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 