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.