Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
lost, something missing from my life as an American lawyer, I quit my job and began island-
hopping through Southeast Asia, an adventure that has brought me to Sandaun Province.
What I haven't reckoned on is the terrain. This morning, sitting next to an Australian mis-
sionary pilot in a little six-seater Cessna, I looked down and saw the Highland trails meander
through wide valleys and over rolling hills until they vanished in the needle-sharp peaks that
form the long spine of Papua New Guinea. We climbed up into the clouds, then swooped
below them again, through passes so narrow I could almost reach out and graze my fingers
alongfern-coveredmountainsides.Fromasmallplane,youcanseeeverythatchedhut,every
outhouse, every pathway leading to it. Here and there, peering into gaps too tight even for
the Cessna, I glimpsed a deep, sunless valley. At the bottom a dim clump of little huts lay
trapped, like children who'd fallen down an abandoned well.
Ishoutedtothepilot,Nigel,“Dothepeopleinthosevalleysevergetovertothenextvalley
to visit their neighbors?”
“No,” he yelled above the roar of the engine, “they live and die on that spot.”
Unlike other expatriates I'd met, Nigel didn't question my plans, just my choice of the
word
walk
to describe them. “Have a look down there! Do you see anywhere to walk? Do
you see any trails? You don't
walk
in Sandaun. You skid on your butt. You throw up. It takes
hourstosloguponelittle hill,andthesloggingmakesyousicktoyourstomach.Nottomen-
tion the sinkholes. Some mountains are so close that the bush on either side grows together
and hides the gaps between them. People have stepped into those sinkholes and disappeared
without a trace.”
Then the nose of the Cessna dropped abruptly, zeroing in on Tekin, and we dived into the
fog. Amazed he could land blind in such a narrow valley, I said it just didn't seem possible.
“True,” Nigel mused as we tilted into a curve, “according to the laws of science, it
isn't
possible. An airplane isn't supposed to be able to do this.” He turned to beam at me: “If it
weren't for the Lord, we'd probably crash.”
I searched his face to see if he was joking, but he wasn't. I stared at Nigel, at the neatly
ironed pilot's shirt-and-shorts with matching khaki knee-highs, at the ears jutting out at right
angles from his head, and the long-toothed Bobby Kennedy grin. To look at him, I would
have taken him for a scientist of some sort—a surveyor, perhaps, sent to ink in the last blank
valleys on a map hanging on the solid wall of a cartographic institute—an avatar of rational-
ity, anything but a loony who thought the Lord could hold an airplane in the sky. I knew his
words were meant to cheer me, but for the first time since coming to New Guinea, I felt a
shiver of real fear.
Once on the ground, I sort my supplies into two piles: things to haul up the mountainside
and things to leave behind. Other than a short, unpaved motor road leading to the village of
Kweptana, there's nowhere to walk out of Tekin but straight up, nothing but steep mountain
