First Contact
Day 40 (day 12 of the retreat) 15th March 2012
“A PIG!”
Callum’s shout extracted my mind violently from a daydream about cake.
“Where?!”
We both stopped dead in our tracks.
We were slowly making our way down the left hand side of a shallow gully. There was some serious canopy overhead, throttling the light out of the forest floor, stifling the plant life, and allowing us a very rare opportunity to walk almost unabated. This meant we had a clear view for about 30 metres, and there, right at the base of the gully, next to a tree, staring straight back at us, was not a pig.
“DOG!” Callum and I were both shouting now “It’s a bloody hunting dog!”
This was incredible news.
Less that 25 metres away was a small-white faced dog with chocolate brown legs. I started down towards it. My heart was thumping hard.
“I don’t believe it! It IS a dog!”
This was huge. There was no way a domestic hunting dog would be this far into the forest without its human owner. This was our first solid contact with people for over three weeks.
“Hello!” I shouted, before sensibly switching to “Selemat sore”, as we were in Indonesia after all. But then I thought there was zero chance the dog-owner actually spoke Indonesian in this land containing one-third of the world’s languages. So, I switched back to “Hello”.
We got to within 20 metres of the dog, then it just turned tail and idly trotted off down the gully.
I kept shouting greetings. No Papuan is ever far from their dog.
No reply.
We traced the pug marks. They went into a stream so I ditched the bags and started searching and shouting frantically. People, without doubt, were near.
We needed help. We were in a bad way. It was obvious that the last few days, despite our mental resilience, had taken a massive physical toll. We were thinner than ever before and were taking serious antibiotics and painkillers constantly to get the worst of our pain and infection under control. We both knew deep down we were getting close to the end of our thresholds. If we could just make contact with someone now then maybe we could get help to the village of Wara. Maybe this ordeal would be over.
I followed the stream right down only to find it disappeared into dense brambles. I scanned the banks, looking for more prints, but found nothing.
As I started back towards where I had left Cal I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I stopped, just feet away from him. We both stood in silence. We could both feel it. We were being watched.
I have never ever been so sure of anything in my life.
After weeks of being in the forest we were acutely sensitised to the calls and movements of the jungle floor.
Now there was an eerie silence.
“If” I stammered, “that was the people of Wara on a hunt, they would have come over. People’s hearing here is too good to have missed our shouts…unless…”
Callum grinned and finished my sentence “…we just crossed paths with a totally different tribe.”
There you have it.
Why I do what I do. For that one moment, where pretty much everything you think you know suddenly and abruptly turns on its head, and you are left standing completely dumbstruck.
The people of Wara were absolutely adamant no one lived or traded south of their position. I had naively ignored their warnings three weeks ago when I pressed on downstream in the forlorn hope they could be wrong. Now, I realise, we probably both were. Whoever it was we encountered that day had zero interest in meeting us, and certainly weren’t engaging in any downstream trading activity with the people of the Mamberamo. That much I do know.
But I can’t tell you anything else, as I literally haven’t got a clue.
A few hours later I found those dogs prints again. They were leading from a side-stream that ran right through the southern line we were cutting back to the village. They followed a freshly cut path right and were matched almost step for step by another absolutely tiny set of human prints.
Five minutes later they all disappeared into another stream.
I never saw those prints again and, in truth, I didn’t really want to.
I like the idea there are people still living on this planet that can express their choice to not make contact with the rest of us. Making first contact with indigenous people should always be a two way choice. We certainly weren’t out there to force ourselves on anyone who didn’t want to meet us. As it was, we just quietly crossed paths in the middle of the forest, and that was fine with all of us.
We were however, getting closer to Wara village, and were starting to court real hope.
The descent.
The door is shut behind us.
My fingernails scrape the wall. Searching in vain. I need a handhold. Right now.
We are locked deep within a gorge. I am up to my neck in white-water and hopelessly out of depth. 30 feet of blank, featureless rock sides are shutting us in on both sides and heavy rainfall has turned the river Wara into a boiling colossus of white-water.
There is no escape and no way back. The force is irrepressible and unavoidable. It presses my back, tears at my packraft and pushes me on, remorselessly towards an enormous set of truly obscene rapids.
Both Callum and I are out of our rafts. We are swimming free, unable to mount the boats, out of control, searching, praying for some slack water.
I scan the rock again.
If I can just find a place to hold on, an eddy or an undercut, we might be able to get out of this. But there is nothing and we are bearing down on the rapids fast now. I stare them up and down. Noisy. Really aggressive. Full of rock and relentless.
Be honest Will, you know it’ll easily kill you both.
Pointless. Utterly pointless. I think to myself, turning in the flow.
A lump on the wall…I spot a small lump in the wall.
I reach out. My whole right hand closes round a bump of cold wet rock. It feels really solid. I pull in hard, the raft swings in the flow, my left hand slaps the wall under the water and finds a hole. I shove my whole middle finger in up to the knuckle and pull with everything I have left. The lump has created six-inches of slack water in its lee. It isn’t much but it gives me the vital seconds I need to spot an eddy and a small tabletop sized rock filled beach. I crawl round. A fingerling ridge, a flake of rock, an imperceptible sub-aqua crack – just three climbing moves to sanctuary. My fingers are tearing in the flow and my shoulder begs me to let go of the rock face, but I won’t. I can’t. Suddenly I am in the eddy and screaming at Callum. Praying he can pull off an identical series of manoeuvres.
He makes it. We hug.
13th April
I still think about it all the time.
I have tried to write this all down several times but it is still so unreal in my head that I wondered whether I should write it at all.
It was by no means the most dangerous moment of the descent, but it was the total lack of control that really sticks in my mind. Getting sucked in towards those deadly rapids with seemingly no way of stopping. It was like that nightmare where you are being chased by something truly awful and you suddenly forget how to run.
In truth I hate thinking about moments like this, but I chose to write it all down in the end as, I guess, it is the foil to all the larking about I’ve written about in these blogs so far. That horrible moment really taps into the reality we face up to when taking on these projects. I knew full well before this expedition had even started that it was going to be a big step up for us both. It was important that we both accepted the risks that were inherent from the outset. We were pushing forward into the complete unknown with very limited equipment and zero support. There was always a chance that something terrible could happen to either one of us and the fact it didn’t this time was down to good kit, skill, determination, but mostly, just plain good luck.
It was an experience I wouldn’t want to repeat in a hurry and it, and all that happened next, was never part of my plan, but when you venture to these places you have to make a trade off; it can be scary and risky, but it can be marvelous too.
Reading this blog you would be forgiven for thinking it isn’t worth it at all, but please allow me time to change your mind in this space a bit later on.
Happy blog next time I promise.
Well, maybe the one after next.
“But, hang on, what happened in between the last blog and this one Will?”
Well…
We made it out of the forest to the sublime Wara village on day nineteen of the project. The village was just a grass clearing in the forest, a wonderful cluster of conical wooden huts and a simple church. The people were extremely kind, warm and
understanding. Most spoke their own language, a Yali dialect, but a couple could speak Indonesian so I was able to get just enough information regarding a forward route. I learnt that Wara village was indeed the last of the Yali villages before the lowlands, but it was not the head of a great connecting northern trade route. In fact, no one had ever descended from their position before, bar a few workers once intent on forcing an overland route for cars and trucks to the coast of Jayapura.
When the people of Wara needed to trade they simply headed back up through the forest to the town of Elelim. It was a dead end. An isolated spoke off the great trade routes of the highlands and not the start to an independent route connecting the lowlands that I had hoped it might be.
We had reached an impasse. The project could have finished right there but I felt there was a good chance we could still find a way to the Mamberamo alone. Our satellite map showed the Wara met a much larger river, known locally as the Bogor, that would eventually flow into the Mamberamo and out to the coasts. Going forward was undoubtedly a risk but we had the supplies and packrafts to pull off the descent if the river conditions remained good. The river Wara was hard but not impassable, and there was always a chance we might find a population of people between Wara village and the headwaters of the Mamberamo that were still using the river route to trade, but were hitherto unknown.
It just felt right to continue.
Three days later we found ourselves trapped in that gully after consecutive days of bad weather. We couldn’t go back up the river as the flow was too strong and the sides were just too steep to climb out. We had no option but to keep moving downstream.
It would take us a week before we eventually made it to the Bogor. A week of swimming, hauling and rafting on just 800 calories a day in atrocious river conditions. By the end I had experienced staggering weight loss and we had both sustained injuries. Every single one of our dry bags had flooded, damaging our technical and medical kit, and sweeping away some items altogether. We were engaged in running repairs to the packrafts and utterly isolated.
It was the twenty-eighth day of the expedition.
Snakes on a plain
We have been walking for over two weeks. The road has run out and we’ve just notched up yet another failure on a big river.
Things are starting to look bleak.
Time is no longer on our side and progress is slow.
A big man approaches me on the riverbank. He explains there is a forward path heading north. A tiny foot-track through thick forest to a village called Wara. The village, he says, is the last outpost of the Yali tribe; it lies beside a great river.
My heart leaps.
Maybe, just maybe, this is the lifeline we need to get to Papua’s swampy north. Could this be the ancient trade route I’ve been hoping to find?
I hastily draw a rough map in the back of my notebook and confer with the man. He nods demurely. Running his finger along the biro-ink ridges on the page, he fixes my eye, “it will take you two days to Wara. May you walk with Jesus.”
I turn to leave but he grips my bicep and leans in close to my face, “but you listen to me, you be aware of the snakes. You understand?”
Sometime in 2006. The Eldon Public House, Leeds. Already well past kicking out time.
“Can they just finish up and leave already?” I was unscrewing the sticky nozzles of the lager taps and chucking them impatiently into a pint glass filled with soda water. It was past midnight on a weeknight. My shift was over and I was knackered, covered in beer, and trying to face up to the horrifying reality that in less than twelve hours I had to hand in a 3,000 word essay on Emile Durkheim that I was yet to start.
What I didn’t need right now was the Leeds University orchestra pissed-up and overstaying their welcome.
Gav, the Assistant Manager, strolled over to their table.
“I am very sorry to disturb your evening Gentlemen, but it is time we closed the doors, do you mind finishing up your pints?” He was smiling politely.
“Yeah, sure, sorry Gav” said one, “yeah no problem” said another, adding with a laugh “we do this every week don’t we mate!” Gav kept on smiling. Poker faced. I could tell he was seething at that comment.
One of the members of the string section took the smallest conceivable sip from his pint, replaced it on the bar mat, and then they all continued chatting.
Gav returned to the bar.
“Admirable restraint Gav, well done” I called after him sarcastically.
“well Will, let me tell you” Gav leaned over the dark-wood drinkers divide and with a sideways glance towards the musicians adopted a hammy conspiratorial tone, “they may well be in the Dork-estra, but you don’t want to piss them off.”
I loved working with Gav.
Blonde, bright-eyed and irrepressible. Gav bounced round the bar every night like Tigger on speed, but it was his story telling that I really admired. He was the Eldon king of the apocryphal tale. His ability to spin a yarn was the stuff of legend.
“Oh really Gav, how come?” I leaned in too, glancing over to the orchestra, playing along, hoping that if the orchestra saw the scene unfolding at the bar they might think we were planning a multiple homicide and leave.
“See the big fella with the flute?” Gav gestured to no one in particular, “They call him ‘the hammer’”
I immediately burst out laughing.
“No they do!” exclaimed Gav in mock defence. “The other night, he was walking home through woodhouse with his flute, you know, the right dodgy dark part?” He was talking about the barren no-man’s land off to the right-hand side of Hyde Park. It was a mugger’s paradise that brightened only once a year when the Leeds City Council allowed the world’s most miserable carnival to pitch up on the plot.
Gav continued, “Well anyway, he gets jumped by these three blokes. The one in the middle is an absolute door frame, a real shit-house, plus, he’s only got a twelve inch kitchen knife with him.”
“Crikey Gav! They must have really wanted to learn the flute!”
Gav ignored me. He was in the zone.
“Guess what happened?”
It was a rhetorical question.
“The Hammer. From nowhere. Our man with the flute rams his fist out like a pneumatic piston, smashes the big bloke right in the teeth, who then hits the deck like a tin can at a firing range. Flat out. Sparked”
I was silent. You could say I was stunned.
Gav nodded knowingly and then continued.
“The hammer legs it of course, but guess what he hears as he’s running away?”
“What Gav?”
“One of the blokes is picking up his unconscious mate and shouts out: ‘oi dick head! You do know we had a knife!?’”
Day 18 22nd February
Six years later, deep in the Papuan forest, I have just unwittingly strolled up the entire six-foot length of a Papuan Taipan, which has raised its head mid-way up my shin and fixed me with a look that says:
“oi dick head! You do know I am the world’s most venomous snake”
It had already been four days since we left the man at the river. The village of Wara has become the stuff of total fantasy.
Two days walk? You have got to be kidding.
Our packs are a disaster.
Imagine you have to walk through a really small space. A sewer tunnel for example. Now imagine, it is over 30 degrees with 100% humidity. You want to tear your clothes off, but you know that if you do you will be attacked by everything and anything that lives in the sewer.
Pretty bad right?
But wait, for reasons unknown you are also carrying a 45-kilogram bag the size and dimensions of a bathtub with two four-foot oars sticking right up into the air.
You are twisting, turning, sliding, trying everything, anything, to make progress down the narrow sewer tunnel without slipping into the drink, but it just isn’t possible. Exhausted and defeated, you slump onto your hands and knees, and crawl, nose inches from the stinking muck.
Welcome to the jungle. Punk.
Did I mention the snakes? Our man from the river may have grossly over estimated our walking prowess, but he was spot on about the reptiles.
This forest was a herpetologist’s dream. Three days, four deadly serpents. And now this. A full-length adult Taipan. Six full feet of Black Death with a striking orange vertebral stripe and a crudely rectangular head containing enough venom to kill 100 William Millards 100 times over, is currently close enough to lick my boots clean.
“SSSS- SNAKE!” I screamed, leaping backwards in one fluid motion. Suddenly forgetting the insane weight of my pack, I hurled my walking stick, the one thing that could possibly protect me from the Taipan, about 300 feet directly into the bush.
I scrabbled to fish my camera from my bag. The snake had frozen to the spot right in the middle of the path. Fumbling, I punched record.
The next few moments were a blur.
“It has moved Will, it’s about four, five metres in front of you now” said Callum over my shoulder calmly.
“Bollocks” I looked up from the camera.
The snake, had been so long, straight and stick like.
I had just filmed a stick.
It had slithered off.
“That. Was. Unbelievable” I turned round, my jugular vein thick and enlarged, pumping hard as my body coursed with adrenaline, “mate, I was so close to standing on that. Bloody hell” I gasped and shut off the camera, staring, shocked, at the space in the leaf litter where the snake had just been.
“OH MY GOD!” Callum was suddenly shouting, gesticulating wildly at the side of my pack.
I swivelled. This is it then. The end. A snake the size of a bus has curled around my rucksack. Its jaws are wide open. It is about to engulf my head.
“Oh no, it’s okay” sighed Callum with palpable relief, “I just thought the machete had fallen off the side of your bag.”
I almost, almost, crapped my pants.
Trans Papua Blog 