The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  The Dani greeted the patrols amicably. As they approached the Baliem, however, the situation grew tense. At one point, the Dutch encountered a war party; two Dani were shot dead. No explanation for the sudden hostility is given in the official Dutch account. The latter was more concerned with frostbite and altitude sickness. The two patrols met up in the Baliem without incident; at a welcome feast in their honor, the Dani sprinkled the Europeans and Americans with pig blood.

  The Dutch journals record the extensive nature of Dani agriculture. Using timbered and stone terraces and crop rotation, they raised sweet potatoes, cucumbers, sugarcane, tobacco, bananas, spinach, and beans. The expedition introduced peanuts, which were soon wildly popular. Cowrie shells were used as currency—ten good ones bought a pig. The expedition lasted fourteen months and produced a National Geographic article that caused a sensation back in the United States. But the moment of “firstness”is very short-lived, maybe only a matter of minutes. The Baliem Valley entered the tourist economy in the following decades, modestly, it is true, but irrevocably. A resort was even built by a German tour operator high up on one of its mountainsides. It is mostly empty now, as Papua’s reputation for violence drove Europeans elsewhere, but there were still a few takers from season to season. The “Stone Age,” meanwhile, had receded to the far side of another range of impassable mountains, to the south.

  The plane slips between black and purple peaks as it descends into Wamena, an alpine land as wet and mossy as Scotland. The terraces are still there, and the river still shines over beds of pebbles, flanked with fenced gardens of taro. The Dani huts are connected by long paths along which motorcycles and bikes glitter when the sun comes out. The air smells of snow and pastures, the sweet odor of grass; by the runway, naked men stand glistening with pig fat, shivering in the mist and holding out fossilized toadstools for sale.

  As we walked the four blocks from the tiny airport to the Hotel Renggku, four or five of them followed us with their toadstools, dog-tooth necklaces, and breastplates of sewn cowrie shells. They all wore tall kotekas decorated with tufts of pig fur that they shook with one hand, expressing a gesture that is said to mean something like “Wow!” They walked on wide, flat feet, the biggest feet I had ever seen. (The Dani make formidable soccer players.) The pig fat gave them a sweet, peculiar odor and they passed their palms across ours as they murmured, in high nasal tones, “Wa wa wa”—welcome, hello, how are you? It was a hustle, but a mild one. At the hotel they simply parked themselves outside the front door and stayed there for three days.

  The Renggku was run by Christian Indonesians. The electricity was off and there had probably never been running water. There was a large photomural of a New England forest turning color, all gold and scarlet, and a Christmas tree stood in a corner of the dining room, its lights ready to go on when the juice returned. The Papuans wandered in and out as if unwilling to recognize the concept of doors. They sat on the sofa of the lobby and twanged away at small bamboo harps. If you caught their eye they would stop twanging for a moment, bare betel-red teeth, and sing wa wa wa. They sometimes crowded around the water fountain and its pile of small paper cups, silently watching the bubbles. It was quite cold and they never stopped shivering; the rain was getting heavier and all around us the mountains were cloaked in clouds.

  I went into my room and lay down, exhausted already for some reason. It was the Muslim holiday of Idul Fitri and the muezzins began to wail, although there are hardly any Muslims in Wamena and the Dani are a pig-worshipping culture. I thought back to Hamza Mustafa’s words about the Indonesians building a new Islamic university in Wamena with Saudi money. It seemed an impossible provocation. Just after our arrival, we heard a rumor over cups of Nescafé that twelve Indonesian soldiers had been killed the day before by Papuans armed with bows and arrows, a few miles out of town. It was difficult to say if it was true, but it was certainly the case that Papuans had recently stormed the police HQ and killed many Indonesians with arrows. The mutual suspicion was intense enough to be noticeable even to a foreigner. I could hear it in the muezzins, somehow, shrieking through the dark as the Dani in the lobby lit up their pipes and scowled.

  I was asleep when Chief Yali woke me up. He came in just to say hello, and when I opened my eyes from nightmares I saw a perfect Orientalist fantasy: a delicate naked man covered in pig fat dancing by my bed, a lofty carrot-shaped wooden penis gourd tied to his head with a piece of string. He kissed my hand. The electricity was now down all over Wamena and the town was plunged in total darkness. But muezzins still sang, the rain still struck the tin roofs. As lightning shot through the broken windows, Yali swung his little hips back and forth and giggled all the same: it was dinnertime. Rising wearily, I uttered the only Dani phrase I had mastered so far. Wa wa wa.

  “Wa,”he said. His face was smeared with shiny black paint and his arms were spotted with white clay.

  Woolford is Yali’s adopted son. The American has been coming to Wamena for sixteen years, and they kissed as father and son. Although Woolford does not speak any Dani, Yali has learned a little Bahasa Indonesian. The table was set with fried tempeh and plates of sautéed taro, a beautifully wild purple color. The table was lit with candles, and into their orbit came wild-eyed men floating in from the darkness wearing dog-tooth necklaces. Boys in pig fur hats twanged on bamboo harps as the doorways dripped and the thunder rolled. And there was William, Kelly’s right-hand man, and Penus, who was going to be our cook in the jungle. Kelly introduced him to us.

  “Hello, Penus,” Theresia and Georg said, shaking his hand.

  Penus well understood the jolly double entendre.

  His laugh was like that of the Jolly Green Giant, setting Yali in motion again like some clockwork toy. Dancing, dancing, the hips jigging. Waltzes in the dark, wa wa wa.

  “Are they always naked,” Juha asked mildly, looking at the naked Dani grinning back at us, “or do they only take their clothes off for us?”

  Whether or not they preferred nakedness, it was more elegant than wearing Nike T-shirts.

  “Are they cold?” Theresia asked. “Is that why they’re covered with pig fat?”

  “Cold,” Yali suddenly said in English. “Good cold. Wa.”

  “He speaks a little English?” Juha asked.

  A few tourists had already gone to his compound near the village of Akima to see the three-hundred-year-old mummy of the great warrior Werapak Elosarek.

  Penus cut us some pineapples. He spoke quite reasonable English from his years of working with Woolford.

  “Yali is famous. He has been in the magazines. He is the Dani everyone know.”

  The old geezer had a canny look in his eye. He sidled up and laid his cheek against the back of my hand. “Me love you here.”

  We ate with the Papuans staring at us by candlelight, crowded round like spectators at a circus atrocity, and indeed they shivered; the goose bumps on their skin were visible. We wore sweaters. Afterward, I wandered outside, restless, a little claustrophobic, and thirsty. The hotel owners said there was a small store down the street where I could buy some plastic bags of orange drink. I set off, though with some misgiving. Wamena’s streets at night are only reasonably safe. There are no streetlights, and away from the larger houses and the airport the gloom is dense. Two blocks away I was lost, stumbling from corner to corner. Warriors wrapped in blankets padded past hand in hand, soaked from the rain, their bodies shiny, as if soaped. Bicycle rickshaws rattled past. Seeing me, the haunted-looking boys did a sharp U-turn and came up, tossing a few words of Bahasa at me. Eventually, feeling alarmed and drained by the wet, I took one to the main market a few blocks distant, which was alive and kicking at eight p.m. So the juice had come back on. Not knowing where to be let off, I waited till we reached a cake shop and stopped there. Two Javan women were serving milk coffee and lemon cakes under a few red bulbs. I dove in and sat by a window with no glass. The whole street was awash with farm implements flown in from the coast—spades, flashlights, plasti
c buckets, blankets, tarpaulins, hoes, rakes, axes. Among these were scattered Javan shops filled with DVDs and cassettes. The rain had turned the street to four inches of mud, and through it slogged desperate-looking men in ragged shorts, heavily muscled and carrying axes. The eyes emitted a wild flash as they scanned the shops. I thought, Please don’t see me. Eventually I was seen, and a tall old man with bark earrings lunged through the flap door armed with a huge greasy machete. He staggered into the cake shop as if tipsy and stared at me with pop eyes. The Javan women began arguing with him, and I think the word they kept repeating meant “Out!” The madman pointed at me. Raindrops dripped from his nose and from hair sprinkled with wet feathers. He seemed disoriented more than anything. When he had been evicted, the Javans served me more coffee. They looked at me with nervous pity.

  How many times in the course of a life do you think you are searching out “the other”? But when the real thing is staring you in the face—without any mediation of superior force from your own civilization—a brutal shock takes hold of you. All your atavistic feelings of fear, insecurity, and tribal chauvinism return to the fore of your consciousness, dragged out from the obscure sediment where they have been languishing since enlightened schoolteachers sent them to the bottom of your psyche all those years ago. They stir; adrenaline pumps through your soul. The sanctimonious reflex of the anthropologist will not help you. It is rare even to be in a place where not a single word of the so-called global language is spoken. Where the tourist infrastructure does not exist.

  I got a rickshaw home, but it left me at the wrong block. I had to walk, lost yet again. Reaching a particularly obscure corner where the rain had reached a new crescendo, I stopped to get my bearings. A small hand suddenly slipped into mine and, controlling myself, I didn’t cry out. Looking down, I found that I had been “seized” by a tiny man about three or four feet tall. It was a Yali pygmy, a tribe from higher up the valley, and his koteka was taller than his own head. A high-pitched voice came out from a pair of white eyes. Wa wa wa! Without saying a word, he took me back to the Renggku for a packet of tobacco. It was like being led by a fairy child—and I the huge buffoon who has wandered into the wrong tale.

  The next day, our group drove out to Yali’s compound for a traditional pig feast. A small metal road took us through the fertile, flat fields of the valley bottom, thick with peanut trees and tubby black pigs. On the way we stopped at a pig fair, held in an open space next to the food market. The men came up quickly, urgently—buy a pig? They could not comprehend the refusal. We were clearly rich yet did not want a pig. Madness. Pure obstinacy.

  The day was misty and wet, the paths to the compound churned to a heavy, tiring mud. The warriors put on a battle for us, chasing about under the Scottish hills with their spears, arrayed in red feathers. And there was Yali in a treelike lookout post pretending to shoot arrows at us. But the whole thing was a preplanned show. The smooth seven-foot spears had not drawn blood in a while.

  Inside the compound the pigs were chased around and then shot with wedge-shaped arrows. The carcasses were roasted on hot stones smothered with piles of leaves; awaiting the results, the men retired to their lodge, a smoky cabin festooned with pig jaws where we smoked in near-total darkness. I couldn’t help thinking that eventually it must always occur to an indigenous people that their primitivity is what is most valuable about them in the eyes of outsiders. Primitivity—always naked and in feathers—is the one economic asset they possess. As soon as they put on T-shirts and sneakers, they cease to be of any value—even though the Korowai and Kombai, I had heard, love Western clothes and wear them whenever they can.

  At some point, I naively asked Yali if he knew anything about the outside world, and a cowering, doglike resentment flashed across his face. Yali had been taken to Japan the year before by a Balinese businessman and his Japanese wife. It had been a sorry affair. Paraded around Japan like the Elephant Man, Yali had been dumped on a plane to Jakarta with no money and then left to beg his way home.

  The men began to sing their songs, which were mournful rather than merry. The room filled with smoke. Yali asked me questions. Did I have a house with dogs? Hearing that I had not one dog, he shook his head. Ah, sad man, sad man. Coughing and blackened with smoke, we reemerged into the rain. They all seemed bronchitic, as bronchitic as I am myself. They smoked more than the French.

  On the way back, we stopped at Akima to see the mummy of Werapak Elosarek. The village is a sea of mud, a long enclosure walled in with thatch huts. The mummy is wheeled out by a grumpy old man and sat on a tree stump. A group of well-heeled tourists from Jakarta suddenly came in, the women shrieking with disgust at the mud and the smell of pig shit. They peered aghast at the naked women chewing on sweet potatoes. Then they took their pictures of the mummy, which was curled in a fetal position on his stump. The flashes competed drearily with the lightning overhead and suddenly I wanted to escape. Poor old Werapak. How could a king of seventeenth-century Papua have ever imagined ending up as a photogenic spectacle on a tree stump? But then, how could Yali have ever imagined being stranded in Narita airport? It is easy to say that the world is a strange place, but the more you contemplate that strangeness, the more you are enraged.

  Before dawn, we were at the airstrip. The Seventh-Day Adventist Pilatus plane arrived, and a Christian captain in a white uniform supervised the filling of the fuel tanks amid a group of Papuans. The fuel was cranked by hand through a hose pipe. He came up and shook our hands. The Adventists fly to the Yanimura and do not ordinarily stop at Wanggemalo, now that the missionaries are gone. So this was going to be an exception, an exception that would cost us handsomely.

  “So you’re off to Wanggemalo, eh?”

  He might as well have added, “Poor bastards.”

  “Quite a fun place,” he did add. But he winked at the same time. I went for a walk with Juha.

  “He seems very amused,” I observed.

  “He knows something we don’t.”

  But the sun had come out, the hills looked as if they were cloaked in flowering gorse. The shadows of clouds raced across them. Naked men sauntered nonchalantly across the grass runway.

  “I don’t care if he does. I prefer that he does. It’s what we signed up for,” Juha admitted. “It’s what we are after. I am just not sure what that is. I thought of getting out of Finland, away from my wife for a little while—and I hate vacations.”

  “I hate vacations, too.”

  “I am not even sure that I like traveling.”

  And of course that was it in a nutshell.

  The immense pile of equipment about to be loaded onto the plane begged the question whether this qualified as “travel.” It was what saved us from complete banality. And yet—

  “I keep thinking about the Dani,” I said. “And about yesterday with Chief Yali. I kept thinking that he was an impostor, and then that he couldn’t possibly be an impostor. Because I am the impostor here.”

  “Yes, we are impostors, of course.”

  I said, “He felt like a strange one. Was he a touristic creation?”

  “No. But I see what you mean. We are out of our depth.”

  “But he wasn’t an impostor, was he?”

  For what is an impostor on Planet Tourism, anyway?

  Juha’s calm blue eyes surveyed the naked men on the runway. A scene. But of what? The Dani were too picturesque by half. But the Kombai were going to be a very different matter.

  As we were loading the plane with the aforementioned provisions—sacks of rice, boxes of peanut butter, biscuits, noodles—Kelly elaborated his own ideas of the matter at hand: “We’re going to find Kombai who have never even heard of white people, let alone seen any. You’ll see that look in their eyes.”

  That look?

  “Yeah, that look. We’re flying to the most godforsaken place on earth. Compared to Wanggemalo, Wamena is like Manhattan.”

  We looked back at the perimeter fence and saw the same naked pygmy from the Yali tribe
standing in the sunlight with his huge koteka, smiling in forlornly. Wa wa wa, he cried, waving.

  “Like The Lost World?” I said. And I added that Arthur Conan Doyle had once suggested Papua New Guinea as a new Jewish homeland.

  “What a nut,” Woolford drawled. “I guess he never went to Wanggemalo.”

  But perhaps, I thought, that was precisely the point.

  ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD

  With the doors open, we flew over the glaciers that separate Wamena from the Merauke forests. Beyond the mountains, the plane drops quite suddenly and you are skimming across the roof of a forest that stretches from horizon to horizon: the largest primary forest in the world after the Amazon. It is a hypnotic voyage. You soon lose all bearings as the volcanoes disappear and your eyes seem to fill with a psychological greenness. There are only trees and, between them, a rare river. There are no villages, only tree houses, and they are as rare as the rivers. The sky is now vast, primordial, filled with a terrifying silver light.