Day 9 - Grass in the Eye

We got up at 5:30am and I recorded a video in the first light of us waiting for breakfast. Of course the idea of getting up early was to get going, and my growly voice protested the delay and the rain that was coming.

We grabbed a bite or two so the folks fixing breakfast wouldn’t feel that we didn’t appreciate their efforts, then set off. And it rained. This was actually the only day where we were wet due to rain. It had rained on day 3, but we’d been more wet from sweat than rain. Our hike here on day 9 was extremely pleasant (and short – under 3 hrs) by contrast to day 3. We hiked up the side of a kunai ridge, enjoying views of the gentle, green, mist-shrouded hills around us, and half regretting that we couldn’t see a little better through the rain. But better limited views than scorching sun.

Reaching the top of the ridge we began to descend. Here it got slick; rather, it had been slick, but heels are less capable of gripping than toes, so we were more likely to fall. At one point one of my heels slid out and my body reacted without first consulting my mind, jumping backwards off the trail. Everyone was kind of surprised. “Why is John jumping off the trail into what looks like a mini-canyon?”

I’d like to protest that as no parts of my body except my hands and feet touched the ground during the maneuver I technically didn’t fall ; ) Not that it really matters. I jumped back on the trail, grateful my body had merely threatened suicide without following through, and we continued on our way.

Here I must take the opportunity to point out that the flora of PNG must have something against John G. Perhaps it’s his accent. Who knows. Anyway, on day 2 a half-way fallen tree cracked him on the head, two seconds after I’d walked under it. He says he didn’t touch it, nor did I. Here on day 9 the trees had gone off the field, but kunai grass had subbed in. John had been poked near an eye, and, concerned it would happen again, put on his sunglasses. After another hour of hiking without incident, he took them off, since it was rather too dreary to be wearing them. On our way down the hill a particularly vicious blade took advantage of his lowered defenses and nailed him right in the eye. And this was no slight jab! He had blurry vision and was seriously concerned that it would not recover. Even the next morning he said it still felt like someone was just standing there poking him in the eye. It took him several days till it was ‘mostly normal,’ and the rest of that day he was out of the game.

On the descent to Onom I got to chat with Katie on the mobile phone for quite some time. It was very nice just to chat about how things were going, to describe the scenery, hear how she and Tikvah were doing. It was kind of weird to be chatting while walking through the PNG bush, but that’s life in a lot of places these days!

We left the kunai grass and the patch of mobile phone reception and plunged into mosquito infested forest for a brief period before arriving in Onom. It was a little village – 23 houses – that felt more ‘bush’ than anything since Dangal, our first village. For the first time we guys were put up in a haus boi (house boy), so Janell stayed separately from us in another family’s house.

We spent the afternoon getting our work done, then taking a wash in a beautiful clear stream. We had some sunshine to dry our clothes and packs… what more could you ask for? We even got supper, albeit a bit later than usual.

Day 8 - Soccer

[I just uploaded two videos to FB, one of some of our hiking on Day 3, one from Day 8. Check them out!]

Sometimes you can’t help having fun. You do everything you can to resist, but it’s just no use…

We had a short, DRY hike from Bencheng to Dungutung. We took two Word Lists (I did one) which were a lot of fun. Two because there were two dialects in the village. We did the Main Questionnaire with something close to 100 adults! I don’t think we’ve ever had half that before (see FB video)! They gave us a bag full of fresh peanuts, and several fresh coconuts to drink each.

Finished with work, we walked to the house we were to stay in. We washed in a clear, fast-flowing, waist-deep stream that was the perfect temperate. No goosebumps. A nap, before which I listened to music for the first time on the survey. Do you know how sublime that can be?

Then a soccer game on a nearby field, where I, to my own surprise, scored the first goal. Another wash. A feast, with greens, chicken, and other goodies. Then a lovely service under the stars, complete with lyrics on New Life put to traditional melodies. An early bedtime, a cool night. Glory.

Day 7 - The Slough of Despond

In each village the survey team gets a different reception. It depends partly on when we arrive, on whether they knew we were coming, and of course on who is around to welcome us. In some villages they make us feel very special and communicate that they are honored by our visit. Other places, for whatever reason, we’re given food and a place to stay and mostly left alone. The latter can actually be rather welcome following an abundance of the former.

We set off breakfastless and without much of a goodbye from Marauna, but that didn’t worry us. We had a guy to show us the way, and we had work to do! So off we went. Our hike began on dry ground, through gardens, past houses… pleasant. Then we entered the swamp.

Brian was trying to keep his feet out of the mud, as they were still covered in sores from our mountain hiking. He had no chance. We’d go through a bit of slippy-slidey mud and think “that wasn’t so bad” only to sink ankle-deep the next step. Hmm. Then we’d come to standing water. I don’t know whether to call it swamp, bog, creek, or just NASTY, but it wasn’t much fun. Generally there would be several feet of murky water under which lurked bottomless mud.

We were, of course, walking on trails frequented by people, so there were ‘bridges.’ This generally meant that somewhere under the water were logs and branches which you were supposed to balance on. Some of us made it across some of the time. Let’s leave it at that, and just be grateful that no one disappeared permanently.

Whenever you hike with a group, pace can be a tricky issue. The fast ones are annoyed at the slow ones and vice versa. In the mountains waiting on teammates wasn’t too big of a deal, but in the swamps, when you’ve got a swarm of 100 mosquitoes following you just waiting for you to pause, you really want to keep going! The trick was to keep the pace down so that constant movement by the whole team was assured. Oh, and bug spray. Thanks to Janell for that. I might have lost my mind otherwise. I hate feeling helpless against creatures smaller than my pinky toe.

We did survive this hike – it was under three hours – and, thankfully, we were able to wash in the river shortly after our arrival in Bencheng. Like most of the other villages we’d visited, Bencheng had standpipes, but apparently they hadn’t been laid very deep in the ground, so the water heated up in the pipes. Everyone made a practice of washing in the river (not the Watut, but a clear river), which we had no objections to.

I helped with the Main Questionnaire and also did the Walkabout Questionnaire for the first time, which I quite enjoyed. Sometimes when you get to a village you do your work, then sit around. You never see what most of the village is like. If you do the Walkabout Questionnaire you’ve got a great excuse to explore. It was a nice day, Bencheng had some lovely views, and I got to talk with some men about the possibility of Bible translation in their area. I returned very invigorated.

Let me give you a little tour of Bencheng. Hopefully you’ll get a picture of what life in PNG is like.

Grabbing my questionnaire and a pen, I follow our host Timothy away from the house. A stream runs just beyond his haus kuk (house cook – the separate building used for cooking, pot storage, etc), and I walked out onto a log jutting over it and hop to the other side. We walk up the dirt track – dry now and easy to walk on – to Nok’s house. He’s to accompany me on the walkabout.

His house, like everyone else’s, has plank sides. These are hand-hewn planks, but whatever wood they use, they’re able to split it pretty thin and even. In other parts of the lowlands I’ve usually seen woven bamboo for walls, but not here. And whereas on the coast sago leaves are woven for roofing, kunai grass is used here like it is in the highlands. This is clearly an in-between zone.

Step into the house and you’ll see its whole skeleton. No drywall here. No wiring to hide. Nothing fancy, just shelter from the weather. Some clothes, probably mattresses and mosquito nets. In some houses, a few books. Tools, like a machete. Maybe a bow and some arrows. Really not much in the way of things, or of decoration. For a PNG’an, a house is for sleeping in. Most of their time is spent out in the garden, in a community area, or out in a house cook or haus win (yes, house wind).

Nok and I head out. I’ve learned the local word for ‘good morning’ and use it at every opportunity. Thankfully it doesn’t sound like an English swearword, as it did in some of the other villages we visited. People are generally thrilled or amazed to hear their language spoken, and it’s a great way to demonstrate interest in them. We pass some folks cooking over a fire. At other houses women are preparing garden produce for cooking, whether that’s peeling various tubers, cutting up greens, or scraping coconuts. Some houses are empty, their occupants likely working in their gardens or perhaps gone to town.

We pass a ‘modern’ (non-bush) house. It’s the house of the APO (aid-post orderly). Aid posts sometimes have personnel, and they sometimes have medicine. Larger or central villages usually have them. It’s often the least traditional part of a village. Not far beyond this house is the school, a series of longish buildings housing different grades. Inside several grades are singing, which seems to be an important part of school in PNG. This is a primary school, meaning grades 3-8. Theoretically. It will often depend on what teachers are available, how many students there are, and whether the teachers think they are ready to move on to the next grade or not.

We’ve reached the upper area of Bencheng, and for the first time I can see out away from the village. To the west is a series of kunai-covered hills (kunai is very tall, tough grass), behind which are tree-covered mountains, their bulk imposing. We know what they can be like. To my east is a long view, since I’m looking across the Watut River – not visible – to the other side of the valley. The team would come up at sunset to this same spot and observe a strange phenomenon, where it looked as though the sun was setting both in the west AND the east.

Nok and I move on. We’re talking about the houses as we go. “Does this house have any immigrants?” “Yes.” “Ok, do their children know your language?” “Yes.” “Ok, how about this house?” 60-something times. We’re doing every other house here, so it’s quite a big village.

Our trail varies. Sometimes we cut through yards, ducking under guava trees or clothes lines. Other times we’ve got a hibiscus hedge bordering the trail, showing us the way. I salute everyone I see with ‘bong naru,’ good morning. We leave the outskirts where houses were scattered helter-skelter and enter the village center. Here the ground is cleared of trees and bushes, which keeps the bugs away. Houses aren’t exactly organized, but each has its own area. The church sits in the middle, an impressively designed building, all bush materials except for the gaudy purple curtain covering the stage. We pass a house they are thatching with kunai, as well as a few liklik (little) houses – outhouses. They’re using WWII oil drums for part of the pit structure. Bencheng was a big US air base back then, known as Tsile Tsile.

Finally we cross the river, mid-thigh deep, and I concentrate on resisting the fast current so I don’t slip and drop my questionnaire in the water. Wouldn’t want to do all that work again! A few more houses, and we’re done. Nok discusses translation possibilities with me earnestly. He says there was a survey back in 1990 (there was) and they thought a translation team was going to come. I explained that we have so few people, but that we’d really like to send someone. We talked about what that would look like. Would someone come to Bencheng? Maybe, or perhaps another village. Given that people go to town a lot, they might even run some training there. Who knows? Nok seemed genuinely passionate about needing the Word translated… it’s a pleasure to meet people like him. I just wish we were able to help in the more immediate future.

Day 6 - Was That a Gun?

Our day began well. Day 5 we’d done little work because people had been gone during the day and it had rained in the evening. But on the morning of day 6 we had a crowd for our Main Questionnaire. I lead it for the first time this survey. It’s really quite enjoyable to use our new and improved tools: they flow, each question has purpose… we just feel like we’re getting things done and aren’t taking people’s time needlessly.

Crossing the river was another hurry-up-and-wait, but we got a closer look at the placer mining/gold panning process. We went across part of the Watut River, wading about thigh deep, and found ourselves on an island in the middle of the river, the main current yet to be crossed. While we waited for a boat we observed the industry all around us. Temporary shelters had been set up on the island, some people were cooking and eating, others were already putting the dirt onto the platforms and washing it. One man was hollowing out a huge drift log, and it looked close to its future shape – a huge dugout canoe.

We finished our crossing in two canoes and made our way through some nasty river-side bogs to Marauna. We quickly realized there wasn’t really a village center as there often is. Instead, it was just a series of houses linked by trails through the tall grass. As usual we simply followed our guides to a particular house where they deposited us. They generally have more of an idea of whose place it is proper for us to invade than we do.

John G once again got itchy feet and set about doing the Walkabout Questionnaire. And once again he was gone several hours, hiking quite some distance (I think he said 15km) to reach all the hamlets of Marauna. Thankfully, unlike Dangal, it was mostly flat.

The rest of us, meanwhile, set about doing the Main Questionnaire. I’ve never seen a crowd so intensely interested! People were crowding in so closely I was concerned Brian and Janell weren’t going to get enough oxygen! I was doing the ‘observing’ portion of the questionnaire – which consists of counting people present, noting who leads the response, writing down any comments that don’t reflect the consensus – so I was on the periphery and had room to breathe.

After this part of the work was complete Brian got his pictures out and showed them around. I was relaxing post-Frisbee fun, when I suddenly got a jolt. Ridiculously loud popping and cracking from my right! Was it a gun? Firecrackers? I looked over and saw a crowd of women and kids scattering in fright. What was happening?

I leapt up and took a defensive stance, prepared to defend our priceless sociolinguistic research at any cost… Well, actually I just sat there, as it all happened too fast to respond coherently. The women and children in the middle of the crowd looking at Brian’s pictures disappeared downward while those on the outskirts scattered. Children started crying, and heads began popping up from where they’d disappeared. Then everyone began laughing. The platform the ladies were sitting on had broken, completely collapsing in the center and effectively swallowing its burden. The popping sounds had been logs 3 and 4 inches in diameter breaking under the weight! I don’t think Brian excepted his pictures to ever be THAT popular!

No one was hurt, though the frightened kids took some calming. I went back to relaxing, looking up a short while later to see them already repairing the platform. We thought we were sleeping there that night so I was glad, but it turned out we walked about fifteen minutes to another part of the village for the night.

They held an outdoor service that night, and we listened to some lovely singing as we prepared for sleep. We’d be back to walking the next day after mostly riding in canoes the past several days, and we weren’t sure how that would go. But we’d gotten work done in two villages that day and felt the satisfaction that doing one’s job brings.

P.S. I forgot to mention the dinosaur. On the evening of day five Janell went to wash. Having used the lovely standpipe shower, she went to the bush briefly, then returned. Looking around for her soap in its ziplock, she saw only an enormous pig, foaming at the mouth. It had eaten the entire bar of soap, in its plastic bag! I guess it’ll have clean innards…

Day 5 - Gold Dust

We woke leisurely. In days 1-4 of the survey we’d only completed work in two villages, which meant we were behind schedule. But we’d also passed by Gumots and now planned to pass both Maralangko and Zinimb, which meant we’d be ahead of schedule! We would have liked to have visited these locations but it would probably have meant a lot more bush walking, and the team wasn’t capable of much more after the brutal time we’d had days 2 and 3.

There was another reason we weren’t in a hurry. John G had left his headlamp at Bubuparum. Not only would it be a major annoyance to not have one the rest of the survey, but it would take quite some time to have one shipped from Australia or Britain on our return. He decided he’d go back for it.

He returned from his canoe ride no worse for wear except being wet; more importantly, he came back with his headlamp. It had fallen through the sleeping platform. We got all ready to go… then waited. Hurry up and wait. Grumble.

I sat down with two of the elderly men of Wawas. They pulled out their gold. It was very strange to have people pull gold out of their pockets, but in Wawas it happened several times. They made hardened spheres of gold dust and kept them somewhere about their person in little bits of plastic, or small containers. The previous day a man had pulled out three such, worth about 550 kina, or nearly $300! This is very unusual in a country where cash is hard to come by.

Though unusual, it wasn’t surprising. After all, the sand we walked on by the river’s edge was sparkling with gold glitter. At least one major gold mine operates upriver, and of course we’d visited the Sumaris mining camp, where they were doing exploratory drilling. Our first day in Dangal we’d seen some of the locals placer mining, though we didn’t get a close-up look at the process till later. They’d build a platform – often of bamboo – which they’d prop at a tilt. Sand and dirt from the river-side would be piled at the upper end and water poured over it repeatedly. I didn’t understand the entire process, but of course gold being heavier ends up at the bottom, and it is then separated out. By some chemical process, I believe involving mercury, the dust is then hardened into little spheres which the locals take to town and sell.

We were told a person could get one or more grams of gold per day from the river, each gram selling for 55-80Kina, or $25-40USD. That’s a great day’s earnings in a country where the minimum wage is something like 2.50Kina/hr. In Dangal we’d wondered what the locals did with the money they made (besides paying for things like kids’ school fees), because we didn’t see evidence of it. In Wawas, we got a glimpse. Someone had a generator, a big TV, and a bunch of DVDs. Boy was it weird to look out that night and see the TV lighting up the village!

Our hurry-up-and-wait was finally over, and we piled into the same dugout as the previous day and set off down the river. It was a lovely ride. There were a few rapids, but having successfully navigated the ones the day before I was less preoccupied by them; additionally, there was of course nothing I could do to keep the boat from tipping, so there was no point in being worried. We accelerated smoothly down the river, passing huge boulders, untouched forests… it was wonderful just to sit back and enjoy. Of course I were getting soaked by the river’s spray, but that was certainly preferable to being soaked from my own sweat.

Being the trip’s logistics guy, one of my responsibilities was keeping track of route data and also thinking about travel plans for the days ahead. We landed near Maralina, prepared to do our work there that afternoon, then return across the river to Babuaf. But that would mean returned across the river again, wouldn’t it? Unfortunately this dawned on me just as our motorized canoe left, so when the others realized the logic of my thought, we were left with a very narrow dugout canoe without a motor to take us across. It did so in three wobbly trips, but afforded us the opportunity for a laugh: the canoe was too narrow for some of the surveyors to sit in the bottom… their hips got stuck halfway down!

We did all make it across, then experienced our first bit of flatland hiking. Boy were we popular here! We each had a cloud of mosquitoes following us and latching on if we paused on the trail. Talk about motivation to keep moving!

The rest of that day was very unproductive. We arrived in Babuaf to find almost no one there. They were all in their gardens or perhaps at the river getting gold. We were able to do only the work that doesn’t require a group: the Word List and the Walkabout Questionnaire. We’d hoped we could do the Main Questionnaire with a group in the evening, but it started raining and they had no building large enough for our purposes, so we agreed to do it the following morning.

I shouldn’t neglect to mention that the stars aligned that day… or rather the mobile phone signal. For the first time in our trip we had a signal, though a very sketchy one. It being Valentine’s Day we men each got a call or text through to our wives, and I even squandered 9 minutes on the satellite phone talking to Katie after the cell phone signal quite on me (gasp!). The sat phone is, by the way, a semi-sacred object to a surveyor, and is generally used only after great deliberation ; )

Day 4 - Mr. Cow and His Size 56 Pants

I recorded in my journal that I didn’t wake till after 8am this morning, quite late when you usually wake with the sun, pigs, and chickens. I woke feeling fairly good, despite two tough days.

We didn’t know exactly what this day would hold. We’d discussed the possibility of a rest day, giving ourselves the chance to heal physically and recover mentally. We were certain that several folks either couldn’t or shouldn’t do any walking that day. The alternative was getting a boat.

We’d descended the Watut River far enough that this was now a possibility. A number of boats were operated from Wawas, which we were probably still a 3 or 4 hour hike from. The guy who’d met us with a rifle the previous evening and who’d put us up in his home had offered the previous evening to hike down to Wawas and ask for a boat to come upriver for us. We’d said, “Yes, please!”

Our concern was the report that all of the boats would have gone down to Lae, the big city in the area, which they apparently do quite regularly. I say we were concerned, but actually we were resigned to the possibility of staying where we were for a day, and perhaps even a little bit happy about it ; )

We decided to go ahead and do some work in Bubuparum since we were there, even though it hadn’t been part of our original agenda. Brian took a word list while John G, Janell, and I went up the short, steep trail to the village. We anticipated finding more folks there, but it turned out that there were only 4 or 5 houses and that we’d probably already met the majority of the population. So we decided not to do any further work except to ask a few questions.

The rest of the morning was restful. Having no need to pack up, we lounged around on our Thermarests, writing in our journals or reading. Three of us had brought e-books, and boy was I happy to have one along! On previous surveys I’d take real books along but always found I read through them in the first half of the survey and had nothing left. With the e-book you can, of course, take tons of books along, and your only limit is the battery.

You might ask about us having time to read. Actually we usually do have time in the evenings on survey, and at least for myself, it’s really important to my mental health to be able to escape the pressures of survey and being in the village. This survey I read some very interesting books. The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life by Francis Parkman, written around 1847, was one. I actually found a lot of parallels between the challenges the author faced on his wilderness experiences and ours, and even many similarities between the way the Indians responded to him and the way PNG’ans respond to us.

Anyhow, around noon the owner of the house hurried up with a boat skipper! They seemed in a bit of a rush, so we packed up our stuff quickly and walked the few bends down the Bitap River to where it joins the Watut River. It was brown and moving very quickly! Which brought a few stories to mind…

In Dangal we’d been told numerous tales of people dying on the river, mostly tourists who’d come to run the rapids. Three Israelis had come and had lost their boat. Two had died, one had been put up in Dangal till a helicopter had come for her (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watut_River for a potentially more accurate version). Others had similar experiences. We were well warned.

The most humorous story concerned Mr. Cow and his pants (this one’s not on Wikipedia, sorry ; ). Two tourists, river-running, had lost their boat. The water had treated them so abusively that they’d lost all their clothes, and their skin had been sliced by the rocks. They wandered into the village naked, desperately needing help. The problem was that Mr. Cow was a rather large man; the storyteller kept repeating that he needed size 56 pants, as if that were the funniest thing in the world. PNG’ans in the village are generally quite small, owing to their diet and the amount of physical work they do.

I think in the end they found some stretch pants or something… anyway, we weren’t in a hurry to die or be denuded by the river. When I first saw our boat I thought it was about 10 ft long and that we were, indeed, likely to die, but then I saw it was at an angle to us and was actually rather too long for good maneuverability than too short. We’d taken the precaution of putting all sensitive items into water-resistant sacks, and had additionally put essential items – satellite phone, GPS, water, food, etc – into small bags we carried on ourselves in case we capsized and lost our backpacks.

The ride to Wawas was mercifully short – just ten or fifteen minutes. I’ve encountered plenty of whitewater in my time and have certainly seen rougher rapids, but we definitely went through some class III’s in our 30ft dugout canoe with a 25hp Yamaha Enduro motor on the back. Thankfully we got wet IN the boat from waves rather than OUT of the boat.

We arrived in Wawas and conducted some quick negotiations. We said to the boat skipper, “If you want to go on to Lae, would you be willing to let us do our work here in Wawas – maybe three or four hours – then take us down to the next village?” Looking at the map the road to the next village looked just as long as some of our previous hikes, and we were not eager to repeat the experience.

Turned out our driver was actually happy to stay the night in Wawas and would transport us the next day. So we began our work, in no hurry. I again helped with the main questionnaire, then made a point of taking some pictures of the others doing their work and of the village. Wawas was a nice place. It was on the border of the true mountains and the hills that gradually petered out into valley. So it wasn’t so steep everywhere as it had been, but there were still some nice hills in the view. Plus it had a minor miracle: standpipes.

Little did we know that EVERY village from Wawas on would have standpipes. Most had been either installed or improved by one of the mining companies in the area as part of their community development efforts. They would dam an uphill water source and pipe it into the village, providing pressure and constant flow using gravity. I can tell you that clear water running from pipes in close proximity to the house you are staying in is wonderful. It’s a HUGE improvement over walking 30 minutes to wash in a muddy river and returning through swampy muck. What’s the point of trying to wash under those conditions? Getting drinking water is also made that much easier… we were very grateful for the standpipes.

That evening we pulled out the Frisbee. Commence hilarity! Everyone – from children to village elders – attempted to throw this odd piece of plastic, all meeting with laughable results. We whites enjoyed being better physically at something than our PNG friends for once. They threw the Frisbee around till it was too dark to see it any more, then collected en masse around the haus win (house wind) we were staying in. None of us really felt much like telling stories, so Bryan got out his pictures and passed them around.

Just after we went to bed it started raining, large drops coming through the roof onto my head. Grumble. The others had placed themselves more fortuitously, so I maneuvered around till I wasn’t getting dripped on as much. The guy to whom the house belonged came along and fiddled with the roof a bit, and I fell asleep, not concerned about being a bit damp.

We were, after all, going back on the river the next day.