last time I was stuck at a river crossing, in Siberia, Ewan and I had no choice but to wait all night.

So we spent the next few hours in the back of the truck or sitting on our cushions on the bank just watching the river flow by.

Whenever I got up to take a walk the water was lapping at my feet, and I began to wonder how long Ben’s ‘few hours’ might actually turn out to be. We were due in Aitape tonight and tomorrow we were supposed to be on another boat, only this one was at sea and that worried me. There was a road from Aitape to Vanimo but it was meant to be pretty rough. An open boat hugging the coast would be a lot safer than trying to go by road. Ben had made this trip more times than he could remember, but it had been a while since he had seen the water this high. He pointed out a smooth, black boulder that was all but submerged by the current.

‘Charley,’ he said, ‘when the water is about halfway up that stone, it is safe to cross.’

Still the time ticked by and, glad of the cushions, we lay down on the bank to wait.

We waited and we waited. We waited a little longer. It got dark, and at 7 p.m. we were still waiting.

With the darkness came the locals, and with the locals came the beer. On both sides of the river now there were groups of drunken men. It was suddenly a little tense down there and even Ben seemed wary.

This one guy and his mate came lurching over to us. Bottles in hand they started slurring on about a bridge that had gone down on their land; they wanted compensation. Ben told me the bridge had collapsed thirty years previously and these two barely looked old enough to remember. It was the drink talking, the drink and the compensation culture that I was beginning to realise exists here. People build their homes right up against the road so if a truck swerves and hits a pig, or takes down a wall or something, they claim off the government.

A couple of hours later the river looked as though it was finally beginning to go down, although now I was wondering if we would get across before these drunks lost it completely and things really kicked off. The gangs of men were hurling insults from one side of the river to the other. They were beginning to hurl them at us too and for safety we retreated to the back of the truck. Then they started to fight among themselves - two guys were right in each other’s faces, shouting and shoving. Another was circling them and when I saw him pull a flick-knife I thought things were going to get nasty. It calmed down in the end, though, and there was a lull in the yelling from both sides.

Finally, Ben could see enough of the rock he had been talking about and said we could go. Only now he wasn’t sure we
should
, because the drunks on the other side had started shouting again. He thought they might attack the first vehicle that tried to cross, so he suggested we go downriver, camp out the rest of the night and come back in the morning. It was so late now and we were so tired that we were resigned to doing whatever he told us. But then the jeep started and with a couple of guys in the back it lurched into the water. The driver pointed the nose upstream a little way then came down at an angle to keep from being broadside to the current. We watched through the darkness as, with the water rushing over his wheel arches, he inched his way across.

No sooner was he on the far side than our driver fired up the engine. Ben told us to grab a few handfuls of stones in case we had to defend ourselves. We did that and, taking the route the jeep had followed, we finally got across. Fortunately no one attacked us. Indeed, one kind soul used a torch to guide us in. It was after 11 p.m. now, though, and it was another five hours before we lurched into Aitape.

At four in the morning a small motel was the only place we could find. It was a bit of a dive, the beds as hard as the back of the truck and the showers so foul smelling I gagged. But who needed a shower? The downpour the following morning was torrential, hammering against the tin roofs so loudly I could barely hear myself think. From the veranda I could see the ocean where waves were rolling in great foaming whitecaps and I imagined spending four or five hours in an open boat without any life jackets.

I hate bloody boats. So far we had been lucky with the Boorman boat curse, but surely this was tempting fate.

Not according to Joyce Rainbubus. She came over in the boat we were supposed to be taking, a large open dinghy crewed by our translator Josh’s brother and piloted by his uncle John. They were from Sissano, a village on the coast between Aitape and Vanimo that had been hit by a tsunami in 1998.

Joyce assured us the crossing would be fine. The sea might look choppy, but once we got beyond the breakers there was nothing that would bother Uncle John. Joyce was a young, attractive woman with the air of a philosopher about her. It was obvious she had lived through a major disaster; anything less was merely one of life’s little irritations and barely mattered.

As it turned out the crossing was just as she said it would be, a bit of a swell but nothing to worry about, though I am never very comfortable at sea. Clouds filmed as nonchalantly as he always does. I sat there gripping the gunwales until we came to the beach.

I chilled out completely later, though. After what the locals told me they had been through, I realised that this little trip was nothing.

The earthquake had struck early evening on 17 July 1998, about twenty-five miles from shore. Nobody realised at the time, but the quake caused a landslide under the sea that in turn created a tsunami that decimated the coast.

Joyce’s father, Shubert, told me he had been on the far side of the lagoon when the waves struck, but he heard the noise even from over there. Joyce remembered it vividly; she said that it was too early to get dark but as the earth shook, the sun seemed to die in the sky. Nobody understood quite what was happening. It was during the school holidays and there were lots of children playing on the beach. They watched in awe as first the sea seemed to be sucked from the sand, and then there was only silence. Moments later the wave came. It was the first of three and over fifteen metres high. Shubert said the kids came rushing inland, screaming for their lives. The wave tore up trees and homes, every scrap of bush and scrub. I could only imagine what it must have felt like to be picked up and tumbled around, drowning in sand and stones and debris.

In all more than 2200 people lost their lives that day. Entire villages were washed away. Almost ten thousand people were made homeless and the Rainbubus family said that even now life was not completely back to normal. Only one building in Sissano had survived the tsunami, and sadly that was due to be torn down soon because of termite damage. Walking around that village, I was conscious of the silence that seemed to remain. Shubert’s son showed me a buckled aluminium dinghy, flattened now and upturned: he and his father had found it wrapped around the trunk of a palm tree and they kept it as a memorial to the people whose lives were lost.

Back in the boat we were all a little subdued. I was no longer concerned about the remainder of the trip, this open boat or the Boorman curse. I could understand Joyce’s demeanour completely. Somehow her family had survived that day when the sun went dark. She was right: a trip around the coast to Vanimo was nothing.

 

 

We didn’t get into Western Papua. I suppose in reality we never were going to. After a day in Vanimo we rocked up at the border to be told that we were not being given entry visas. We didn’t bother to argue. Mindful that those five Australians were still being held, we just bit the bullet and set about trying to find a flight out. We had planned to make our way across the Spice Islands but now that was out of the question. It was a pain in the arse, but then I suppose there had always been a sense of inevitability about it. The really irritating part was we had to take a flight back to Port Moresby in order to continue our journey. After two days we finally reached the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, by way of Singapore and Jakarta. I’d picked up a cold in Papua and spent the flights coughing and sneezing, and getting the hairy eye from other passengers convinced I was carrying swine flu.

We’d originally planned to arrive in the far north of the island, but landed instead in Padang in the province of South Sulawesi. We travelled on swiftly to Makassar, a city that had once been the most important trading port in the region. Both the Portuguese and the Dutch came here and the Dutch tried to colonise it, but the Makassarese kings kept a policy of free trade, allowing anyone to do business in their city. Because of that neither the Dutch nor the Portuguese could get a proper foothold.

I’d been to Indonesia before of course, on the last trip, but not this part of it. That’s the beauty of the place - there are so many islands, there is always somewhere new to explore. When Ewan and I crossed borders in Africa it always took a couple of days to acclimatise to a new country and to figure out how things worked. It was the same here - it was only on leaving Papua that I realised how tough it had been to get around there. You can’t just get a bus or rent a car, and the roads are awful, with no real infrastructure to speak of. Food is also quite hard to get hold of. Now we were here, with a million and one restaurants on the same street, it struck me that we had been hungry much of the time in PNG.

I could feel a real vibrancy about this place - an Islamic country in the middle of the Indian Ocean with all the trappings of the West. Historically, Makassar was a centre for shipbuilding, where pinisi - the traditional Indonesian two-masted ships - were built in their thousands before being sailed all over the world.