PAPUA NEW GUINEA
EXPEDITION
AN UNMOTORISED CROSSING
30th March 2014
Week 3: Arrival in Green River
We are intrigued by the tribal traditions for which Papua is world renowned- we have met many locals sporting intricate decorative tattoos on their faces, each of which have significance- announcing where they are from, or who their father was. Houses in and around Green River are all self-built on stilts, and people live mostly as subsistence farmers. Shops are very rare and extremely expensive. Rice and noodles will be on sale at four or five times of their ‘recommended retail’ price, and who buys them other than two tired Brits is beyond me.
Papua is proving to be an eccentric country, but in its way, it seems to work.
We plan to leave Green River tomorrow, Monday 31st March. Stage 2 will see us climbing to altitude across the Star Mountain range, and travelling through one of the least populous areas of PNG. Our PNG translator is not sure of the details for the challenge ahead- some of the communities have absolutely no regular contact with the outside world.
Our route will take us through the communities at Idam, Hotmin, Fiyak, Telefomin and Tabubil, where we will observe and document the impact of the OK Tedi Mine on the local community, and we expect this stage to take 20 days. If all goes well we should be reaching Tabubil around 20th April. You can track our progress on the interactive map on the site, or best viewed in full screen here.
Thankyou for all of the support on facebook, twitter and via the sat phone- we can receive messages via twitter or the AST satellite comms, and really appreciate these moral boosters. We can’t reply, but will do so upon our return! Likewise thankyou for all of the support in Papua so far, the welcome has been immense. This great support has given our Childfund fundraising boosted this week, as we head towards our £10,000 target.
On to stage 2!
Patrick Hutton
[blog called in via AST Satellite Comms]
P.S. Happy Mother’s day to our long suffering parents.
On 25th March, after 11 gruelling days of walking over tracks and bush trails, we arrived at the end of stage 1- Green River. Initially, our biggest problem came from above- as the sun took its vengeance on our solar starved skin we adapted our routine to avoid the heat.
As we adjusted means to cope, we began to realise that the equipment on our backs, whilst supposed to be our life support, was actually more of a hindrance. As I trudged over one of a number of log crossings on 24th March, I gracefully slipped in to a ‘Jennifer Lawrence at the Oscars’ moment.
The weight of my bergan got the better of me, tipping me off the log and spinning down a ditch. Landing on my Osprey pack saved me from injury, but the incident illustrated the burden which our kit had become, and highlighted how vulnerable we really are out here. Following this incident, we woefully realised that the prospect of realising our aims unscathed was slim, unless we drastically streamlined kit.
Upon reaching Green River we ruthlessly began a refreshed kit cull. Our main camera has fallen victim, along with our trusty Alpacka Raft and some small but weighty equipment- in total dropping the weight of each pack to a feather-like 30Kg. We will use our less intrusive mini-cams to document the next stage of our journey- from Green River to Telefomin, where we (hopefully) will be reunited with our ‘excess’.
The unmapped bush tracks upon which we are now travelling are remarkable rugged, vertically climbing, sliding drops, and shunting sideways, backwards and occasionally forwards. There seems to be little logic to the unmapped tracks, and we find ourselves becoming frustrated at Papua’s idiosyncratic descriptions for distances. 'Not far', or my favourite, 'too close', can refer to any distance from twenty minutes to three hours of walking- which can seem like a masochist mind game as we struggle to manage our expectations. Time in Papua is also subject to interpretation. We are yet to spot anyone wearing a watch, and five minutes can expand to forty-five minutes, with absolutely no consequence. Richard and I are gradually dropping our ingrained western ideals of space and time, relaxing to the Papuan mindset.
As we have travelled further and further inland, people have become more and more inquisitive, and children now run away screaming in terror… seeing two 'wait man!' approaching. Walking is not the norm in this district. Long distances are covered by canoe, and so we provide a source of amusement and bemusement to locals as we march through on our seemingly illogical journey.