Life in the Waria Valley
Added to website: 04 September 2007
The following is an extract from the beginning of book two of handwritten notes made on site by Andrew Farmer in the Waria Valley, Papua New Guinea. Bego had a few bits of wire and a metal sieve in his canvas bag and not much else. He stuffed it into a flour bag with some of the kit we had in a pile on the bench and tied the top with bush rope and disappeared.
My rucksack was stuffed to the brim with mammal traps, GPS, personal kit, first aid kit, bags of string and gloves for handling bats and assorted head torches and batteries, along with other essentials including hammock and satellite phone that added up to a heavy pack, though not quite as full as last time. Jeff’s was even heavier as he had included all the field guides, including hardback versions of Tim Flannery’s, ‘Mammals of New Guinea’ and the huge ‘Butterflies of the Australian Region’. Oscar had borrowed my 30-litre day pack and stuffed in what he could. The cooks were determined to bring what they wanted, and there were a few others that announced they were coming. Kawai (not son of Kawai senior, but brother of Wapo), who has a strange sort of crazy manner, and in another life would be an artist or criminal, was in the gang. Wapo was coming too and Zinny later.
“Next week only the boys on camp at Atai,” Chef Giri had announced with a smirk. “The meri are staying and working in the gardens.”
A load of stuff disappeared on the heads of the girls, in bilums, and with some of the boys. So we hoisted up our rucksacks to set off.
“Put your bags on the canoe, they are waiting at the river.”
No, no we will carry them.”
So we walked off and stopped on the lush green bank above the river. I bounded down the steep, windy slope and found the canoes with Magimo, Bego’s wife, who said that Bego had come back for us.
“I’ll carry mine,” I said and set off back up the slope. The path rose out of mud and stones and roots, with grasses and cutting mimosas on the sides. Kawai came bouncing down with Jeff’s rucksack. He stumbled a bit and was hunched up with the weight. He vanished down the slope.
“So you decided to send your sack by canoe,” I said to Jeff.
“No he just took it when I wasn’t looking.”
It was not far to where we met the canoes in the ox-bow lake amongst the trees and cultivated land. My sack went across the little inlet by a superbly hollowed out tree trunk with outrigger. We managed to slide and wobble a way across some slippery twisted trunks, to avoid taking our boots off, to wait on the other side. We all collected our loads and moved on.
As we passed, heads bobbed up from their work and startled. Grubby looks dissolved to waves and smiles. We were walking in a line of assorted shapes and sizes. Two white men in bush hats carrying bulging, enormous rucksacks and machetes or buckets. Graduated sizes of barefoot girls were carrying inversely proportional sizes of bags of miscellaneous kitchen items and food. Boys with buckets and rice bags, a water container and big blue tarpaulins, hacked their way through the undergrowth and overgrowth. We seem to have more stuff than necessary, but then we have more people than necessary.
As soon as we arrive at the place we had chosen to camp, various grass knives flit about temporarily clearing ground vegetation in all directions. We were camped on the main track, which was basically an overgrown unused path - but up on the sides amongst some trees. I found suitable trees to fasten ropes to, to put up a science shelter by day and Bego’s sleeping shelter by night. We rooted around and eventually found suitable spots for our three hammocks - mine being down a slippery slope in amongst the clicking ants that attached themselves to my clothes. I hacked down a dead tree and one million swarmed out of the hollow centre and all over the place giving out frantic clicking sounds.
“Oops,” I thought and tried to throw the trunk away without being overrun by big black ants with giant mandibles.
Giri and the boys built a shelter and a fire and started making a table while Bego dug a ‘post office’ where we could make deliveries into a slot in the ground, and surrounded it with sago leaves from the swamp.
I walked up into the rib of primary forest to look at the potential survey area in my mind, but in reality scrabbled up a vertical slippery slope, grabbing on to tree roots then stooping amongst pointed barbed wire-like vines and rattans and crashing through vegetation to reach a bit of a clearing, then picking a path up the slope through the trees. There was a swamp on the right, a cleared area on the left and primary forest straight ahead as far as you could walk, then further still until you reach the sea on the opposite coast. But all this was obscured by tall trees and palms and vines, along with screeching cockatoos, tapping at tree trunks and flapping overhead.
I found a good area for mist nets and went back down. Next time we cleared a bit of a path with machetes and vowed to come back and camp several hours up the side of Mount Atai. The only problem was - no water, so we would have to arrange portage and cut down on all the paraphernalia that seems to follow us around. On my own I can carry all I need for a few days, or about a week if water is available, but here we attract a whole hamlet of helpers and smiling faces and blank looks - but it is all good.
We found a place to set up the bucket lines and mammal traps deeper in the forest and went down again to put up the nets. Back at camp, Bego had built a table for all our equipment and was fiddling around with his canvas bag. Chef had a radio in pieces on the ground and a burning spear in his mouth, and was wearing a woolly hat and wellies with his shorts and electric blue basketball vest.
Bego produced the semi-spherical metal basket with a wire attached and gave it to mini Bego (Tom), who climbed up a tree. He produced another battered radio and fixed the wire to it. He lifted his head and grinned through his beard.
“Election results”, he announced.
The route up and down the mountain rib and the mosquitoes and other biting things became very familiar over the week as our legs became stronger, then tired and weaker. The gruelling 6am to 9pm schedule caught up with us and we were feeling the pace by the last night when it rained. The table in the shelter attracted one million flies due to the latex sap from the Ficus species, but luckily they departed at dusk by the time the mosquitoes really kicked in.
Some of us swam back from Atai camp after a little walk which was made all the sweeter by not washing for the preceding few days. Bego clung onto a plastic water container while Magimo took our kit in a canoe. The whole route was recorded on the GPS clunking away in my rucksack. The river was cool and silty and got painful as it shallowed, and I was forced to walk ungainly across the hidden stones.
“How was your swim?”
“Excellent.”
“Looked more like an ungainly walk to me.”
There were several copies of a serious looking face attached to a hut by the riverside as we passed. These pictures turned out to be an accurate forecast of the eventual winner of the provincial elections.
