Baliem Valley

I’m surprised at how normal it feels to have wildly exotic sightings in Wamena. This morning I took a rickshaw to Wamena’s tiny airport to buy a plane ticket, and while I was there I spotted a Dani tribesman for the first time. The man was dark-skinned with a negro look to him, and he must have been only five feet tall. The Dani men traditionally are completely naked with only a thin dried gourd covering their ‘privates’, for lack of a better word. I was amazed at how similar he looked to the picture in my guide book that inspired me to come here several months ago. It still blows me away that all it takes to get somewhere so far away and exotic is booking a few plane tickets.

Before I came to Wamena I expected that at least a handful of tourists would show up at the airport every day – and I expected that a hoard of guides would be waiting outside scrambling to compete for their business. I was clearly wrong on that. There are no tourists in Wamena – I’m the only one I’ve seen so far. And there also were no guides waiting outside the airport terminal. It feels exciting to be somewhere so isolated, but at the same time I don’t want it to be so challenging to travel here that I can’t enjoy it. I asked some local police officers where I could find a guide and after twenty minutes or so they introduced me to a man named Malvin Ogoya. Malvin seemed vaguely competent and knowledgeable about the area, but he wanted to charge me 5,000,000 rupiah for four days of his services. I realized that I needed a cheaper guide. Enter ‘Mickey Mouse’.

I walked across the street to the nearby ‘Nayak Hotel’ and a man of indigenous descent said he could be my guide. He introduced himself as ‘Mickey Mouse’. Mickey Mouse offered me essentially the same services as Malvin, but for only 2,500,000 rupiah. Unfortunately Mickey is obviously less competent than the barely-competent Malvin and he really only speaks a handful of words in English. I decided it would have to do and Mickey hurried off excitedly to find me a taxi for the day. While I was waiting the Dani man from the airport followed me into Nayak Hotel. He sat down on the chair in front of me and tried to communicate, but I finally just gave him my guide book and showed him a few pictures. When Mickey Mouse came back I got him to take a picture of me with the Dani man. I was surprised how talented Mickey was with the camera – and my guide book conveniently covered the tribal man’s offensive parts in the picture.

The first stop of the day was ‘Jiwika’ a village famous throughout the Baleim Valley for its prized mummy. A naked Dani man brought the mummy out of a crude hut and put it on a tree stump for me to see. I was blown away by how quickly and casually it all happened. I remember seeing a mummy once before at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, but that was in a museum… and it was behind a protective sheet of glass. This mummy, which the villagers claim is 368 years old, was right out in the open – and so close that I could have reached out my arm and touched it. I turned around and a crowd of bare-breasted tribal women had emerged from a straw hut to meet the villages’ new visitor. I was a little shocked because I don’t remember ever seeing bare-breasted women in front of me before, but this was definitely a wild cultural experience and nothing that could ever be attractive to me. I took a handful of pictures that bear serious resemblance to Grandpa Calder’s photos from Ethiopia. I decided it would be best to leave those pictures off the blog, but someday maybe my grandkids will see them at a family slideshow and get a few good laughs from them.

Mickey recommended that I see a nearby limestone cave and we were off in the taxi for another random adventure. There wasn’t a whole lot to the cave; it was really just a giant opening in a cliff with a few stalagtites hanging down, but it was fun because it was just something to do in the Baliem Valley. Later we drove across the valley to the other side, where I enjoyed a panoramic view of the entire valley from the top of a small hill.

I have to admit that I’m a little apprehensive about traveling in the Baliem Valley. I’ve never been in a place before where I was literally the only tourist around. I’m sure that plenty others have come here as well and that they’re always perfectly safe, but there’s just no infrastructure to support tourism. There apparently are so few tourists that it doesn’t make financial sense for people to cater to them. After arriving back at my hotel I paid 730,000 rupiah to settle the bill for the day. Mickey tried to convince me that I owed him 1,000,000 rupiah, even though we both agreed on 730,000 originally and I confirmed it with him several times and even wrote it on a piece of paper so he could see the amount. This morning I had planned on spending three days and two nights hiking through the jungle and visiting obscure Dani villages in the valley, but I thought twice about it. Here I was half-way around the world, the only tourist in an isolated valley in Papua, and I was about to go on a three day hike through the wilderness with a clearly incompetent man who not only tried to cheat me, but was also named Mickey Mouse.

After evaluating my options I decided to spend my nights here at a hotel in Wamena, and I’ll hike nearby trails during the day with Mickey. It’s one thing to spend an afternoon with a guy where the worst case scenario would be to have to find my way back to Wamena on my own (obviously I’ll pay close attention to the trails we follow so I can do that if I have to). It would be quite another thing to be thirty miles from the nearest semblance of civilization and find out that Mickey Mouse is either completely lost, or has no intention of taking me back unless I pay him some exorbitant amount of money. I won’t let that happen. Taking the conservative road has its drawbacks, of course; I won’t get to see the truly exotic far-off villages that I otherwise would see if I put my trust in Mickey. With that said, the reason I came here was to see wild tribal people and it turns out that I can see them fairly easily. I’m happy just to spend the next few days doing day hikes – I still should have plenty more experiences that only could happen in the remotest corners of the earth.