Songs of the Baka and Other Discoveries

by Dennis James

  We spend a pleasant last night in Simbai after a good dinner, sitting around the warming fire. The next morning, Dickson says our flight to Mount Hagen has been “canceled.” It was to be the first leg of our transfer to Wewak on the way to the Sepik River. The travel agency has chartered a special flight for us, which will also be transporting some “foodstuffs” to cut the cost of the charter. Sure enough, a small silver plane appears over the valley, banks, lands, rolls up to the turnaround, and parks. Local men rush up to the cargo door and begin tossing boxes of noodles onto the tarmac. Another stream of men files down the hill from the village with fifty-kilogram sacks of coffee beans on their backs, which they deposit in the plane. Waved into the plane’s cabin, we find we are the only passengers. We sit on the floor behind a lashed-down pile of coffee bean sacks that fills the rest of the plane. There are no flight attendants, no instructions, and no lunch, but there is plenty of leg room.

  Two plane changes, five landings and take-offs, and ten packages of complimentary biscuits later, we land in Wewak, a coastal town, for an overnight stay at the Boutique Hotel. We enjoy a swim in the pool, a hot shower, a spicy seafood stew, and a night on a good mattress.

  Sepik River

  The next day we are driven by Land Rover to Pawgi, a town on the Middle Sepik River, picking up our guide, James Korgo, on the way. We dump our gear into a thirty-foot motorized dugout canoe and travel downstream for an hour to Korogo, a village spread along the left bank of the Sepik.

  The Sepik, milk chocolate in color, with endless bends and curls, is one of the longest rivers in Papua New Guinea. It is more than a mile wide in its lower reaches. A distinct riverain culture affiliated with the Crocodile Clan has stimulated an extraordinarily rich production of wood carvings in the Middle Sepik villages—mostly masks and statues depicting spirits and ancestors. There is more tourist traffic, commerce, and exposure to Eurasian culture here than in the Highlands.

  James Korgo is, as the Godfather would say, “a serious man.” His family compound on the river encompasses several acres and a lake. There is a central house, on six-foot stilts to accommodate the Sepik’s annual flooding, with four rooms and a kitchen area. Under construction is a guesthouse and houses for his sons and daughters. He is confident that the guesthouse will be occupied regularly. He does his own carpentry, just as he carves his own dugout canoes. He is the local magistrate, charged with keeping the peace in his district.

  We tour the village with James, walking along the bank, greeting the residents. We come to the remnants of a spirit house or haus tambarans a group of carved and weathered pillars bereft of roof or walls. The carved images reflect the Crocodile Clan’s creation myth, which involves a crocodile that mates with a female human, who gives birth to two eagles.

  The village’s new spirit house is a large two-story structure with hardwood pillars and a steep thatched roof that swoops up in front like the prow of a sailing ship. The roof is topped with the mother figure giving birth. We enter the spirit house and find several men, two in tribal dress. The two beat out a rhythmic welcome on bathtub-sized hollow logs. While we walk around the grounds, James engages the men in discussion of some complaint they have, speaking in Tok Pisin. He hears them out, speaks patiently but assertively, and resolves the matter.

  Spirit house, Sepik River

  A spare room in James’s main house is used for guests pending completion of the guesthouse. It is separated from the master bedroom and the other rooms by woven grass walls, the arrangement not conducive to privacy. Dinner consists of everyone sitting on the floor of a common room with dishes passed around—vegetables supplemented by bony but tasty river fish.

  I sleep well except for a necessary trip to the family toilet, which involves descending and later ascending a shaky bamboo ladder and walking one hundred feet to the latrine. This is more or less the situation in all of the guesthouses we occupy. Doing this jaunt, half-awake and with a dim flashlight, can lead to spatial disorientation resulting in a nasty fall or getting lost in terra incognita.

  Over the next couple of days, we travel in James’s motorized canoe down the river to villages noted for their wood carvings. These are the type of artifacts we saw in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and which piqued our interest in PNG. We stop for provisions along the way and end up buying a bride price, a carving that men traditionally give their future in-laws before the wedding. The piece is carved in the shape of a stylized crocodile with rare circular shells attached to its back. This type of shell was at one time used as currency. The seller tells us that this was his mother’s bride price. Putting aside the pre-feminist nature of the work, we think it is beautiful.

  One village, Palumbei, is particularly interesting. Located a few hundred yards from the river, it looks like a Hollywood set for the musical South Pacific. Coconut palms tower over a manicured village green the size of a soccer field. Graceful thatched huts on stilts are spaced dozens of yards apart. Several narrow lagoons, full of water lilies and crossed by footbridges, traverse the area outside the green where the rest of the village people live. Two spirit houses, each belonging to a separate clan, stand at each end of the green. At the center of the green are the remains of an older spirit house, destroyed during the Japanese occupation in World War II.

  Several men lounge in one of the spirit houses, sitting around and talking. Although these structures are used during initiation rites and other ceremonies, on a day-to-day basis they function as a place for men (not women) to hang out. Graciously, an exception is made for Barbara.

  We are greeted by a traditional sing-sing. In contrast to what we observed in the Highlands, men and women dance and sing together. The men emerge from a spirit house, forming a circle. The women come out from a grove of trees, forming an outer circle, their skirts swirling. All wear elaborate face paint.

  There is a small Christian chapel on the green as well, its wooden walls painted white with a metal roof and a cross on top. Purportedly, New Guinea is now mostly Christian, although it is obvious that the vast majority also adhere to their traditional animism. I want to know whether the Christian clergy discourages practice of these ancient rituals, so I ask James what faith he professes or follows, if any. To my surprise, he looses a tirade against organized religion of any sort. James is Christian, but he has no use for the churches that are “corrupt, hypocritical, and full of jealousy and inner power struggles.” James prays directly to his creator without an intermediary. He tells me that the Catholic Church is more accepting of traditional practices than are the Protestant churches. He acknowledges one significant achievement of the Christian ascendancy: “It kept us from killing one another.”

  Traveling on the huge river is mesmerizing. It loops and almost doubles back on itself. Aside from the hum of the motor, there is the stillness common to big rivers. Snow-white egrets and cranes beat up out of the shallows, flying to their nests in the high trees and gorging on river fish and frogs that they will regurgitate for their young. Early morning fog envelops the river, limiting visibility to thirty feet. James, in the stern, can hardly see the bow of the canoe, let alone the riverbanks. Yet he powers up and steers on instinct, having lived on and traversed the river all his life. The fog burns off, but hours later a sudden accumulation of dark clouds appears downstream, and James makes for the left bank. We pull up to the dock of a small village, jump out of the canoe, and reach a thatched shelter just before the downpour hits. The rain lasts thirty minutes. It wanes and we thank our surprised hosts, hop back in, bail out the rainwater, and push off.

  We spend a rare uncomfortable night in a village on a tributary of the Sepik. It was advised of our imminent arrival, was presumably paid the guesthouse rental fee, but is totally unprepared for us. The room is tiny and hot, with no floor pads, blankets, or pillows. These items are offered for an additional overpriced purchase. Fortunately, we are carrying inflatable camping pads and pillows, which we use to keep us up off the rough bamboo floor.

  The village is t
he only one of all those we stay at or pass through that looks run down. Paths are indistinct, and drainage ditches are crossed by single shaky logs, rather than by several solid boards or sturdy bamboo poles lashed together, as in other villages. Holed-out hulls of large dugout canoes lie rotting on the ground. James decries the waste and says he may make an offer to buy one and fix it. Children with distended bellies run naked after us, asking for candy. Further from the river is a hut where an old man sells carved artifacts. They are mostly simplistic versions of more complicated and subtle works we have seen elsewhere. He brings out a green stone the size of a ciabatta roll, etched with unknown script. He says it was found in a cave with bones and skulls hundreds of years old. We are interested, but James takes us aside and says the inscriptions have been recently made by machine, not hand. We pass on it. There seems to be a pervasive demoralization in this place, for reasons unknown to us.

  Our last day on the river takes us to Angoram, near the mouth of the Sepik where we are to be picked up and driven back to Wewak for the night. The following day, we are to fly to Port Moresby to connect with a flight to the Tufi Coast for the last leg of our three-part trekking tour. We climb into a big Toyota Land Rover 4x4 with the driver, Leo. James hitches a ride into town with us, sitting in the truck’s bed with three of Leo’s young sons. The highway is, as expected, a nightmare of giant potholes and washouts, which Leo avoids for the most part. The ones he hits bounce the truck like a basketball. Suddenly, the truck veers off the road on its own volition. Leo manages to wrestle it back on the asphalt and brings it to a halt. After he spends a few minutes on the ground under the left suspension, Leo announces that we have lost a nut needed for the steering mechanism. I am dubious about our chances of reaching Wewak before dark. Leo’s boys go back to where the truck went wild and look for the nut in the road, returning within five minutes, smiling broadly. They have found it. We are in for one more stroke of luck—Leo is able to borrow a wrench from a friend who happens to be passing by in his car. Within a half hour, we are back in business.

  We spend the night in Wewak at the Boutique Hotel, where a number of businessmen are also staying. In the morning, while we wait in the lobby for our ride to the airport, I notice a lone westerner sitting on a couch, doodling with his iPhone, looking somewhat morose. I ask where he’s from. “Spain,” he says. I ask what brings him to Wewak, Papua New Guinea. “Tuna,” he replies, like someone else might say “ball bearings,” or “plastics.” Further inquiry discloses that he is a scout for a big fish processing company and is interested in the tuna runs in the Solomon Sea. His company is considering the possibility of seine net fishing off the coast using New Guineans for cheap labor. He discloses this hesitantly, almost apologetically. He is a sad, little man who, I believe, senses the adverse social consequences for New Guineans of what he does.

  We fly back to Port Moresby and are ready the next day for a two-stop short flight to the Tufi Coast. Once again, the unexpected intervenes.

  Tufi … or Not Tufi

  There is no problem with the first stop of our plane on its way to Tufi from Port Moresby. We land and take off within ten minutes. The second stop is at a town called Popondetta, twenty minutes from Tufi by air.

  Some passengers deplane. Barbara and I and the other Tufi-bound passengers wait in the plane on the runway, eating airline biscuits. Unexpectedly, the flight attendant asks us to leave and wait in the terminal, a two-room cinder block structure. We sit on some benches facing the runway and watch the pilot, copilot, and terminal manager confer on the tarmac. The flight attendant emerges from the plane carrying a case of bottled water and distributes the water to the waiting passengers.

  War detritus, Popondetta Airport

  Finally, the copilot says that in his walk around the plane during this layover he saw some hydraulic fluid running down a seam in the fuselage. He offers to show it to me. Sure enough, there it is, a translucent ooze an inch wide, running down the side of the plane. The leak could cause hydraulic pressure to drop, and the pilot could lose control of the wing flaps and would have a tough time landing.

  We wait for an engineer to arrive, talking with the pilots and smiling at the other passengers, who do not speak standard English. The pilot is from Australia and the copilot from India. They are young, in their thirties. They work a staggered schedule of two months on and three weeks off. They miss home. The pilot says, however, that he has learned more about flying in one year in PNG than he did in ten years in Australia.

  There is no viable alternate route, by land or sea, to Tufi. We wander out to the road where a market of rude tables and canopies has sprung up just outside the airport gate, doing a brisk business in betel nuts and fatty sausages. Barbara finds the women’s washroom locked and goes over to the plane with the pilot who turns on the engines so the plane’s toilet will flush. “It’s the least I can do,” he says. I wander the airport grounds and find the wreckage of an American B-24 Liberator bomber from World War II, one of many that litter the island. During the war, these planes were made in Detroit, where I was born and raised.

  Relatives of the passengers from Popondetta who were waiting for the plane arrive with steaming platters of chicken stew. The recipients graciously offer to share the food with us, noting that we have been nibbling on airline biscuits all day. I gratefully accept. We thank the family (grandmother, mother, and granddaughter) with a dozen ballpoint pens, and they are thrilled, especially the granddaughter. Later, I fall asleep on one of the benches in the building. When I awake, the copilot is showing selfies he just took sitting in the cockpit of the old Liberator.

  Finally, an engineer and a mechanic arrive, disappearing into our plane and reappearing on top of it. There is much going back and forth to their tool bin and stock of parts. Every thirty minutes or so, they run the engines for a test, then turn them off and shake their heads.

  The hours go by.

  By late afternoon, the worst is realized. The plane is going nowhere. A part in the hydraulic system is not available, and they cannot jerry-rig a substitute. Another plane is flying in with the part, but it will not be able to take us to Tufi because it is getting dark and Tufi has no runway lights. So we are going back to Port Moresby. The next day is a Tuesday, when they do not fly to Tufi. This means losing two days from our trek of the villages on the coast around Tufi, reputed to be the most beautiful part of our tour. We have now been in Popondetta for ten hours.

  Our practice of “going with the flow” has lost its charm at this point. We call Emanuel and ask him to tell his boss that the airline should be persuaded to schedule a Tuesday flight to Tufi from Port Moresby. Some hours later, we succeed: the airline has agreed to schedule the Tuesday flight. We further insist that all the people who waited in Popondetta with us be called and offered priority seating on that flight.

  The next morning, we fly to Tufi without incident, with several other New Guineans whom we had befriended during the long wait.

  Angorogho and the Skull Cave

  The Tufi coast is a large bump on the northeastern nose of Papua New Guinea, jutting out into the Solomon Sea. It was formed eons ago when three local volcanoes erupted. The lava flow took the form of many long fingers pushing into the sea, creating long, narrow, steep-sided bays of calm water between the fingers. These bays are called “rias” by geographers and “fjords” by everybody else. The coast has white sandy beaches, crystalline waters, pristine coral beds, towering palm trees, rain forest, and a dozen villages.

  There is one resort in the tiny town of Tufi Station, called, appropriately, Tufi Resort. It is high-end but very eco-conscious and encourages its clients to stay in village guesthouses. After lunch at the resort, we climb into a large outboard for the one-hour trip to the village of Angorogho on Afati Bay, the starting point for our trek in Tufi. On the way, we stop in a small village to pick up Clarence, who will be our guide on the peninsula.

  As we approach Angorogho, a sing-sing group comes out to meet us and, behind them,
the whole village. Their sing-sing outfits are similar to those we have seen, but the headdresses are a wild rainbow of bird of paradise feathers—red, yellow, blue, black, and white, tied around the forehead and similar in shape to the classic Sioux chief’s bonnet.

  Skull Cave, Angorogho, Tufi

  A path runs from the village to a point overlooking the sea. We arrive in time to see an enormous school of dolphin swim into shallow water near the beach, their backs glistening in the late afternoon sun as they roll through the still surface of the sea.

  Before dinner, we climb into a dugout outrigger two-man canoe and cross Afati Bay to a mangrove swamp. Forty feet up on a cliff face are the Skull Caves where, one hundred years ago, the losing members of a warring tribe hid from the enemy and starved to death. A young man in a canoe, paddling furiously, catches up with us, hands something to Clarence, and paddles off. Clarence says, “It’s about time. I needed this.” Then he pops it in his mouth, and I realize this is a betel nut delivery.

  We beach the canoe and clamber over slippery mangrove roots to get to the cliff, which is nearly vertical and crisscrossed with vines. With the assistance of our village escorts, one pulling from above and the other pushing from below, we scramble up the vines and footholds to the caves. Sure enough, there they are, four human skulls in one cave and two more in another. The villagers are fairly casual about handling the skulls, and Barbara takes pictures with their permission. We leave the skulls the way we found them, facing the cave entrances, perhaps still hoping for a delivery of bananas.

  After dark, dinner is served in a ten-by-ten-foot open pavilion with bench seats and a thatched roof. The table is beautifully set, with traditional cloths and flower petals. The village chief, Donald, is our host. We are also joined by Clarence, Donald’s sons and wife, and assorted villagers. We talk into the night. Donald brings out a coffee-table picture book about Tufi in which he, his family, and various people we have met are featured. He is proud of the sympathetic light in which Tufi is pictured but is disappointed that its publication has not led to further tourist interest.