Paradise: Solo Across New Guinea

By Chuck McAllister

Having parted company with his wife of four years, Chuck McAllister decides to clear his head by wandering solo across Papua New Guinea—a rainforest island where tribal loyalty still reigns supreme—where travel is achieved on foot, by canoe, or hitching a lift with a missionary pilot. Here, many of the people still live as subsistence hunter-farmers, building houses of bamboo and thatch, and getting by without running water, electricity, medicine, or roads. Clan wars are common and celebrations are enacted with drums, dancing, and feathered headdresses. Living in their grass houses and sleeping alongside their pigs, McAllister survives narrow escapes from jungle disease and freezing mountaintops, and makes acquaintances of every description, from Western missionaries to the grandchildren of headhunters. His story is offered in a breezy anecdotal style, enlivened with comic adventures, bits of history, tribal mythology, and personal revelations, and touches upon all those areas central to the human experience—love, sex, religion, war and peace, wealth and poverty, life and death, joy and sorrow. Through it all McAllister learns to live in the moment, look to the future, and let go of the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chuck McAllister
• Release date: Jan 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9780988719811

Book preview

What others are saying about Paradise by Chuck McAllister:

-- An insightful peak at a vanishing world. Highly recommended!

-- Captivating on so many levels. You can get a taste of the lush tropical rain forests, and the high mountains, with their beauty and their dangers. It was a very enjoyable read.

--I found myself looking forward to each new chapter and wondered what could possibly happen next. I also felt immersed in a culture that was quite fascinating. This is a great travel book and highly recommended.

Paradise: Solo across New Guinea

by Chuck McAllister

Paradise: Solo across New Guinea

Published by Chuck McAllister

Smashwords Edition

Text and cover photo copyright 2013 by Chuck McAllister

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

MAPS

The Southwest Pacific

Papua New Guinea

The Highlands Highway

The Sepik River

PART I: The Mummies of Aseki

Chapter 1: Prehistory

Chapter 2: The Missionaries’ House

Chapter 3: Stuck

PART II: Hailans Haiwé

Chapter 4: Goroka

Chapter 5: Close to the Edge

Chapter 6: Mount Hagen

Chapter 7: Changing Times in Kutubu

Chapter 8: Tradition and Tourism in Tari

Chapter 9: The Mountains of the Stars

PART III: The House of Sanguambi

Chapter 10: River

Chapter 11: The Children of the Dead

Chapter 12: The Chambri Lakes

Chapter 13: Purgatory

Chapter 14: Blackwater Lakes

Chapter 15: Lower Sepik

Chapter 16: Mount Hagen Show

Chapter 17: Farewell

The Southwest Pacific

Papua New Guinea

The Highlands Highway

The Sepik River

Chapter 1 – Prehistory

A grinning man, wearing very little apart from a bark loincloth and a pig's tusk through his nose, is standing in line next to me at the bank. And, in my Dockers and dress shirt, I am the one who looks out of place.

In another week I will be taking advice on how not to be eaten by a crocodile while bathing or doing laundry.

A few weeks earlier, I had been dying, all alone, 14,000 feet up the highest mountain range east of the Himalayas. A cold afternoon rain had caught me off guard, and the nearest settlement—a grass-roofed village of subsistence farmers—was a hard four hours’ walk behind me. The clouds had closed in, and visibility was reduced to ten feet in each direction. And it was getting colder. My body, gone hypothermic, had stopped shivering some time ago; my arms and legs were numb and my mind was slowing down. What I needed was a chance to dry off and warm up, but my situation offered no such opportunity.

Though I didn’t realize it all at once, I had come to this place to escape my troubles—trying to outdistance a home life gone sour—and, on that day on the mountain, my plan had unmistakably backfired. I had spent the past four weeks running as hard and as far away as my strength and stamina would carry me. Doing it my way, which at the moment was not working out so well. And now, fading in the throes of hypothermia, stumbling toward an empty mountain cabin lying an unknown distance ahead of me, it was time to acknowledge that it was, after all, possible to go too far, possible for a man to run himself to death.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The day I packed for my first trip to Papua New Guinea, there were still cannibals living there. It takes a moment to process this information, because cannibals are something we hear about as children, until you grow up and decide it’s just another tall story, like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, something cooked up by explorers to make their adventures seem more adventurous. Cartoons and old movies from the 1940s depicted villagers living in thatched huts, wearing grass skirts and a bone through their nose, and charging around the jungle with spears and shields. But as you get older you learn that these are just caricatures, unfair portrayals put forth by insensitive Westerners with no understanding of reality. And then you go to New Guinea, and people are living in thatched huts, wearing grass skirts and a bone through their nose, and charging around the jungle with spears and shields. The idea that such a place existed at all made me want to get there in person, before the things that made it different were gone for good.

Guidebooks called it an island of superlatives. The tallest mountains in the Pacific, the most rainfall in the world, the weirdest birds, the biggest butterflies, the largest number of spoken languages, the most primitive living cultures—really, there was plenty to recommend New Guinea apart from its cannibals, if that's your idea of a good time. It certainly sounded like mine. (Most of them were retired cannibals, to be precise, but in 2012 twenty-nine of them were arrested for killing and eating several accused sorcerers that same year.)

And then there were the bugs. I was, in a hobbyish sort of way, a tropical entomologist—a bug scientist, in case you didn’t already know, and my area of expertise was dragonflies. New Guinea was already known to harbor nearly 600 species of dragonflies, most of them found nowhere else on Earth, and I was itching to try my hand at discovering a few new ones. I was still at a point in my life where I nurtured unsatisfied urges to make some kind of name for myself. Pinning my name to the Latin binomial of a newly-discovered critter or two might, I thought, do the trick.

I knew, right from the outset, that New Guinea was a journey I'd have to make on my own, because there simply wasn't another person of my acquaintance who showed the slightest interest in going. I've never been a superb vacation buddy. Give me sufficient funds and enough time, and I'm not heading for Vegas, Disney World, or anything with the word 'cruise' attached to it.

I suppose if I had more of a social life, or a significant other with similar interests, it'd be another story. But as it stands, I'd rather go someplace uncomfortable but different, than somewhere luxurious but familiar. And once I get there, I don't particularly long for the company of fellow foreigners. I don't wish to catch up on the latest politics or celebrity gossip, or compare notes on the best trinket stands. I’m certainly not lying on a beach or getting my nails done. Full immersion is my racket, and I sometimes feel that Western company tends to haul me back out of the pool. Speaking the language of my birth, hanging with other Anglos, listening to an ipod—all that stuff keeps me home, and what I seek is not home.

How will I reach you? my mother wanted to know, as I described my plans for the summer.

You can’t, I replied. There won’t be any phones except in a few big towns. Regular mail would take months to get there, and I won’t have any regular address anyway. I promise to call you every few weeks when I have the opportunity.

What if something happens back home? How will you find out?

I won’t.

So Papua New Guinea—PNG to the people who live there—was tailor made for a person of my habits, still relatively free of modern distractions. And I wanted to see it before the cell phones got there (and the oil rigs, and the clearcuts for pipelines, and the catchment ponds for toxic stripmine waste). As I packed my bags, American television and radio were pulsating with breathless reports of a retired football player accused of a double murder. It was a huge story and anyone could see that the newspeople were not about to drop it any time soon. I was only too glad to be missing out on the next couple months of media chatter.

I’d been around a bit, lived in fairly third-world conditions for extended periods of time. I knew how to do without hot water, electricity, and refrigerated food. I knew what it was like to wait half a day for a rusted hulk of a bus that no typical suburbanite would set foot in. I’d eaten a wide variety of foods that took their main ingredient from parts of the animal kingdom that most Westerners would rather approach via pest control. But New Guinea went several steps beyond that. Trembling in the throes of hypothermia, or entering the smoldering remains of a village just burnt to the ground by an enemy clan, or nursing infected wounds that refused to heal, I was often tempted to ask myself, Why have I done this? With all the places worth seeing, why sit in a grass hut swatting mosquitoes and picking leeches off my ankles? Why spend ten hours hiking solo down a forest trail, to a village that might offer no welcome once I got there? Why live with the children of headhunters? Why sleep with their pigs?

For me, the question answered itself: New Guinea was one of a kind, a last vestige of what the world was like before the homogenizing effect of Western society, with time running out as far as I was concerned, and if I wanted a glimpse of this last stronghold, I had to get there post haste.

To fill out the picture a little bit, New Guinea is the second largest island in the world after Greenland, located just below the equator, due north of Australia and southeast of the Philippines. Its position in the southwest Pacific ensures it some of the highest rainfall on Earth, with areas receiving over six meters—twenty feet, for my fellow Americans—per year. The island boasts several of the world’s largest rivers and some of the highest mountains found anywhere between the Himalayas and the Andes. The people speak an astonishing number of different languages, accounting for more than forty percent of the world’s total. Its diverse ecosystems range from hot, humid, coastal mangrove swamps, through mountain rainforests, high grasslands, treeless mountain peaks, and even a few summits bearing glaciers.

Although it lies close to south-east Asia, New Guinea’s animals bear stronger ties to those of Australia—the two islands having once been joined by a now-submerged land bridge. New Guinea has never been contiguous with the Asian continent, so there are no tigers, tapirs, elephants, or monkeys as in neighboring Indonesia, but instead pouch-bearing marsupials such as possums and tree-kangaroos, and the odd, hedgehog-like echidna, who like the Australian platypus lays eggs. There are no large predatory mammals, and so the top of New Guinea’s food chain (apart from humans) is occupied by man-sized, predatory birds called cassowaries.

Brightening the forest canopy everywhere are the Birds of Paradise, forty species of the most strange and spectacular feathered creatures imaginable. Sharing this airspace, like handmaidens to royalty, are two-dozen species of giant Birdwing butterflies, the largest nearly a foot across, decked in emerald green, sparkling yellow, and tinted with ultra-violet, all set against velvet black. And, emulating the glory of this airborne aristocracy, are the feathered warrior tribesmen living on the forest floor below.

These grand and (occasionally) glorious people, thanks to a series of historical accidents, remained practically unencumbered by Western civilization until after the Second World War. They knew no woven cloth or extracted metal. Few of them had even the skills of pottery. The wheel was unknown to them. Axe-heads were chipped from stone; body adornment was restricted to paint, feathers, leaves, bits of fur, shells and the tusks of pigs. In the absence of clothes, the mountain people insulated their bodies with generous coatings of pig grease. They knew the forest, and the forest—assisted copiously by representatives of the spirit world—provided for them. Primitive as their life seemed, it was not, strictly speaking, Stone Age; in fact, the New Guineans were men of wood more than anything else, and most of what they made decomposed quickly in the humid climate.

The colonial powers were never able to make much of New Guinea. Poked and prodded around its margins since the late sixteenth century, the island was mainly the province of Christian missionaries until gold was discovered in the Huon Penninsula in the 1920s. More than half the island’s six million inhabitants were discovered by the outside world since 1930. Between then and now, development in the Western sense had been slow and steady, with the result that the tone and pace of village life remained, in large measure, essentially unaltered. New tribes were still making their first contact with outsiders in the 1990s.

I wanted to visit some of these people before the leveling effect of our own society took its inevitable hold on them. I had no illusions of being some sort of heroic explorer. Rather, just as one might wish to visit Paris if the Eiffel Tower was scheduled for demolition, I only wished to see some of old New Guinea before it was turned inside-out.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It took the better part of thirty-five hours to get from Newark International Airport to Port Moresby, PNG’s capital. The usual baggage claim and customs formalities passed without incident, which was a relief because, for reasons inexplicable to New Guinean officials, my gear included combustible chemicals and hypodermic needles. Choosing not to linger, by 2:30 I was outside Jackson International Airport and looking for a taxi.

My immediate destination was Boroko, a relatively quiet section of what is widely considered one of the most dangerous and desperate cities on Earth. (Writer Paul Theroux described Moresby as …one of the most violent and decrepit towns on the face of the planet… thoroughly vandalized before it could ever be finished, and for quality of life The Economist had rated the city 137 out of 140, ranking it lower than Lagos and Karachi.) Most of the non-nationals were here on business, and were immediately picked up by company cars or hotel limos, leaving me to the taxis. A dark-skinned man in a yellow twincab pickup truck—my prospective cabbie—gestured to me and I went over. It was time to find out if I could speak Pidgin.

Pidgin English—or, more properly, Neo-Melanesian—is the tradespeak of Papua New Guinea, developed on an ad hoc basis to allow communication between its four million inhabitants (another two million live on the Indonesian side of the island), who among them speak over 700 different tribal languages. Pidgin, or tok pisin in its own terminology, has gotten a bad rap by outsiders for its limited vocabulary, and by some nationals for being a holdover from colonial days. Its great strength is its short learning curve. The vocabulary is essentially English, and though it can look utterly chaotic in print, when read aloud the meaning usually becomes obvious. Vowels are short, not long, and certain consonants, like F and P, are sometimes used interchangeably. But apart from that, tok pisin is a relative breeze—like English, it is a language that is easy to speak poorly.

I’d been told, by some guy on the plane, that the cab would run about eight bucks. The cabbie wanted 10 kina—about ten dollars—for the trip. Eight kina inup, o nogat? I countered (Eight kina enough, or no got?), but he just smiled amiably and replied, Nogat, ten kina Boroko.

Having exhausted the full range of my Pidgin bargaining lingo, I handed him my bags, hopped into the front seat (the back seat was considered standoffish), and in a moment we were careening off, downhill, through the dusty streets of suburban Port Moresby.

My first impressions were of heat and drought. The only thing that cut the intensity of the sun was the terrific quantity of airborne red dust, which merely shifted the brightness to haze. Even on pavement, reddish-brown powder kicked up behind every vehicle—though we didn't have much company on the roads. The hills between the airport and Boroko were almost treeless, a dry brown grassland dotted with grey-green shrubs, their natural colors muted by a thin layer of brown dust. We passed neighborhoods of one-story houses built of corrugated sheet metal, and billboards advertising local cigarettes and national lotteries. Yards were screened-in with chicken wire, shaded with a tree or two, and kept lively with small children, brown dogs, and domestic fowl. After we were well underway I turned to speak with the driver.

You savvy tok Inglis? I asked him. He smiled, startled and pleased that I had made the effort.

A little bit, he replied. I figured him to be about 25 years old, and he didn't look much like the coastal Papuans who worked the customs desk at the airport. They had a sort-of Polynesian look about them—kind of Asianish—but this man looked more West African than anything else.

Encouraging conversation, he asked, Yu kamap long wat kantri?

Mi haiskul tisa bilong Amerika, I said. Ples bilong yu wé? (Place belong you, where?)

Mi kamap long Hagen. Mount Hagen was New Guinea’s largest highlands city, situated far in the country’s interior.

We drove awhile longer, passing a dust-coated billboard for Rothman’s cigarettes, then I ventured, "You come to Moresby for wuk?"

Yes, he said, "Hagen is more nice, only dere is no wuk in Hagen. Here I can earn mani. Save up. Soon I will go home, I hope."

You like it better in Hagen?

"Moa moa betta. Moresby too hot olitaim. You can grow nating. Too dry. Hagen is nice, you can grow samting." He was making a decent living in the city, but this highland cabbie remained a subsistence farmer at heart. Moresby did not get high marks for agricultural potential.

You come from village?

Yesssss, he said, beaming proudly, very nice village. Nais tumas (nice too much). Cool an’ green, wit many haus. Bik gaden. Planti vegge-ta-bull. Gut tumas.

Are you living in Moresby all alone?

"No, I have many wantok in Moresby."

Wantoks are relatives, neighbors, and mates, the people with whom you share a common tongue—one talk. With so many languages spoken on the island, and with intertribal animosity always running high, the only people you could trust for sure were the small crew that spoke your own local dialect. To the New Guinean away from home, everyone else was speaking some form of mumbo-jumbo that you couldn’t make out, and they might be talking about who-knows-what. Having a wantok or two gave a man confidence. And, as with my cabbie, you could always count on a wantok to put you up if you came for a visit, or to help you find a job, or get you out of trouble.

I wanted to know if his village still held traditional festivals. Village bilong yu, yupela.... (you fellas) Yupela have sing-sing?

Yesssss, he said, grinning at my savvy. Big sing-sing. Nais tumas. I will go back for big sing-sing, September I am hoping.

Do you paint yourself up?

Yesssss! Oliman get painted up.

You put a pig’s tusk through your nose?

He smiled broadly. Bikwan.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I was getting my keys from the manager of a Boroko guesthouse, a courteous but businesslike, middle-aged Australian who everyone called Brother John. Always moving, he didn't stop for small talk, but he did answer a few questions for me as I got settled in.

"You’ve heard of our rascal problem, no doubt. The crime situation has gotten pretty bad in recent years, yeh? Even so, Boroko’s mostly all right. You kin walk around in the afternoon. If you kin hendle New York or Chicago you'll hev no trouble in Boroko. Mind you, this is Moresby so keep yer security door locked et all times. Things heppen. If someone comes up to the gate, no matter what he tells ya ..."

This was not the first I had heard about PNG's raskol problem, and I wasn't prepared to ignore the warnings. The word raskols conjures up images of naughty little street urchins, but Moresby's raskols were grown men—gang members and thugs, to put it sweet and neat. Raskol crimes included armed robbery, rape, and murder, and were well-publicized. The raskols themselves were mainly young guys away from home, come to the larger towns and cities hoping to strike it rich, with no means of earning honest money and no wantoks to keep them in line. The raskol problem was not, alas, a figment of nervous expat imaginations, and to judge by their example, the only sane response was to insulate oneself as much as possible and live permanently on guard. But this was not what I came here to do.

Two days earlier I had been on a United flight from New Jersey to Sydney. I was sitting next to a young couple from Australia, who were just concluding a 7-week round the world vacation. The man’s name was Reg; he was in computers and had been to PNG several times. He launched into the raskol problem right away.

Moresby is a bit like Cowboys and Indians, he began, You’ve really gotta watch yer back I’ll tell ya. If you kin manage in New York City it’s not so bad, I suppose, only in PNG you’ve gotta be careful because people tend to take the law into their own hands a bit.

I suppose, I ventured, it must feel safer once your neighbors get to know you.

I really don’t mix that much, Reg admitted, Mostly I go in for a particular job and pop back out again. It’s usually just Moresby or Mount Hagen, and then I’m out.

This, I learned quickly, was quite common among the expats. Don’t ride the buses, they’d tell you, but few had ridden one themselves. A lot of bad news seemed based more on hearsay than first-hand experience. Everybody knew somebody else it had happened to.

And (I had read), a lot of times foreigners, unmindful of local customs, inadvertently left a bad impression in their wake, and this complicated things for the next person who wandered through. I wondered if Reg had any tips on local etiquette.

It's a very patriarchal society, he replied. They have their wantoks, and everything is ordered around that. And for God’s sake, be careful, because they do believe in payback. If you're driving a car out in the bush somewhere—even if you're just the passenger—and you hit someone, or even a dog or a chicken, under no circumstances do you hang around, ‘cause the villagers will want to take it out of your hide. Instead, you drive straight to the nearest police station. And even then the police may just settle it by flying you straight out of the country. 'Cause those bush men’ll have no problem cutting off your arms and legs...

Everywhere I went, crime and violence was the favorite topic of discussion in white PNG. It seemed to allow the storytellers a perverse sense of satisfaction, combining the suggestion of bravery on their part for living there, with a means of legitimizing their contempt for the locals. Hearing talk like that, I suspected the truth would be found at least slightly in the other direction.

On the other hand, the expats were not alone in their dread of raskols—it was a national issue that cut across all lines of race and economic status. And so the most interesting thing I heard on the subject was from two young Papuan women who sold me my local plane tickets from a travel agency in Port Moresby.

The raskols, Imma told me, are quite alright once they know who you are.

Yes, Maria concurred, And if you see a group of them hanging around where you have to pass by, just nod your head and keep it simple. They are unlikely to bother you. But stay where there are lots of people walking about.

The problem happens, Imma added, when they pick on you and you don’t know how to handle it.

Should I be a tough guy? I asked them, and hoped the answer wasn't 'yes.' (My Ichabod Crane physique and amiable demeanor do not supply the necessary gravitas for intimidating street thugs.)

No, Maria responded, Not a tough guy. Just treat what they say as a greeting, if you can. If a raskol should say something rude to you, under no circumstances should you respond by saying something obscene in return.

That’s right, Imma added, Once they know your face and respect you, they will protect you and look out for you.

It was difficult to reconcile this advice with the persistent talk on the street of raskols running amok, robbing, raping and pillaging. There was no doubt that crime, both petty and violent, had increased greatly in recent decades, and continued to be a major problem in most of PNG’s urban centers. But to what degree did this differ from any big city in the Western world?

The quick answer, I suppose, is that one is unlikely to be hacked to bits after walking into the wrong neighborhood in New York or Los Angeles, but obviously there are perilous precincts in most cities no matter where you go. New Guinea’s working stiffs—grassroots in Pidgin—dealt with the raskol problem as a matter of exercised caution and chance. Near as I could tell, the lion's share of genuine panic came from the expatriate population, and all I heard from them was unmitigated gore and horror.

For my part, it took only a few days to see that an attempt to assimilate improved matters considerably. I didn't kid myself that I was being accepted as part of the family, but it did seem that an attempt to meet the nationals on their own terms was appreciated. And the cues could be rather subtle. Australian expats, for instance, favored dark, reflector sunglasses, which had the effect—intended or otherwise—of preventing direct eye contact, which is an essential piece of PNG body language.

Most expats seemed to live on a separate island, neither loved nor hated, just there. They hustled from air-conditioned cars into air-conditioned office buildings, socialized in private clubs, and lived in special compounds behind rolls of razor-wire and remote-control gates. From where I sat there was little or no visible attempt on their part to assimilate or integrate. Possibly this made them an even greater target for crime and violence than they might otherwise have been.

But frankly, I didn't get much of a chance to ask any of these people, because on the whole, expats kept their distance from travelers such as myself. A civil nod of the head and a concise hello was the most I usually got out of someone, in the few seconds between the time they popped out of their Land Rover and the moment they disappeared into the Bank of South Pacific. Expat women simply didn't bother to make eye contact at all—as if we were all conspirators against a brutal regime and we didn't dare blow our cover by acknowledging one another. Probably most of the young solo travelers they'd come across were hippie wankers or deadbeats, or both, and the settled expats just didn't want to be bothered.

Whatever the true nature of the raskol problem, it was certainly more than media hype. I stayed off the streets after dark, and avoided lonely places and shantytowns. I steered clear of isolated groups of young men, and kept to areas where I saw women, children, and elderly people. Generally speaking, I did my best to combine common sense with an open mind. The trick was to keep an open mind without letting your brains fall out.

12:30 a.m., Monday, July 4

I was wide awake from jet lag, contemplating how quiet the place seemed, after all I'd heard about it. While the guesthouse did have a high fence around it, there was no razor wire or guard dogs or anything. No police sirens in the distance, no rowdy groups of young men, no screams in the darkness. I did notice a security guard walking past during the night, but that was the only indication of Moresby’s raskol problem.

By 8:00 a.m. I was on the pedestrian mall in Boroko, between the Post Office and Steamships Department Store. Steamie’s, even here in New Guinea, was, in all its particulars, a modern supermarket. (In the larger towns—Moresby, Lae, Mount Hagen, Goroka, Wewak—a person could find a limited but fairly inclusive assortment of basic groceries and dry goods. Once you got into the sticks, however, it was Subsistence City.)

I had nothing to eat since my arrival and needed to do some food shopping. The store was supposed to open at 8:30 but it was now 8:45 and there was no telling just when it would really get started. The local populace was beginning to gather outside, hunkered down on the mall sidewalk, with a subdued but growing sense of impatience. Highland New Guineans didn’t tend to sit on walls—in some towns it was forbidden, a way to discourage loitering; instead, they squatted, feet flat on the ground, resting their weight on their haunches, wrapping their arms around their knees. This yoga position was a holdover from the days, not too long ago, when clothing was unknown and a person assumed this pose in order to conserve body heat.

Inside, we could see the staff being given some sort of pep-talk or message from Management. I joined the line of squatting men and women outside, hunkered down, and waited for things to happen.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The people of Port Moresby seemed generally to be in good health, unlike the common image of the urban poor in the Third World. You didn't see a lot of beggars either. They were of two main ethnic groups, each vying for local supremacy. Moresby, which is a coastal, low-lying city, seemed to be ethnically dominated by immigrants from New Guinea's interior highlands. These immigrants—the Highlanders—were quite distinct racially and sociologically from the coastal Papuans who originally made up the entire local population, and there was a certain level of distrust between the two groups. The Papuans are honey-skinned people, with a distinct Asiatic influence to their countenance: high cheek bones, almond eyes, thin lips, and small noses. Their hair is frizzily curled, but a bit looser than, for instance, that of Africans (During the Second World War, when many Papuans served as medical assistants, the Australian soldiers affectionately nicknamed them the fuzzy-wuzzie angels—those were the days!). Highlanders, by contrast, are so dark-skinned, full-lipped, and crinkly-haired that even a trained ethnologist might mistake them for equatorial Africans.

Highland men and women, to my eyes, had very similar facial features, and if you removed the beards from the men, it would be more-than-usually difficult for a Westerner to distinguish the sexes by their faces alone. The women's features struck me as coarse by Western standards, which is not to say that they lacked feminine beauty. New Guinea women dressed colorfully and many had attractive tattoos on their arms and faces. Men, for the most part, wore second-hand clothes—typically a pair of cotton shorts, a canvas hat, and a T-shirt with advertising on it (Coke, Papa Smurf, Metallica—if you've put your old clothes in the donation dumpster, it may well be in New Guinea today, where it was not handed out gratis, but sold by the charity that accepted it from you). Shoes were uncommon, even in major towns and cities.

The Papuans, who thirty years ago were the only brown-skinned people in town, were generally the people who—besides the Chinese and Australians—owned shops and ran things. They tended to regard Highlanders as uncouth yokels who overcrowded the city and were responsible for most of the crime. The Highlanders, as with immigrants everywhere, did most of the work considered undesirable by the Papuans, for relatively low wages, and worked very hard at it until they prospered. Then they brought in more wantoks to help out. The Papuans, with their home team advantage, were disinclined to work quite so hard, and resented the Highlanders for getting along as well as they did with so little education or big city know-how. In return, the Highlanders tended to view the Papuans as lazy and soft, and felt that Papuans held too many positions in government and business. The Papuans were intimidated by the highlands population, which on a national level greatly outnumbered their own, and felt that the highlands received an unfair proportion of government money and attention.

The ones hunkered down on the sidewalk, waiting for the store to open, were Highlanders. The people inside the supermarket, which was now almost a half-hour late in opening, were Papuans. The Highlanders on the outside regarded the holdup as irritatingly typical—and to be honest, the Papuans indoors didn't look at all like people in a hurry to get started.

As I sat waiting with the others, people smiled at me in passing and said moning. (After twelve, the greeting changed to apinun.) I even managed an extended conversation or two, though in Moresby most folks spoke better English than I could speak Pidgin, so it wasn't much of a personal triumph. By the time Steamie’s had opened, I had started thinking that New Guinea would prove to be, if I kept my wits about me, as safe as home.

Well—as safe as home, if you lived in a slightly edgy city and knew which neighborhoods to steer clear of.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Once in Moresby it took me two days to get my affairs in order—visiting the national museum, buying topographic maps, and obtaining collecting permits for my part-time research as an entomologist—and on the morning of the third day I was sitting in a hangar awaiting my flight with North Coast Aviation. The attendant weighed my baggage, and then he weighed me. I was going to the mountain town of Wau in a prop job with eight seats in it, and there was no room for guesswork. The latest arrival from Milne Bay Air pulled in, with five passengers, who were met inside the hangar by a small party of well-wishers.

I must tell you that New Guinea was a great country for hanging around the airport. Most of the flights were tiny, so