Day 3 - On and On and On

We woke the morning of the 12th, in the dark, to a tropical downpour. I’d woken up several times during the night and it had been dumping rain then too. “I have a bad feeling about this” doesn’t begin to capture my dark thoughts that morning. The vertical ascents and descents had been tough enough the previous day without the rain, and what about creeks and rivers we might cross?

I had felt similar dread in Montana, waking up in a quinzhee (a snow shelter) with the temperature at minus 5 F, knowing that my boots were frozen solid and that I had absolutely no desire to climb out of my sleeping bag.

Dawn brought a new perspective and a stop to the rain. We had breakfast in the camp canteen and bid our host goodbye. With improved spirits we set out… straight uphill another 200m (650ft) to our highest point of the survey, 1021m (3,350ft). We rested there before plunging down the north side of the mountain. And plunge we did! In the next two and a half hours we descended 681m (2234ft) over a distance of about 2km (1.24mi). This is a grade of about 34%, and would NOT end up being our steepest descent that day.


By the time we reached Bukandu at the bottom of the mountain it was just after 1100. Despite a slow and slippery descent, we all felt pretty good. We asked the folks there whether they thought we could get to Wawas that day. Some said yes, others said no, it will be dark. Based on the evidence of days 2 and 3 of the survey, pessimists should be respected. They proved right again and again.

We said, “Well, we’ll give it a try,” and set out. We were soon to realize that Lazarus, our guide, had not walked this portion of the trail before. If we had known we may have attempted to do something differently, but actually there was no one else available to take us; he may have been our only option.

We filled our bottles from a questionable water source (putting into it, as always, water purification tablets) and crossed a landslide. That turned out to be the easy part, because we promptly turned straight up an extremely steep kaukau garden. Kaukau is a staple food in much of PNG, somewhere between a regular and a sweet potato. And guess what? We went straight back down an equally steep kaukau garden on the other side.

A lovely boulder-filled creek quickly cheered us, and we walked upstream in the clear water. Lazarus kept disappearing ahead of us, and I had to track him by his wet footprints. We started yelling at him to wait up, but finally we didn’t see him for such a long time – nor was he answering our yells – that we decided we’d better stop and let him come back to us. We’d gone up the stream quite a ways by this time. We found some rocks to sit on and had ‘lunch,’ which meant that we all snacked on something or other.

Katie had made me some fruit leather from banana and strawberry – very tasty! – as well as some granola bars with chocolate in them. The flavor of chocolate, by the way, is greatly enhanced by physical exertion and the consumption of PNG food. John G had some delicious dried bananas and some trail mix. Brian had bees, and Janell butterflies. Well, not to eat.

Brian had been extolling the wonders of his skin; that wherever he went other people would get bitten by sand flies and mosquitoes and he would remain untouched. We took great pleasure, therefore, in the swarm of bees that began to cling to his pack and his clothes there at the creek, and which followed him for several days. We never did figure out why.

As for butterflies, there were some lovely ones flitting around. Janell took some pictures of them, then spent a few minutes sitting in a pool in the stream, soaking up nature’s splendor. Finally Lazarus returned with some glum news: he didn’t know where the trail was.

Turns out a lady had given him instructions in Bukandu. “Turn at the tree,” she’d said. The tree? We’re in a stinkin’ jungle, lady! Not knowing what else to do, we ventured back down the stream, poking into the bush here and there to find the trail. Finally it was indeed a tree that steered us right! A huge tree had been felled, completely blocking the path, but we found it zigzagging up the hill beyond.

It was now after 1pm, and our day of hiking was only just beginning.

Looking at the map some of us had guessed at the number of valleys and streams we’d be crossing. This gave us a measure of confidence as we went along, checking them off the list. Turns out our map-reading was overly optimistic.

We later learned (why is it you always learn things AFTER you need to know them?) that this trail was ‘built’ only within the last year or two, and that very few people used it. This meant that the trail was barely there in many places, in terms of being able to see it and in terms of having a place to put your feet. If you look at the elevation profile at the top of the page you can see this portion of the journey from Bukandu to the spot labeled ‘Kunai Over Bubuparum.’ We kept expecting the trail to stop going up. Indeed, if it was sentient, we would have commanded it to cease doing so. We were, after all, following the Watut River downstream. We didn’t anticipate going up, and up, and up…

Several things frustrated us during this time. Naturally, the interminable trail had us concerned, and it didn’t take us long to figure that yes, we were going to be hiking in the dark. But perhaps equally frustrating was Lazarus, who kept disappearing ahead. We’d shout at him to wait for us, that we didn’t want to lose the trail, that we had headlamps and could hike in the dark, etc. He persisted in disappearing up ahead. I could possibly have kept up with him if I’d pushed myself very, very hard, but of course I wanted to stay with the team.

The team was suffering from a variety of challenges. The trail itself was quite daunting, with only small footholds keeping a person from falling a very long way down the mountain. This was, of course, both physically and mentally challenging. Our weariness and the technical trail was also resulting in injury. One member’s feet were getting rubbed to pieces by his Chacos, while all three of the others suffered from cuts to hands and arms from grabbing onto sharp grass and plants to keep from falling.

Thanks to my experience in mountains and to my excellent footwear (the Salomon TechAmphibians I was trialing this trip), I fared well. I enjoy being out in the wild and don’t mind steep terrain. Though it was a long day for me, I never reached the same degree of weariness I had the previous day, and in fact it was more waiting on people and our runaway guide that wore me down.

Before I begin to sound proud in my abilities I want to say that I was immensely impressed by my teammates. Each was challenged by different things, but each faced their challenges with a great deal of fortitude. I suspect one team member reached the ‘can’t go further’ state long before the end of the day, but just kept going. Another became hysterical with exhaustion and strain, yet kept putting one foot in front of the other. They each had a much harder day than I did, and I had to remind myself of that when I was tempted to become impatient.

I can’t really give many more details of that portion of the trip. It just kept going on and on. We’d cross tiny trickles of water in shadowed gullies, then swing out on long, dry, gravelly portions of the trail. We kept being disbelieving about our continued ascent… surely this trail was taking us somewhere we didn’t want to go? Yet there were no other trails, no other options.

Darkness fell, and we turned on our headlamps. And plodded on. A few times there were moments of hope. A sudden breeze curving over that next ridge surely meant a clearing, right? Hey, Lazarus is saying no more uphill! Dare we believe him? In each case hope was unwise; perseverance was a better companion.

Finally, and somewhat suddenly, we came out onto a ridge covered in kunai, the head-high grass of PNG. The last of the light, which hadn’t reached us under the trees, showed us to be on the edge of a precipice. We could see the river down to our right, seemingly miles below. “Wawas,” Lazarus said, pointing over a distant ridge, “Is over there.”

It was 7pm. There was no way we were going to get to Wawas. Could we camp where we were? We had no tents, no shelter at all. We did have some matches, so we could start a fire. We had some food we could eat cold. We had mosquito nets. What if it rained? Would we sleep at all, even if it didn’t?

We debated our options. Lazarus told us that there was a small village at the bottom of the valley that stretched away to our left. Could we send someone down to check? Get some locals to come up and take our packs down? I was voted the man for this job, but expressed my dislike of the idea. I felt that we were within reach of houses and people, and wanted to push on as a team.

There was little argument. I think we were too tired to debate. We decided to descend.

Remember our 34% grade of that morning? Check out the elevation profile again. From Kunai Over Bubuparum at 650m (2,133ft) at around 7pm we descended to Bubuparum at 278m (912ft) by 9:20pm. That’s 372m (1,220ft) descent in about three-quarters of a kilometer. That’s a 49.6% grade! Of course the trail zig-zagged slightly, but it really was extremely steep, and, by this time, completely dark. Not to mention we’d already been hiking 11-plus hours by the beginning of the descent.

Back in my college days I took groups of high-schoolers out on hikes. One of the ways I got over my boredom at their slow pace when hiking in the dark was to go to the back of the line, then switch off my headlamp, walking by the light of the kid in front of me. Frequently he’d forget I was there, and would at some point turn around and get quite a fright to find someone following him in the dark! You can guess what kind of a childhood poor Tikvah is going to have…

Anyway, my evil habits helped me on this night, for I gave my headlamp to our guide so that he could find the trail, and walked between the other surveyors, getting enough of an idea of the ground from their light to keep from falling down the mountainside.

You may be feeling (and rightfully so) that this entry is going On and On and On like the title says, but I have one final detail to relate. Disputes over land are frequent in PNG where one’s survival depends upon gardens; these disputes sometimes lead to violence. Some of the members of the people group we were surveying had killed three young men of a group on the opposite side of the river within the past few years. Our guide started hallooing the village from some distance away, and some time later a young man came up the trail holding a rifle. He wasn’t sure who he would encounter in the dark, and was worried that his enemies were coming to retaliate. Firearms are, by the way, illegal in PNG.

Thankfully he and Lazarus spoke a common tongue, and naturally we whites weren’t after him or his family. So he cheerfully led us down the final descent to his house. The village of Bubuparum, it turned out, was quite tiny and up the opposite side of the valley a ways. Thankfully the guy who met us had a house right on the water which he invited us to stay at. We washed under a spout by the river, ate a bit of food, and went straight to bed.

We’d left that morning at 7:45am, arriving at 9:20pm. Once again we’d only gone 7km horizontally, but had actually ascended 869m (2,851ft), more than the previous day. Unfortunately I hadn’t recorded total descent for day 2, so figures for total descent on day 3 would be a bit of a guess, but it must have exceeded 1,053m (3,455ft).

I spent the night wedged between John G and Brian in our mosquito net, but my weary body didn’t have any problem sleeping…