Day Two - Stairs Anyone?

The pigs did keep it down… till 6am, apparently their feeding time. Then they went crazy, and we opened our eyelids to a gray morning.

If we’d have known what this day would hold, would any of us have rolled out of bed? Perhaps not. We may have waited in Dangal until teleportation was invented.

Before the trip I’d studied the maps of the area. None had great detail, but they showed high ridges around the river valley. We assumed, though, that people traveled from village to village, and that there were trails along the river. Both of these assumptions proved false.

We left Dangal at 8:10am, intending to go to ‘Gumots.’ I say ‘Gumots,’ because it turned out this was the name of an area, not a village, and because we never actually made it there. Our revised target, on discovering this, was Wawas, but even still our one day trip turned into two days of extreme hiking and a third day in a canoe. But I’m getting ahead of myself.


On this day, the 11th of February, we found ourselves crossing slippery rocks that sloped down into the roiling, brown Watut River. It was hazardous stuff. A slip could easily send a person into the water, and with a heavy pack on…? These rocks didn’t last long – thankfully – but we found ourselves facing another challenge: vertical hills.

Our guide explained that the trail we followed was built by the Australians in 1942, during WWII. This area was an important supply route for the intense fighting that happened around Lae. Australian troops would have had PNG’an carriers tote the supplies over this trail. An interesting book by Peter Ryan, Fear Drive My Feet, tells of war efforts in the area. I need to pick it up again to see if he was in the Watut Valley, but if memory serves, I believe he was one valley to the east near Wau.

Take a look at the elevation profile at the top of this page. The section from Dangal to Sumaris Mining Camp is the portion we hiked today. The GPS says we only did 6.35km that day, but that includes 806m (2,644ft) of elevation gain. I’ve done more than that in a day in the Canadian Rockies, but never in as vertical a fashion as we did this day. It felt like going up very steep stairs, and then down very steep stairs. Then up very steep stairs. And down again. Oh, and did I mention that it’s all quite slippery, so that every muscle is straining just to keep from sliding off the trail? An additional hazard was homicidal trees; one leaning over the trail cracked and gave John G quite a whack on the head as he passed under it.

We stopped at a hamlet along the way, one of the locations John G had been the previous day in his epic Walkabout Questionnaire. This was the hamlet where the council – the village-level government authority – lived. On the previous day we’d been unable to get consent from the people who participated in our work. Consent for what?

Well, in the research world it is considered unethical to run around collecting all kinds of research, then publicize it without getting the consent of the people to do so. We as a survey team have discussed what consent means in the PNG context. After all, the vast majority are unfamiliar with academic writing and the like. So what we do is 1) carefully explain who we are and what we’re about, 2) explain the purpose of our research, 3) describe the particular papers we write, and 4) who we want to share them with. Then we ask them whether they agree to us doing so or not. Generally, after being clear on our purposes and values, they agree.

Thankfully, though the council had left, apparently looking for us, there were some other community elders who said, “Yes, you may use and publish your research.” So we went on our way.

Our guide, a Dangal man named Lazarus, as well as two or three teenagers accompanied us. In true PNG fashion, they each carried a small bag with virtually nothing in it. Thankfully one of them was willing to carry one of our packs when a team member found himself more weary than anticipated. Who wouldn’t be? By about noon we descended/slid down yet another precipitous hillside and found ourselves at a lovely little waterfall. Our clothes were completely drenched from sweat, so we had no hesitation about jumping in and cooling off. We each ate a little bit, knowing we had one final ascent to Sumaris Mining Camp.

You may remember that our original intention was to go to Gumots, later revised to Wawas. We knew Sumaris was less than half of the way there, but by the time we reached the waterfall, we knew we could go no farther than Sumaris, at least uphill. My quads were beginning to cramp even before that final ascent. We had our fingers crossed that the “American” who was “learning our vernacular” – the boss of the mining camp – would extend us hospitality. We were at the end of our physical abilities for that day.

Up that final, interminable ridge we climbed. And climbed. And climbed. John G requested that I shout out our elevation at regular 10m intervals. Just so we could feel like we were getting somewhere. We each made a guess at the elevation we’d find the camp… unfortunately Brian’s guess, the highest one, still fell short. We finally saw pole structures covered in brightly covered plastic sheeting above us, and knew we’d made it.


What followed caused us to dub the camp the “Watut Hilton.” The boss, actually an Australian who didn’t even know Tok Pisin that well, was extremely friendly. He said we could stay for the night, could eat their food, could take showers, and could even wash our clothes in the washing machine. Say what? A washing machine in the middle of the PNG bush? Yes indeed!

The corned beef sandwiches were prime rib, the watermelon the most succulent, refreshing fruit imaginable. The showers were ridiculously hot. We collapsed mid-afternoon on mattresses – not our Thermarests but real mattresses – and either slept or wrote in our journals.

That evening we schemed much about the coming trail. Could we make it to Wawas? How many ridges and valleys were between us? What was the trail like? Our Australian host put himself at our disposal, helping us with some maps, even letting John G get on a laptop with satellite internet so he could put an update on our survey facebook page! (http://www.facebook.com/pngsurvey?sk=wall#!/pngsurvey?sk=wall check out the Feb 11 entry) We asked about the possibility of helicopter transport, as one had flown in at least three times that day to deliver supplies. We figured the chopper could probably drop us in Wawas in about ten minutes. Our host was optimistic about the possibility and contacted his boss, who – concerned about public image – said no. We didn’t blame him. Public relations and who-helps-who can be a delicate thing.

We went to bed feeling that we’d done all we could do, and just happy to have a dry place to rest. We woke the next morning before dawn to a tropical downpour. I’ve rarely felt so much dread…