Dear
family and friends,
Steam
was rising from the fifteen fire pits, each about 8 feet across, filling the
air with cooking smells. They were not necessarily the normal cooking smells I
am used to; rather it was a bit like steamed spinach mingled with the smell of
boiled wieners, too long in the pot. Some 1,500 to 2,000 of the locals were
sitting around, eagerly awaiting the opening of the pits.
Alex,
my guide, and I had set out from Wamena, the principal town in the Baliem
Valley, to visit the Dani villages of Yetni, Kunma, Polimo, Tangma, and
possibly a couple of others, at the very eastern end of the valley. The
villages are very small and very close together, and three or four hours
walking would easily take us through them all. However, when we arrived at
Terminal Jibama, the becak station at the ‘pasar’ (the local market) to get a
ride out to the area, we learned that a ‘festival’ was being held at Sugokmo,
the end of the road and our intended point of drop-off for our hike.
This
was a great stroke of luck. Festivals are held only infrequently, with a major
one held each August, specifically to coincide with the height of the tourist
season. So this one, which turned out to be very large, was quite unexpected. A
festival generally consists of traditional dancing by men and women, music, pig
feasts, and mock tribal fighting. The Indonesian government and missionaries
have encouraged the locals away from real tribal fighting by introducing these
mock battles. Real fighting regularly took place up until about 1970; until
then, it was not unusual for a loser to contribute to the cooking smells. I was
also told, however, that many of the battles were ritualistic, intended more to
appease ancestors and bring good luck, rather than to wreak carnage. It was
apparently not unusual for clashes to dissolve into an exchange of verbal
insults after a couple of hours of fighting, after which everyone could go home.
But, not all tribal warfare has ended; as recently as 1988 a battle between two
groups resulted in 15 deaths, and there have apparently been reports of other
tribal conflicts throughout the 1990s.
But
let me back up a bit. Papua, recently renamed from Irian Jaya, is Indonesia’s most easterly province, comprising
the western half of the island
of New Guinea, the
world’s second largest island. (The eastern one-half of the island is, of
course, the independent country of Papua New
Guinea, and Greenland is
the largest island.) Papua lies in the transition zone between Australia
and Asia and contains flora and fauna from both regions, including some
kangaroos and wallabies. Although now rarely seen, and definitely not by me,
the celebrated birds of paradise also inhabit parts of Papua while the forests
contain over 2,500 species of orchids.
In
a world that had been almost completely measured, mapped, and explored to its
furthest corners, it is more than a little extraordinary that westerners did
not discover the Baliem
Valley in the center of
Papua until 1938. Then again, lying at an elevation of over 1,600 m, and totally
surrounded by mountains reaching to 4,750 m, maybe it’s not entirely surprising
this place went unnoticed. Moreover, after first contact, WWII intervened, so
it was not until 1954 that outsiders truly arrived in the form of Dutch
missionaries. What they found when they did come was a valley 60 km long and
16 km wide, and home to many tribes, now collectively called ‘Dani’, differing
from each other by appearance, language (fully 20% of all the world’s languages
are to found in New Guinea), customs, and dress, but all living traditional, and
very much stone age, lives. Today the valley is the most popular destination in
Papua, offering, as it does, the opportunity to visit the last truly
traditional culture in the world.
The
main entry point to Papua, and the Baliem
Valley, is the city of Jayapura (or, more
accurately, Sentani, the nearby city where the airport is located). I caught an
overnight flight from Jakarta,
and what with two stops along the way, and two hours time change, I arrived in
Sentani at 8:00AM. As a city, Sentani is just a few hotels near the airport
with a string of small shops, warungs (diners), a couple of banks, and other
struggling businesses stretching for a kilometer or so along the highway to
Jayapura. It all looked pretty bleak to me. It was typically very hot and muggy
when I checked into the Hotel Ratna, one of the more inviting places to stay,
in spite of it not having hot water.
On
arrival at the airport I had been greeted by ‘Alex’, citizen of the Baliem, and
according to him, an excellent guide. After checking into my hotel, I agreed
with Alex to pay his flight into Wamena in exchange for a few days guiding. Alex
is of the Lani tribe, a group that lives in the western end of the Baliem. He
spoke some English, and no doubt he knew the valley, but he did over sell his
guiding skills a bit. Yet in the end, it worked out okay.
I
was only staying in Sentani one night, just long enough to obtain a ‘surat
jalan’, the travel permit that is required to visit anywhere in the Baliem
outside of Wamena, the only real town. To get a permit, one must provide two
passport size photos and pay 25,000 Rupiah, about $3.50 Cdn; but as they are
unavailable in the valley, surat
jalans must be obtained from the police before arriving. The idea is that you
will be expected to produce a copy for the regional police at each village you
visit. The truth is, few villages now demand them, and the practice of
requiring visitors to get one is probably just bureaucratic persistence, given
the modest cost to obtain one.
There
are no roads to the Baliem, the only way into the valley is by air; everything,
and I mean everything, must be flown into the valley, so early the next morning
Alex and I boarded a Trigana Air flight headed to Wamena. Trigana is actually a
cargo airline making several flights a day with cargo, but as this is the off
season for tourists, the usual passenger carrier, Merpati, is not running
flights, so Trigana picks up the slack and offers a couple of passenger flights
on its prop driven aircraft. The flight takes less than 45 minutes; from the
air, the valley is lush and green with many farming plots to be seen, the
brownish Baliem River squiggles through it, and a solid
wall of mountains surrounds it.
Wamena,
almost exactly in the middle of the valley, has only existed for a few decades;
today it is home to about 8,500 people. Aside from administrative offices and
schools, it consists of a few hotels, no more than two or three ‘restaurants’,
a couple of bars, a few souvenir shops, quite a number of traditional market
stalls in the town, and at least two large markets just outside the town itself.
It is generally really quite squalid with lots of garbage and litter in the
streets, and it is not the rosiest smelling place in the world.
On
arrival I checked into the Hotel Anggrek (Orchid Hotel) from where I was to
make forays out into the countryside over the next few days. Alex’s and my
first stop, reached by pedal rickshaw, was the main market about 2 km away from
the town center. The market is very rustic, and almost entirely for the Dani to
trade fruits, vegetables, and pigs. One of the more interesting products was
Red Fruit, or Buah Merah as it is known locally, and native only to Papua. Alex
told me that this fruit was very much in demand with buyers coming in from Jakarta to buy it. Claims
are being made that its oil is very effective in the treatment of many diseases
including HIV/AIDS.
It
was at the market that I encountered the first of the traditionally dressed
people I was to meet over the next several days. In appearance, the Dani people
are quite small in stature, wiry, very dark skinned, curly dark hair and
typically with deeply furrowed brows that give, the men at least, quite a
fierce and ferocious demeanour. In actual fact, they are really as curious
about us as we are about them, they are quite shy, but very quick to smile and
will often cover their face with their hands to hide or suppress a giggle. When
shaking your hand they prolong the contact as if really wanting to feel you. A
handshake will often begin with them grasping your arm above your wrist, then
after a period, they will release your arm to shake your hand. The whole
greeting may take more than one minute.
Of
course the immediately obvious thing about the Dani is their dress. Most Dani
are now opting for western dress, shorts, t-shirts, and Nike knockoffs, but a
sizeable number of locals are still encountered wearing what they always wore. In
the case of Dani women, if unmarried, a grass skirt is worn, whereas a married
woman will often wear a skirt of fibre coils or seeds strung together, but in
both cases it is worn very low under the belly and just covering the buttocks. No
top is worn, but you almost never see a Dani woman without a woven string bag
looped over her forehead and hanging down her back. I saw everything from sweet
potatoes and yams to babies and pigs being carried in those bags.
Many
Dani men are still wearing only a penis sheath, made from a cultivated gourd,
to keep out the cold. These gourds come in various sizes, some quite short,
others are at least two feet long; some are straight, while others are twisted.
Again some, on closer inspection, might sport a bit of ornamentation such as a
drawing or etching. They are held in place by a simple string around the waist.
The only other thing worn by these men might be a headband made from feathers
or coloured string. As the valley is quite high, it is often cool with
considerable rainfall, so it was always a bit of a surprise to see these guys
trudging down the road or wandering around the market dressed only in a single
solitary vegetable.
After
our visit to the market, the first village Alex took me to was Sumpaima, just a
few kilometers down the road. Dani live in family groups in small village
compounds, which, I might say, always seemed cleaner and more inviting than the
streets of Wamena. Sumpaima, like all other compounds I saw, was fenced and had
an inviting, grass-covered portal for entry, and like many others, had flowers
growing around inside. Polygamy is the rule with Dani people, a man may have as
many wives as he can afford. I heard it said so often, I am sure the current
‘bride price’ is about four or five pigs. Alex claimed, and I’m sure it was
true, to have two wives, one in his home village, another in Wamena, for which
he paid five pigs each. (I have read that sex after a birth is taboo for up to
five years. While understandable in the context of dedicating the mother to the
new child, this practice clearly contributes to both polygamy and the pretty
much rampant adultery.)
Men
and women do not sleep in the same house, and all the compounds I visited were
laid out the same, one long house with several doors, along the right side for
cooking, across from each door on the opposite side of the compound was a
separate house, called a honai, for each wife with her children, and at the top
of the compound was a slightly larger hut for all the men. The first wife lives
in the house closest to the men’s hut, with succeeding wives further away. I
was invited into the men’s hut and I must say it was neat and altogether quite
inviting. Sumpaima, like a few other villages has a famous mummy, the preserved
remains of some exceptional leader, and of course, it had to be trotted out for
me. Alleged to be 350 years old, this mummy was curled up, very black, some
chunks appeared to have broken off, and it appeared to be more smoked than
anything else. I paid the standard 20,000 Rp ($2.75 Cdn) for the privilege of
seeing the grisly thing.
One
other unusual, and now banned, custom that I will mention was that of women
cutting off one or two joints of their fingers when a close relative dies. I
saw several elderly women in the market mutilated in this way. One in
particular I noted had the tips of all her fingers on one hand missing up to
the last joint.
The
Dani subsist mainly on yams, sweet potato, and taro, which they have apparently
been cultivating for over 10,000 years. Although metal implements are now
available to them, many can still be seen cultivating their plots with stone
tools. The ubiquitous pig is also a major part of Dani diet, and fat, mostly
black, porkers can be seen wandering about everywhere. (I also read that the
pigs received as a bride price are treated as members of the family, sleeping
in the house, the women sometimes suckling the piglets.)
I
was in the valley for four days and did a pretty good job of covering it from
one end to the other, from Yetni in the east to Pyramid in the west. My
transportation was always by becak, minivans that carry locals in every
direction. These becaks were in the worst repair of any I have ever seen
anywhere, but like others everywhere, they always had seats for about eight
people but unfailingly carried at least 15 people. Besides me, all but one of
the others would be smoking. On one such ride, the one person not smoking was a
toddler about 18 months old, but her mother would give the child her cigarette
to play with between drags. Becaks wait until they are full before they leave. On
one occasion I paid for three extra seats to hasten departure; even at that, we
left with 18 of us on board. Plus the driver. Closely packed as we always were,
and personal hygiene not yet a fully developed concept here in the valley,
riding in a becak for one or two hours was quite an olfactory experience.
Incidentally,
all the Dani now seem to be smoking, and I very much regret that I got talked
into the practice of giving them cigarettes as a small gift when they posed for
a picture or whatever. Alex was quite insistent that we carry cigarettes to
give out, but I now think it was mainly to feed his own smoking habit, a habit
only slightly less important to him than chewing betel nut.
A
few of the roads in the valley were paved about 20 years ago, but they are
already breaking up badly in many places, and some stretches have disappeared
back to rubble, other pieces have been completely washed out. Bridges are the
most precarious I have ever been on; in many cases the crosspieces are broken
and missing, and drivers must hit the supporting stringers to get across. Each
ride was always a bit of an adventure.
But
of all the sights, certainly the festival was the most interesting. Alex and I
spent several hours there. When we first arrived, a fire pit about 100 feet
long was fully ablaze and filled with large stones being heated; other people
were busy digging the cooking pits, each to a depth of two feet. While women
prepared the pits with a base of grass, followed by a layer of what I think was
morning glory, the men butchered the pigs, at least 30, maybe 40, of them. The
pigs were first rolled in a fire to scorch the hair off, then they were gutted
and hacked up into large slabs. Sweet potatoes, yams, taro, and corn were put
into the pits first, followed by a layer of hot rocks hauled over by the men
with split sticks, more morning glory was added to cover, then more vegetables,
more morning glory, more hot rocks, then slabs of pork, morning glory, hot
rocks… you get the idea. After all the food was in, the ends of the grass that
formed the base was pulled up and over and lashed into place to seal the pit. And
the steam wafted about.
All
the while this was going on, tribal groups, each about 100 strong, were
arriving. The groups consisted of both men and women, many members were
bedaubed with mud paint in traditional designs, most were carrying spears or
axes, some men only wore the penis gourd, others had feather headdresses, while
still others had boar tusks through their noses. (These boar tusks are now
seldom worn, I would think only for occasions like the festival, but many men
are equipped to do so. Often when standing alongside a local man, and looking
at their profile, I could see right through their nose to daylight on the other
side!) A noisy clamour announced the
arrival of each group; it seemed one half the members would keep a rhythmic
chant while the rest carried on with loud yelps. They would charge into the
clearing, rush at the others already there, swirling around them, all the while
shaking their weapons and generally having a grand time. Groups arrived steadily
for at least two hours; the running and shouting continued the whole time,
never stopping for even one moment. It was all very festive.
I
kept reminding myself how lucky I was to happen on to this event, it was
totally authentic, absolutely not geared for visitors. Of the near 2,000 people
there, I was the only non-local; although after some time, a German couple who
were flying overhead saw the gathering and landed to see what was happening.
Alex
and I left just as the food was to be served. But after attending the festival,
I now have a new get-rich-quick scheme, ‘The Merv Isert Weight Loss Plan. Results
guaranteed’. My plan is to fly people to the Baliem, take them to a native
cookout to watch the full ritual; the slaughtering of the pigs, scorching of
the carcasses on the fire, the butchering with all the bubbly, slightly blue,
viscera tumbling out, the slabs of bloody meat loaded into the fire pit, and
finally the serving of the more-steamed-than-roasted chunks of fat pork. I
believe the experience will have clients eating nothing more than soda crackers
and water for at least one week following. After no more than three such
sessions, their appetites will have totally disappeared, their stomachs will
have shrunken to the size of a pea, and the weight will just fall off. I know
it sure worked for me.
On
the other hand, if you are one of those exceptional individuals who can be
served a slab of that slick, glistening, slithery white pork, find yourself a
place to sit on the bare ground between the litter and pig turds, flies,
dust, and smoke swirling all around, with the diner most immediately close to
you wearing only a penis gourd, and the many children around you with near
terminal runny noses, and then tucker in and eat, you my friend, have an eating
disorder so rare, and so profound, research will be done on it, books written
about it, and the disease will doubtless carry your name.
But
I really do not want to make fun of these people. In the first place, their
lives are no less worthy than mine; they are simply trying to satisfy the same
needs, the need to live a life free from hunger, to raise a family, and to live
a life with dignity. Moreover, when you think for one minute on the incredible
changes brought to them over the past four to five decades, you cannot help but
admire how they are adapting. At warp speed they have rocketed through the
copper, bronze, and iron ages, the industrial revolution, introduction of the
iron horse, automobiles, jet travel, computers, and the information highway,
all arrived in the valley at the same time. They literally went from crude
stone clubs to karaoke clubs in one generation.
The
Dani’s existence is, paradoxically, not helped by the fact that Papua is rich
in natural resources. It is covered with tropical, near impenetrable, rain
forest that outsiders want to harvest, oil and natural gas exploration is being
conducted, and it is the site of the world’s largest gold mine, and third
largest copper mine. No, not Bre-X. Rather, it is The Freeport Mine, operated
by the American giant, Freeport McMoran. (But one could speculate that Bre-X,
even though it was on far away Borneo, got some of its luster from just being
in the same country as Freeport.)
Freeport
is the single largest foreign taxpayer in Indonesia, having contributed over
$1 Billion to the tax coffers in the past fifteen years, yet little or none of
the money benefits Papua. Being rich as it is, Indonesia
is not anxious to cede their control on Papua, even though the only claim Indonesia, with a government resident more than
2,500 km away in Java, could have on the area is that Papua, like the rest of Indonesia,
was once colonized by the Dutch. When the Dutch finally left Papua in 1969, Indonesia
really just took it over.
It
is not surprising that Papuans are resisting Indonesian control, and there have
been a number of demonstrations and riots by pro independence groups, with a
major uprising as recently as two years ago. I spoke with a Canadian missionary
who has been in Papua since the 1960s; he told me that these incidents have
been met with the harshest measures by the Indonesian military, including
strafing and bombing of villages, and always leaving many Papuans dead.
So
ends my Papuan visit report. I know it is quite long, but this has been seminal
experience for me. Not a lot of travelers do come here to Papua; in 2002 only
1,000 visitors came to the Baliem, while last year only about double that
arrived in Wamena. I am very glad to be one of those who have made the trek.
My
original intention for a visit to New Guinea was to go to Papua New Guinea
after my stop in Papua, but I have decided not to go on to PNG. I confess that
traveling as I do does grind me down a bit, particularly in a place like the Baliem Valley.
Moreover, I don’t believe I would see much that was truly novel after my visit
to this extraordinary area. Also, part of the reason I planned to go to PNG was
to get another Indonesian visa, as tourist visas like mine are only good for 30
days. I have learned that it costs $200 Cdn to get another visa in Vanimo PNG
when it should cost $25 US. Besides being a cheapskate, I hate to support that
kind of corruption. And lastly, tropical storm Ingrid, a force 4 system, was
forecast to hit northern Papua in the next day or so. As it was, my flight out
of the valley back to Sentani was delayed due to a very heavy rainfall, and I
had no wish to be stranded in a local hotel for a few days. (But I must also
note that although I said when I first arrived, Sentani looked quite bleak, it
is amazing how luxurious it now seems after Wamena.)
So,
I am now off to Bali for what I believe is
some richly deserved beach time. I hope you enjoy this letter and that you are
all well.
Merv.
No comments:
Post a Comment