Backpacking Papua New Guinea: One of the Planet’s Most Mysterious Corners

Eons old Highlander cultures; and meeting my ‘blot’ brother…

With just a backpack on my shoulders and my first year of teaching in the rearview, I waited at the airport gate. I did not have an itinerary for the weeks ahead—a three-month journey to Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia—just a return ticket from Jakarta at the end of the summer. I put my trust in the hands of fate instead.

As the long hours passed on the plane, I inched closer to the far side of the globe. A pretty girl with tattoos dressed as a hippy standing in the aisle caught my eye. I left my seat under the pretext of ordering another beer and struck up a conversation with her. She was petite and fit, with thick, straight black hair that cascaded down her back and around her chest. Her accent was from South America.

Seeing through my bullshit question about the flight’s drink menu, she rolled her eyes but smiled with bemusement.

“Hablas español?” I asked teasingly, knowing the answer before asking.

“Of course, I am Colombian.” She replied still smiling, her body language opening up.

“Badass—What a beautiful country,” I said, calculating at what point in the dialogue to try to impress her by inserting that I had probably visited whatever city she was from. Leaving the points on the table for later, I inquired about her current travel plans.

“I’m heading back to Thailand,” she explained. “I have friends in a beach town there, and I’ll be able to make good money working as a personal trainer with tourists. I have been traveling for about ten years so far—teaching English, personal training, bartending—but I think now I’m ready to post up in Thailand for a good while.”

I inquired about how many countries she had seen in ten years, and, pausing to think, she responded that she had been to at least fifty in total. I told her I was going to backpack through Papua New Guinea, and her eyes widened. PNG, she exclaimed, was one of the planet’s few corners in which she had been too afraid to step foot.

“Man, I have heard too many horror stories about PNG. A friend of mine who has been through all the wildest places—Iran, Afghanistan, Venezuela—had to turn around after only a few days in Papua New Guinea. It’s that hardcore. Why are you going there anyway?”

I explained how I had always been fascinated with the mysterious lands of Melanesia: how the people are rumored to be the first human beings to reach Asia, how they have lived there for over seventy thousand years and even mixed with an extinct cousin of homo sapiens known as homo sapiens denisova many millennia ago. I told her that since childhood, I had been intrigued by New Guinea’s wild and vibrant cultures: Wigmen deep in valleys of the Highlands who, even up until recent times, forcibly resisted the advances of modernization; crocodile warriors who resided in the coastal jungles and made scale-like scarifications across their bodies in imitation of their most revered totem; Asaro Mudmen who fashioned masks out of clay intended to mirror the countenances of the spirits that co-inhabited their lands, the list goes on…

My new friend was impressed, and my excitement for the adventure ahead heightened. I told her that I planned to write about it afterward, and, jotting down her email, she asked me to send her the memoirs at a later date. Well, here they are:

**

After a 20-hour layover in Jakarta, I boarded another plane and flew East over Indonesia’s tens of thousands of islands to the remote frontier province of Irian Jaya, occupying the western half of New Guinea Island. The width of Indonesia from East to West is about the same as that of the USA, and the plane touched down in various small cities en route to distant New Guinea. Passengers rotated on and off as we island-hopped East. After Jakarta, we stopped in Surabaya, a city on the easternmost finger of the teeming island of Jawa, then Makassar on the enigmatic, and often volatile, island of Sulawesi, then somewhere on the gargantuan landmass of Borneo, and then, finally, Irian Jaya, Indonesia’s Wild East. Phenotypes, clothing, and demeanors morphed at each stop. In Surabaya, a bearded man in a turban, a tunic, and military fatigues sat down next to me and began to silently read from the Quran. In Sulawesi—about halfway across the Indonesian archipelago—soft Southeast Asian features and slim builds began to meld with Melanesian features. Upon reaching New Guinea, the black skin, stout muscular builds, and tightly curled hair of the locals confirmed that I had indeed arrived on the far side of the Wallace Line.

The history of the relations between New Guinea and Indonesia is dark and complex, and it begins with the Dutch East India Company. Prior to the gradual colonization of this region, spurred by the Dutch East India’s desire to gain a monopoly on the spice trade in the seventeenth century, this enormous archipelago contained countless kingdoms encompassing a dazzling range of religions, languages, ethnicities, and cultures. Sure, there had been empires such as Sirijaya and Mataram—those who built the magnificent Buddhist stupa known as Borobudur in the ninth century—that had conquered a large number of islands, but they stopped far short of ever uniting a territory as vast as modern-day Indonesia.

The Dutch East India Co. came to absorb thousands of islands, many of which were as distant linguistically, culturally, and ethnically as, say, Russia is from Ireland. On the Western end of their sprawling colony sat Java, Sumatra, Bali, and the other Sunda islands, territories that were populated roughly ten thousand years ago by a seafaring people originating in Taiwan, the Austronesians. This same group of intrepid mariners eventually came to inhabit Polynesia—including Hawaii and Easter Island— Micronesia, the Philippines, and even Madagascar off the coast of East Africa. Their descendants, although having mixed with countless other peoples over the millennia, remain the most geographically widespread ethnolinguistic group in the world, with most still speaking Austronesian-derived languages. Moving East from the Malay archipelago, the Dutch Crown swallowed up the Maluku Islands (a.k.a. the Spice Islands), Borneo, the world’s largest island and whose jungles contain some of the last uncontacted tribes, and Sulawesi, a landmass almost comical in its shape, with giant peninsulas jutting out like writhing tentacles. Finally, on their eastern extremity and over two thousand miles from Old Batavia (modern-day Jakarta), the colony annexed the western half of the Melanesian heartland, the island of New Guinea.

The Melanesians were probably the first human beings to reach Southeast Asia, arriving in New Guinea and Australia—at the time as one landmass referred to as Sahul—seventy to eighty thousand years ago. As the Austronesians migrated South from their homeland in Taiwan and came to dominate the Sunda Islands, the Melanesians were gradually pushed East of the Wallace Line, a tectonic divide whose deep waters separated the Australasian landmass (i.e. Australia and Melanesia) from mainland Asia even during the peak of the last Ice Age over twenty-five thousand years ago.

After WWII, the Netherlands relinquished its claims to these territories, and the novel notion of “Indonesia” (from the Greek for “Indian Islands,” in reference to the South Asian and Hindu influence on these lands) was born. The boundaries of the Dutch empire became the prototype for the newly-established Indonesian Republic, setting the stage for decades of ethnic and religious conflicts to follow. Having only been established in 1945, the acceptance of Jakarta’s rule over such a huge collection of disparate peoples has, by no means, been accepted by all Indonesians.

It seemed natural that the western regions of the island of New Guinea, namely West Papua and Irian Jaya, should be united with their Melanesian kinsmen in Papua New Guinea, another nation established in the wake of WWII after the British relinquished its claim to the Eastern half of New Guinea. After all, prior to the Dutch occupation, these Melanesian lands never really had had a historical connection with the Malays or other Austronesian cultures. Granted, they traded with and knew about each other (the word “Papua” comes from an Austronesian word for “curly-haired”) but they were as mutually unknown and distant to each other as Classical Greece and Ancient India would have been.

Unfortunately for the Melanesian nationalists, Papua was the most resource-rich province of Indonesia. Alas, New Guinea is described as an island of gold floating atop a sea of oil, and the newly established Republic of Indonesia was not about to allow the lucrative resources of West Papua and Irian Jaya to simply slip away. In fact, the Freeport Mine, the largest gold mine in the world—and controlled and operated by US interests—generates more tax revenue for the Republic of Indonesia than the entire populace of the nation.

As I peered down the cabin, I beheld a Papuan shaman, as black as a West African and naked except for a penis sheath and a collection of seed necklaces. To his right stood a Javanese man, bearded and sporting a batik shirt and a kufi. In Indonesian New Guinea, the tension between Austronesian Indonesians and their Melanesian counterparts can be turbulent. The Indonesian government incentivizes the Javanese to settle this rebellious and recently-acquired province in an effort to pacify it and annex it more completely. Javanese—nationalistic, pioneering, and devoutly Muslim—have poured into this eastern frontier by the hundreds of thousands in recent decades and have gradually overwhelmed the Melanesians culturally, politically, religiously (the Melanesians are overwhelmingly Christian) and, most notably, economically. Although sugarcoated and distorted by Indonesian propaganda, what has occurred in Irian Jaya and West Papua can be called cultural—and even literal—genocide. Countless Melanesian languages and lifeways have been and continue to be erased either directly or indirectly by the Indonesian government. To say that there have been human rights abuses would be a gross understatement—it was not uncommon, even recently, for remote Melanesian villages to be massacred to the last man, woman, and child by the AK-47s of Indonesian soldiers—but the international community remains largely silent about such atrocities due to Indonesia’s vehement refusal to allow foreign NGOs or journalists to report on the activities in these provinces.

The massive island of New Guinea remains divided more or less equally between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Related to the Aboriginals of Australia, Papuans are descendants of one of the earliest waves of human migrations out of Africa. As mentioned, between eighty thousand to a hundred thousand years ago, their ancestors, over many generations, followed an Ice Age coastal route out of Africa, around Arabia, India, and Southeast Asia, and finally to the end of the world, New Guinea and Australia. Geneticists speculate that Andaman Islanders and negrito populations in places like the Philippines and Vietnam might also be descended from these ancient coastal wayfarers. Akin to how homo sapiens in Europe and the Middle East mated with their distant cousins the Neanderthals, the ancestors of the Melanesians intermixed with a homo sapiens subspecies referred to as the Denisovans. Roughly five to eight percent of their DNA originates directly from this extinct branch of the homo family tree.

**

I finally arrived in Jayapura, Indonesia—the last stop in Asia before Oceania—and grabbing my luggage I made my way to continue the long journey by car. I glanced around for somebody who looked Papuan to inquire how to arrive at my next destination, the PNG border. Most of the citizens of Jayapura are “mix-breeds”—a term they themselves use that refers to their mixed ancestry from recent Javanese arrivals and indigenous Papuans—and chances were that those who looked pure Papuan were also going to PNG. When the word got around that a foreigner needed a ride to the border, a battalion of taxi drivers began to swarm, shouting prices, arguing with each other in Bahasa, and moving in closer, like hornets. Finally, a taximan offered what I deemed a remotely honest price, and within a few minutes, I was hurtling down a mountainous coastal road. The route, well-maintained on the Indonesian side, snaked through dramatic cliffs and over surreal vistas of the Pacific Ocean. After about three hours—it was now late morning—I arrived at the border. My heart rate escalated and my adrenaline made me catch my breath in anticipation of what was to come.

The Indonesian border control office was a few meters from the New Guinean one, and the ornate entrances to each country seemed to taunt each other: above the entrance to Indonesia was a passage from the Quran written in Arabic calligraphy, while an opposing sign above the entrance to PNG declared, “This land is and forever will be ruled by Jesus Christ.” Given the religious violence between Muslims and Christians that had plagued Indonesia’s eastern territories, such standoffishness was no surprise. The gateway into PNG stood decked out with tribal motifs and giant faux New Guinean musical instruments.

Even the air was different upon entering PNG. The buildings, roads, and walls were dilapidated in comparison with the modernized Indonesian province I had just left. Gone were the soft mirthful countenances and gentle demeanors of the Indonesians; the people here were hardscrabble and tough. Short muscular men stared at me with quartz-like eyes deep-set behind grizzled faces. A drunkard, naked except for a filthy pair of boxers, paced the dusty clearing in front of the office where my passport was to get stamped. As he saw me approaching, he began to shout incoherently and make lewd thrusting motions in the air with his hips.

I arrived at a dirt parking lot outside the consulate, where folks waited for transportation and women had set up crude stalls to sell roasted root vegetables and cheap pork sausages. I approached a group of men smoking cigarettes and inquired about how to get to Vanimo, the closest town from the border and where I planned to sleep that night. A skinny fellow with ragged clothes politely told me to wait where I was for a bus that would take me to my destination for roughly a couple of dollars. I offered him some Marlboro Reds, which he accepted with gusto, and soon onlookers started approaching to meet the strange tourist and bum an American smoke.

When the van arrived, I confirmed with the driver that it was in fact heading towards Vanimo, and I climbed inside. The three-person rows held four people each, and the new passengers sat on the floor once all the seats were filled. The man sitting by the window in my row lit the cigarette I had given him, and the driver threw on some PNG reggae, tranquilizing yet upbeat melodies that went perfectly with the serene palm trees outside and the golden midday sunshine streaming through the van’s open windows. The smells of smoke, dreadlocks, and bodies dominated. As the pulsing reggae wafted out of the van’s speakers and nicotine jogged my memory, my mind drifted back to nearly identical van journeys through Jamaica many years ago. Young New Guinean girls stole glances at me and giggled as they boarded or exited the van. I allowed myself to relax, and remembered a verse from the poem, “Ithaka”:

**

Laistrygonians, Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your [travels]

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body

I descended to the main square in Vanimo, the first “city” in PNG after the Indonesian border. The stunning tropical beach rimmed with mountains and turquoise colors clashed sharply with the squalid and ramshackle buildings and dirt streets before me. The bank, central supermarket, and municipal buildings—together comprising Vanimo’s center—looked like gigantic concrete boxes that had been haphazardly plopped down atop a sandy clearing. There was a large cluster of tents and tables, where locals hawked betel nut, fresh fish, greens, and an endless variety of exotic produce. Fishermen near the beach waved and grinned at me, their teeth covered with what looked like thick red paint. They wore bilums, handwoven, rustic, yet sturdy bags that were ubiquitous across Papua New Guinea. While in the Highlands, bilums were much larger and made of wool; here on the coast, they were fashioned out of brightly-dyed plant fibers and either slung over the shoulder or behind the ears and across the forehead. The diamond and checkered patterns were intricate and wildly varied; in fact, to New Guineans, the bilum’s patterns immediately indicated the “tok-ples,” or ethnicity, of its weaver.

As the fishermen bantered with each other, every few minutes one of them would dig inside his bilum for a green nut, a small plastic container full of lime powder, and a celery-like stalk they called “mustard.” After breaking open the nut with severely corroded teeth and extracting the small yellowish fruit, the men proceeded to break off a small length of the crunchy mustard stalk, dip it in the lime powder, and pop the combination in their mouths. As they chewed, the mixture obtained the consistency of wet cement and the color of tomato juice, leaving their mouths looking like a construction site after a rainstorm. Every few chews, the men ejected a bright-red missile of spit. The distance and precision with which they spat was impressive, the result of years and thousands of betel nuts worth of practice. Similar to nicotine or caffeine, the betel nut contains alkaloids that increase alertness and reduce hunger, the latter quality a great boon for the many New Guineans who only eat one meal per day. The real sweet spot, I was informed, was obtained by simultaneously chewing betel nut, or “buai”, and smoking locally grown tobacco, or “brus”, far stronger and harsher than its industrial counterpart.

Within an hour of arrival, I had made friends who led me on a tour. My self-appointed guide, David, was skinny and soft-spoken with an easy laugh and gleaming slightly nervous eyes. David was in his early thirties, but his wrinkled face, broken teeth, and gray hairs made him look much older. He walked me through the dirt streets around the central plaza, as curious locals clamored around to talk to us. David relished the attention and respect lavished on him for showing around a tourist in places tourists did not usually enter. Although Chinese merchants had a presence in Vanimo and owned all of the stores and businesses, white people—especially one interacting with locals—were a novelty. A young man with much lighter skin approached and began to converse with me in a rugged Aussie accent. His eyes were green and his skin had yellow undertones, but his hair and facial features were Papuan. He told me that his father was an Australian miner who had worked in PNG and his mother was a Highlander. The young man had lived in Australia during his childhood but had not been back since returning to PNG in his teens. The dirt on his face and clothes belied the fact that he slept on the street and was deep into addictions. He noticed that I did not wear a bilum and he gave me the one he was wearing, which I used for the remainder of my journey through PNG and have held on to since.

Like this young man, many around the central plaza had gaunt faces and dirty clothes. Privately, David explained that crack cocaine and other cheap hard drugs had ravaged the lives of many a young man in Vanimo. Another addict silently shadowed us for about ten minutes, and I grew wary. David, sensing my discomfort, explained that he was harmless but had experienced brain damage from severe drug abuse. David walked over to the young man, a stout lad who said nothing but unceasingly stared at me, and handed him a green betel nut from his bilum. The gift of the betel nut seemed to satisfy him, and he sat down to enjoy a chew as David and I continued walking along the plaza.

I returned to the market with David to get an herb to help with back pain. The woman who sold the plant rubbed the leaves, covered with microscopic thorns, over my back and neck. After the tingling sensation subsided, the pain in fact diminished, much to my relief and the New Guineans’ satisfaction.

David invited me to crash at his house that night in Vanimo, and I pitched a mosquito net in an unfinished shed in his backyard. As a token of gratitude, I purchased enough “White Can”—a surprisingly good pilsner produced in PNG—to keep us merry for the evening. After watching a riotously beautiful sunset—dripping gold and pink over sea, mountains, and jungle—David, his neighbors, and I shared cigarettes and beer in the communal area of David’s neighborhood, a clearing with wooden benches and plastic chairs in the cluster of bungalows. A group of us—about ten men—talked and laughed into the night, as children ran from one house to another and the women tended to housework and occasionally chided their kids from the doorways. Some of those drinking with us felt less comfortable conversing in English, and they shyly inquired with David if I spoke Tok Pisin.

Tok Pisin or “Talk Pidgin” is the dialect of English spoken in Papua New Guinea, a legacy of the British colonization of the island and born out of the New Guineans’ efforts to communicate with English-speaking sailors. Tok Pisin varies across Papua New Guinea, with different versions being spoken in the Highlands, the Islands, and the mainland coastal regions. Nonetheless, in a country that has over eight hundred indigenous languages, Tok Pisin serves as the de facto lingua franca of the streets. Although official grammatical rules for the language do not exist, as far as I know, Tok Pisin’s informal grammar, vocabulary, and rhythm are distinct enough from standard English that I understood almost nothing during my first week in PNG. After getting used to the accent and having some of the quirks of the speech and spelling explained, I found myself beginning to understand and communicate on the streets. Missionaries later told me that native English speakers usually acquired proficiency in Tok Pisin within about six months. Impressively, most New Guineans can effortlessly switch between Tok Pisin, standard English, and their “Tok Ples” (Tok Pisin for “Talk Place”), or Papuan language.

David translated the conversation, primarily a stream of raunchy jokes and stories, between English and Tok Pisin. One man sitting with us was older—probably in his fifties judging by his wizened frame and gray hair—and his command of standard English was as strong as David’s. He wore a simple brown T-shirt with a red star and the words “Organisasi Papua Merdeka” emblazoned on the front. Considered either freedom fighters or terrorists depending on who you ask, the Organisasi Papua Merdeka, a.k.a. The Free Papua Movement or simply OPM, is an illegal guerrilla group that opposes, often violently, the Indonesian occupation of West Papua and Irian Jaya. I did not ask the man if he was OPM; however, I later found out that Vanimo and the surrounding jungle was in fact a safe haven for this persecuted group, whose members—along with many civilians suspected to be members—are systematically hunted and executed by the Indonesian military.

Before my departure, I asked around Vanimo about agarwood, a precious wood that is perhaps the most sought-after perfumery ingredient in the world. “Oud,” as it’s known in the Arab world, is produced by slow-growing trees of the aquilaria genus, native to the jungles of Southeast Asia. Once in a while, usually after trauma from lightning storms, such trees get infected by a particular fungus and produce a resin to combat the infection. Over the decades, this resin accumulates in the heart of the tree and can be harvested as the divinely-fragrant agarwood. Similar to wine or tea, the “terroir” of each region adds a distinctive personality and profile to the product. The agarwood of PNG is considered by connoisseurs to be among the finest and most complex in the world. The very best agarwood that PNG produces is referred to as “crocodile wood,” or “puc-puc garu” in Tok Pisin. Possessing a texture akin to the scaly hide of a crocodile, this grade of wood is onyx-black and so dense with resin that it sinks like a stone in water.

The heavenly smell produced by agarwood incense and oil, praised by Buddhists as the “Scent of Nirvana” and Sufi mystics as the “Fragrance of Paradise,” comes at a price. The aquilaria trees can be artificially inoculated to produce resin; however, the fragrance of farmed agarwood, for some reason not fully understood, never approaches the scent of the wildwood. As the resin takes many decades to accumulate in the trees, the supply of wild agarwood has dwindled almost to nil. Barring a few Buddhist monasteries whose monks have refused to cut down agarwood-laden aquilaria trees considered sacred, old-growth, wild oud trees are practically extinct in Vietnam and other countries in Indochina where they were traditionally sourced for centuries. Most of the wild oud from such regions have long been harvested and reside in safes, perfumeries, and museums across the world. Commanding prices in the tens of thousands for the finest quality product, violent black markets, and mafias control the traffic of oud in poor countries like PNG where wildwood can still be found.

After spreading the word that I was seeking agarwood, a truck halted to a stop next to me minutes before my departure from Vanimo. A man I had met the day before came out holding a plastic bag, which he handled nervously, as if it were contraband. Glancing about to see if anyone else was around, he revealed three large pieces of agarwood, not “puc-puc” grade but high-grade nonetheless. I was used to buying agarwood chips, and there was a small beam about the size of my forearm. I paid him twenty dollars for the wood, and it remained deep in my backpack for the rest of my journey through Asia.

**

From the jungles of Vanimo, I climbed upwards into the mountainous heart of New Guinea, the notorious Highlands. Grabbing the default mode of transportation in PNG, an oversized van known as a PMV, I began the inland ascent into the rugged, chilly hills. The Highlands were the last area of New Guinea to be explored by Westerners, and until recently, many of the region’s tribes were uncontacted. The terrain is rugged and hostile; nonetheless, and to the shock of the first Westerners to venture there, the Highlands are heavily populated and contain a dazzling diversity of ethnolinguistic groups. Linguists estimate that Papua New Guinea contains about eight hundred living languages—or in other words, about fifteen percent of the world’s languages—and the highest concentration of them are in the Highlands.

I disembarked in Goroka, a small mountain city that boasted an airport and one of PNG’s best universities, focused primarily on mining and geological sciences. As I stood at the bus stop, a young man wearing a scarf around his head like a turban kept glancing over and grinning at me. Typifying the Highlander phenotype, he was short, stocky, and powerfully built, with a barrel chest and thick neck, and for a moment, his focus on me made me uneasy. Remembering that the friends I made in Vanimo had notified their wontoks, or relatives, in Goroka about my arrival, I realized this man had been waiting at the bus stop for me.

New Guineans, as with peoples from other Melanesian cultures, deeply value extended family. Second, third, and even distant cousins are still treated like family. The word “wontok,” which can be used interchangeably with “kin,” derives from the Tok Pisin phrase “one talk,” referring to those who speak the same tribal language. In an island containing a mind-boggling array of language and cultures and where tribal warfare is all too common, caring for and respecting your wontoks is crucial. There is an unspoken expectation that when you come to your wontok’s aid, say in a tribal feud, he reciprocates at some point, even if he be a distant relative and the need be decades in the future. One Highlander I befriended on the coast explained that he would not hesitate to make the long return journey to his native village if even a second or third cousin was in a bind or needed his reinforcement in a dispute.

The man waiting for me at the bus stop introduced himself as Ian. His brown face was fully-bearded and spattered with scars. He had a noble bearing and possessed a sincerity and guilelessness that reminded me of indigenous people I had met deep in Amazonia. As we walked down the streets of Goroka, young men greeted Ian, exchanging jibes and salutations in Tok Pisin. We stopped to buy betel nuts and loose cigarettes from carts, and the gray-haired aunties selling their wares doted on him with tenderness and affection. An old soul at twenty-two, Ian’s life experiences had given him the poise of a man at least thirty. Later, he explained that his wontoks in Vanimo had asked him to look after me in Goroka because he knew how to fight well and knew the streets well; in other words, he could protect me if necessary. Each morning we brewed coffee and purchased fresh bread from a local bakery. After breakfast, we had another cup of coffee and a few cigarettes on the patio while we philosophized about life and love. An hour after the meeting, we were buddies; after two weeks, when the time came for me to depart Goroka, we were “blots,” brothers united as if by blood.

Ian’s first languages were Kafe, his Tok Ples, and Tok Pisin. Although he spoke fluent English, his thick accent belied the fact that he had only learned Standard English in high school. In Goroka, Ian had bounced between manual labor jobs and was no stranger to poverty, often consuming merely one meal per day and quelling his hunger pains with betel nuts and tobacco. He had moved to Goroka in his teens but had spent his childhood in a traditional Kafe village, one without electricity and inaccessible at times due to poor road conditions. The buildings of his village were made of wood and thatch, and he slept with his siblings, parents, and grandparents in the same room. They raised pigs and chickens and farmed tubers and highland fruits. Villages such as his were prone to raids from gangs of hooligans that roamed the countryside. Such marauders, known as “raskols,” are an epidemic throughout Papua New Guinea. Packing homemade guns fabricated from welded piping and machetes, raksols rape, rob, and pillage until stopped by the authorities, vigilantes, or rival gangs.

One fine evening while we were telling stories and sharing smokes around sunset, I asked Ian more about his life in the village. Earlier that day, he and I had ridden to a village a couple of hours away from Goroka where our friend Molly, another Kafe, had grown up and where her ninety-year-old grandfather lived. The village was no more than a small cluster of thatch huts, and the ancient grandfather, although blind, deaf, and mute, commanded the affection and reverence of a high priest among the villagers. Ian recounted how his own village, and countless others in the Highlands, were in fact quite similar. As the last sun rays illumined his face, I asked him how he had gotten the prominent scar that formed a crescent moon around his right eye. Ian explained that it was from a tribal battle wound.

When he was seventeen and living in the Kafe village, a bloody dispute arose with men in a village in another valley. The beef began when Ian’s uncle, a respected leader among the Kafe, was driving near the rival village and a gang of raskols stopped his truck. Recognizing them as Kafe, the drunk young men insulted Ian’s uncle and made sexual comments about his uncle’s wife, who was in the passenger seat. Ian’s uncle remained silent during the ordeal and eventually the young men got bored and walked away, cursing at them and reveling in their drunken vulgarity as they departed.

When he arrived at his own village, Ian’s uncle’s rage reached a boiling point, and he rallied his kinsmen to ride out the next day to seek revenge. The Kafe men decided that the score could only be settled with bloody retribution, even if it meant killing them. All the able-bodied men in the village were notified that, before daybreak, they would set out in a caravan of trucks to find the miscreants. Males as young as fifteen and as old as fifty joined the impromptu militia. I asked Ian if he was nervous the night before, and he said no. Even with the knowledge that the next morning he would risk his life, Ian slept soundly the night before the raid. I asked if the mothers and the wives in the village supported this approach, to which he shrugged and said that they really had no choice but to accept it.

The men reached the enemy village shortly before sunrise and expected to launch a surprise attack. The villages in the Highlands were small enough that individuals had few places to hide, and they wanted to find their targets shortly after arriving. If they could not find them, they would go after whatever men they could find until the perpetrators revealed themselves.

Unfortunately for the Kafe vigilantes, the intoxicated men had preserved enough of their wits to realize that they had started a serious feud. Instead of being caught by surprise, they and their own kinsmen waited in ambush. Ian and the Kafe fighters dismounted from their trucks and began to sneak into the village, but they were assailed with missiles from hidden enemies. Before they could process what was happening, the Kafe war party was wounded with stones, arrows, and even some bullets from homemade guns. Expecting fisticuffs, Ian’s kinsmen had not brought their own guns and quickly found themselves on the retreat. Fleeing back to the vehicles, a hurled stone cracked open Ian’s eye socket with an impact so hard that he briefly lost consciousness and fell. He could hear his comrades shouting and running away, and thankfully he was able to summon enough adrenaline to get himself off the ground and back to the trucks, saving his own life.

The men returned to their own village and assessed their damage. Many had been wounded but all had survived. The Kafe once again rallied and headed back into enemy territory, but this time with their weapons. Luckily, further violence was curtailed, as the elders from both sides agreed to resolve the dispute in a formal meeting. As the Highland custom dictates, a few days later the two warring parties met and exchanged gifts and began peace talks. The elders from the raskols’ village agreed to compensate Ian’s uncle for the young men’s insolence as well as for the damage from the skirmish. The payment would be made in cash and live pigs, the latter traditionally being one of the most prized possessions in the Highlands as well as acting as a symbol of wealth. After the exchange was complete, the cycle of violence was broken and peaceful relations between villages were effectively restored.

Ian explained that such conflicts were common in the Highlands, and villages and even whole ethnicities could get locked into blood feuds if such conflicts were not resolved in the initial stages. The violence was almost always rooted in three causes of conflict: women, land, and sorcery. Highland sorcerers were known as “sangumas,” and their dark arts, considered necessary for the protection and wellbeing of a village, were taken deadly seriously throughout Papua New Guinea. In fact, there was even a clause in PNG’s legal code forbidding witchcraft, on pain of legal prosecution. Every tribe and village had its sorcerer, usually a woman who lived in isolation from the rest of the village. They could propitiate the local spirits to ensure agricultural prosperity and healthy children, but they were also summoned to attack enemies on the spiritual plane.

I inquired with Ian how one could know when a sorcerer’s treachery was at hand, and he explained that the black magic usually manifested in illness, crop failure, and other unusual miseries in the village. If a village leader fell sick, there were methods to determine if the illness was natural or the result of sorcery. Sometimes the evil spirits summoned and sent by an enemy sorcerer manifested in dreams or could be sensed by another sanguma.

A village not far from Goroka, Asaro, was notorious and feared because of its sorcerers. The Asaro are frequently pictured in National Geographic-style exposés of the New Guinea Highlands for their “Mudmen” rituals, in which Asaro create grotesque masks out of clay intended to imitate the forms of the spirits who co-inhabit their rugged mountain homeland. The ritual is performed by the Asaro on an as-needed basis, whenever the elders feel that spiritual allegiances need to be reestablished or malevolent spirits need to be intimidated away. The Asaro were not feared as fierce warriors, but they were left alone and respected by other tribes due to the cunning of their sorcerers. Later in the day while on the street, I attempted to reopen the conversation about sangumas with Ian. He stiffened and admonished me solemnly: “Listen, brother—you can’t say that word in public places. Somebody might hear you and get the wrong idea…”

**

Since the earliest recorded accounts of this island by the ancient Chinese, New Guinea has been an island of enchantment but also of terror. Eventually, I felt comfortable enough to ask Ian about the phenomenon that the outside world usually associated with PNG: cannibalism. Tales of cannibalism and the ferocity of New Guinean warriors surely was part of the reason that this island remained isolated and relatively unexplored by outsiders until late into history.  Similar to the way Colombians quickly tire of and resent foreigners pressing them on cocaine and drug traffic, New Guineans loathe being questioned about this ancestral custom, as they are painfully aware that many in the Western world still picture them as cannibalistic savages. Nonetheless, Ian patiently explained the practice as he understood it.

As recently as a few generations ago, cannibalism was widely practiced throughout the island of New Guinea. Ian’s grandparents, who had been alive until late in his childhood, had eaten human flesh. In fact, his grandfather had been an influential Kafe leader who had vehemently denounced the encroachment of outsiders and Christianity into their territory. When foolhardy missionaries persisted in their efforts to contact and evangelize the Kafe, Ian’s grandfather had been one of the leaders in favor of killing and eating them. It was intended to send a message to other would-be intruders. Two missionaries, a man and a woman, met this fate. Their bodies were cooked and eaten, along with their leather shoes. The Kafe eventually converted to Christianity, but the incident with these missionaries remains alive in their collective memory to this day.

Cannibalism served as a form of psychological warfare in pre-contact New Guinea. As one Highlander explained to me, if you killed and ate one enemy, other enemies would be more likely to quickly surrender in the future. In addition to consuming “long pigs”—unlucky white-skinned intruders—to deter encroachment, cannibalism served to strengthen alliances and peace treaties between villages. Ian recounted that in his grandfather’s time his village maintained peace with a neighboring village by exchanging a chosen person from each village to be sacrificed and eaten. In fact, the ill-fated would be selected as a young child, and his parents and the other villagers understood that when the time came, usually around early adolescence, he would be offered as a gift to secure an allegiance. I asked how they could possibly choose a child to be sacrificed, and Ian claimed that usually it was a child the elders recognized would grow into a large and plump teenager; in other words, one that would be the most appetizing.

**

Before arriving in PNG, I had been warned about the violence. The cities, especially Port Moresby and Lae, have nasty reputations for their problems with raskols and gangs. Most of the raskols migrate from the Highlands down to the coastal cities in search of greater economic opportunity, dreams that almost always end in disillusionment and life in the slums. The slums, usually lacking even the most basic infrastructure and sanitation, sprawl out for miles in cities like Moresby, Lae, and Madang, and for long-term residents, especially foreigners, it was not a question of if but whenyou would get mugged at gunpoint. In the surprisingly quaint and handsome coastal city of Madang, a local pointed out to me the exact spot on the bridge we were crossing where the mayor’s son had been ambushed and hacked to death the week before.

Far from the cities, the Highlands were also no stranger to violence. For countless millennia, these hills have been watered with blood from tribal warfare, or intra-villages clashes like the one Ian described. Tragically, death and destruction have assumed unprecedented dimensions in recent decades due to the introduction of high-powered firearms and explosives, usually smuggled from China or the Indonesian army across the border. As Ian explained, warfare and raiding in the olden days were akin to an athletic contest, as the warriors would fight each other in small bands and with weapons like clubs and bows and arrows. Now, with modern weaponry, entire Highland villages can be massacred quickly. Recently, Highland elders from various tribes convened to codify official rules for tribal warfare, recognizing that technology has created a degree of destruction that would have been unimaginable for their ancestors.

In Lae, I crashed in the house of a young man I had befriended named Stephen, on the wooden floor of the permanent lean-to that was his home in the hills outside of the city. We exchanged tales deep into the night. Stephen had been one or two credits away from graduating from the University of Lae with a degree in engineering, except a drunken brawl with a cohort of campus security guards had gotten him expelled before graduation. Stephen was tall and sinewy and looked as if he could have been a good athlete if it had not been for his chain-smoking. His buddies called him “Iron Fist,” and he explained that many a scar he carried should have belonged to the friends he had saved by stepping in during street and bar fights.

Once, Stephen got stabbed and had to take himself to the emergency room. The brawl had started when a raskol, no older than fifteen or sixteen, had insulted him in front of a group of friends. Knowing that Stephen was bigger and stronger, the kid pulled out a blade in the hope that Stephen’s courage would fail. Reading the raskol’s eyes, Stephen could sense his fear and knew that the kid was incapable of lethally stabbing him. He stepped forward, crossing the point of no-return in a street fight. Stephen’s intuition was correct, and he landed a few hard punches on the kid’s head before the kid could react with the knife. While on the ground, the raskol’s blade entered Stephen’s shoulder, but by this point the adrenaline running through his body blocked out any pain. Within minutes, Stephen’s fists had rendered the boy unconscious. Luckily, there were not any large rocks on the ground, as Stephen stated that he probably would have bashed the boy’s head in if his hand had found one. This incident happened when a tribal war raged outside of Lae, and Stephen recounted how the emergency room that night was flooded with the corpses of the victims the conflict had claimed, most of the bodies having been hacked up with machetes.

Days later in another coastal city, a family boarded the bus I was riding. The husband grasped his wife’s arm, which held a small child. I noticed bright red fluid on the woman’s hair, neck, and clothes. My first thought was that it was betel nut juice that she had somehow spit it onto herself, but then I saw the gash on her skull. After a few stops, the family disembarked, and I asked a local what had happened. He explained that the woman’s husband had probably hit her on the head with the blunt side of a machete during a disagreement.

In spite of the violence that I had heard about and occasionally seen for myself, a brawl in a bar and an abrupt fight that erupted between two drivers after one cut the other off on the road, I felt safe in PNG. The locals, almost without exception, treated me with the highest courtesy and deep curiosity and warmth. Many were so joyfully surprised to meet a tourist that they insisted on engaging in long conversations, buying me beers, and sharing information about where they lived or their hometowns. Call it my good luck in finding good people, but even knowing that violence was commonplace, I felt that my new friends had my back as I navigated through their country. There was one moment in a club where a drunk young man yelled at me and seemed to want to fight, but Ian and a group of friends with whom he played rugby assured me that there was no need to worry.

**

The going in Papua New Guinea is rough. The lack of infrastructure can appall, traveling is undeniably more dangerous than in most countries, and the poverty you witness will not soon be forgotten. Despite the discomforts and lost weight, the days in PNG were exhilarating and eye-opening beyond what I could have ever expected. Barring illegally entering a Yanomami reservation in the Amazon, I have never before felt so acutely aware that I was entering a forbidden land, one that the internet and even travel writers had warned me not to explore. I would not revisit Papua New Guinea for the pristine nature, nor even to see more of its ancient culture. However, the friendships I forged during my short sojourn make me long to return. What deep, authentic souls graced my path at every step of the journey in PNG! Ian, Stephen, Veleen, Molly, Mattheus, Wolf, and many others—if you are reading this article, know that I consider you all my wontoks.

The New Guineans use the word “lewa” to refer to the emotional “heart,” and New Guineans are veritable giants of lewa. On this isolated island, among one of the Earth’s most ancient societies, hearts are wide open and as genuine as they come. The human warmth here never ceases to amaze me. After talking to a stranger on the street or at a food stall for less than ten minutes, they would end the conversation with a hug and “I love you.”

On my last day in the Highlands, some of Ian and Molly’s wontoks made a mumu and threw a going-away party in my honor. A mumu is a Highland delicacy in which meat, usually pork or chicken, is wrapped in thick layers of banana leaves along with aromatic herbs and coconut flesh and then placed for hours in a makeshift, subterranean oven dug into the earth. I would be disingenuous to praise the New Guinean cuisine—it usually was little more than rice and cheap sausage with nothing green in sight—however, the mumu was scrumptious, especially accompanied by copious rounds of White Can and local turmeric-infused liqueur, another Highlands specialty.

Once I reached the coast, I returned to Vanimo and hitchhiked to the Indonesian border. The driver cracked open a beer and lit a cigarette, a luxurious Cambridge brand smoke, not the hand-rolled brus that most smoked on the street. He offered me what he was having. The weeks here, attempting to live as the New Guineans lived, had left my body feeling polluted and tired almost to the breaking point. I had slept almost exclusively on floors and mats. Rodents had cohabited just about every place I had laid my head. I had skipped many meals. But fuck it, I thought, might as well celebrate—I wasn’t even sure I would survive three weeks in PNG. I accepted the intoxicants and reminisced on the journey that was now ending: Ian and Stephen, with whom I felt as close to as if I had known them for half my life; the sublime beauty of the misty Highlands and the sundrenched tropical cays of the coast, nature practically untouched; the deep conversations I had had while moving through country…It had all begun on this very same road three weeks ago. The luxury of Jayapura was almost too much to take. Here were modern buildings, cars, roads, and stores. The Indonesian food was almost too exciting after the bland diet that had sustained me in PNG. It started to sink in that I had just visited one of the world’s wildest corners. Relief mixed with nostalgia. I made it…I did Papua New Guinea with a backpack, motherf*cker…