Walking with the Cannibals.

by Prem Kumar Singh (India)

A leap into the unknown Papua New Guinea

"May I dry my sleeping bag near your fire", I asked hesitantly as I slowly walked inside the little thatched gazebo like structure that they had prepared for the night. It was raining heavily and they were all seated in a circle around the fire under the precarious looking thatched roof boiling some leaves and sweat potatoes for supper. I was aware that they wouldn't understand my words due to the immense language barrier but in such extreme conditions, people don't really need words to understand each other. They readjusted their positions and made space for me to sit near the fire and spread the sleeping bag over their feet to help me dry it faster. As I sat there that rainy night sharing their shelter and trying to converse with them using gestures and drawing and by pointing at things and calling it by their names in our respective languages, I could not even for once fathom that these are also the people who occasionally practise ritualistic cannibalism. This story begins when my Estonian friend Kristjan and I decided to climb the highest mountain in the continent of Oceania. As luck would have it, this mountain happens to be in the remote island of Papua New Guinea and is called Puncak Jaya. To reach to the specific island where the mountain of Puncak Jaya is we took a plane from Bali to Timika and from there we took a small plane (Cessna Caravan) and landed on the makeshift airstrip in the island of Sugapa. It is from Sugapa that our week long trek to the mountain begins. While, we had a fair bit of idea about what the actual climb is going to be like, we hadn't done a lot of research about the island itself and the trek that leads on to it. Owing to prior experience, we had thought that it going to a simple 4-5 days trek, the kind that most mountain expeditions entail to reach to the base camp. It was upon us landing in Sugapa and meeting the local guide did we really come to a realisation of where exactly had we brought ourselves. It was apparently the most remote island in the oceanian continent and a bone of contention between Indonesia and Australia. It was also where one of the biggest gold mines in the world was located and yet it was ridden with an absolute lack of any form of healthcare or modern education system or even roads. Some people wore only a penis protection pipe and red clay based war paint on their face and roamed around the village with their tribal bows and arrows. But amongst all other things, what was most interesting was the fact that a few tribes on the island are known to practise ritualistic cannibalism. And this particular piece of information was quite daunting to us, especially when the only plane that carried us to the island had now gone back. Over the span of the next 5 days, we went further inside the island negotiating ankle to knee deep bog and torrential rain. We were never sure what we were stepping on, as we couldn't see anything on the ground. Sometimes, we were stepping on roots in the bog, other times god knows what. And at every village that we crossed there was a meeting setup with the villagers and our porter team which entailed loud screaming and shouting from both the side, resulting in our heartbeats growing faster with every passing minute till the meeting was over. But throughout the expedition, the one things that I absolutely loved was how easy it was despite not knowing each other's language to interact with these people, how genuine their smiles were and how ready were they to go out of their way to make our lives slightly more comfortable. By the end of the expedition, I was sharing meals with them, I was dancing with them around the fire, laughing at their practical jokes and even leaning on them for help during the critical parts of the expedition. What seemed like a leap in the unknown turned out to be such a beautiful lesson in human connection.