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 ; )