On the first day, my camera broke.
Sooo...Chicago to San Francisco to Taipei to Jakarta, followed by an unusual Indonesian domestic overnight flight hitting every other island in the south Pacific in order to get to the remote far east island of Papua. Followed by an overnight stay amidst mini ants and lizards in sweltering Jayapura in order to catch a rare flight to the interior of this, the world's second largest and largely unexplored island. Then a choppy flight aboard an eggbeater to the exotic Baliem Valley, first discovered in 1938 and home to some of the world's most remote and fascinating indigenous tribes.
And this afternoon, we finally reach our first thatched hut village, with the women wearing solely grass skirts and the men wearing even less: feathers in their head dress and most uniquely, a long carrot-shaped gourd sheathing their reproductive member, with the tip of this gourd held up in front of their chest in what appears to be a permanent state of "excitement" by a string that circles behind their back. And these stone age warriors are carrying spears and arrows (the latter of which turned some Australian missionaries not too long ago into human pincushions).
And what happens?? My camera breaks!!! Irreversibly. Right before they pull out a smoked mummy of some 250-year old warrior ancestor from their hut that looks eerily much worse than Han Solo did after he got cryogenically frozen to stone!
Ha! What are the odds?
So tomorrow we head out on a multi-day trek to even further removed villages in the mountains, inaccessible by road, plane or any other method save our feet and some very rickety suspension bridges. To make it more interesting, the rains have come early. What was supposed to be the dry season is now, as I listen to the pounding of rain on the sheet metal above me, far from dry. Should make for an interesting mountain trek!
But there shall be no pictures.
On this trip, only my eyes will be the camera, my eyelids the shutters. Whatever forces have kept this, the infamous "Black Island," safe from intrusion and discovery for so many generations, have worked their dark magic once more and will prevent my escaping with more than a handful of images.
Ah well. Such is life at the edge of the world. And an adventure is still an adventure!
See ya on the other side!
This plane is the only way in (or out) of the Baliem Valley in Papua. Can't get there by road, by river, by sea, or any other method. In fact, during a 4-month period when drought and wildfires caused smoke that made air service impossible, the area was completely cut off from the outside world and hundreds in the main town of Wamena died of starvation.
