Showing posts with label trekking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label trekking. Show all posts

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Beauty and the Beast: Hiking the GR20 in Corsica (Retrospective from September, 2015)

Cerro Castillo, Chile, November 28, 2015

When I was planning my farewell tour of Europe for the summer of 2015, one of the things that I knew had to be on the itinerary was hiking the famed GR20 trekking route in Corsica.  I’d heard it being talked about for years by hikers, often in hushed tones, and I thought it would make a fitting finale after several weeks of warming up for it by hiking in the Pyrenees. 

As detailed in the previous post, the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley (as Robbie Burns said).  After Terri received the news of her unexpected (and very un-Swiss) last-minute rescheduling of her Swiss citizenship ceremony, originally scheduled for September 16th but now postponed until September 30th, we frantically rescheduled and rebooked and by the evening of September 3rd we were in another 2-euro 2-hour bus from Gavarnie (where we had received the e-mail that put us into motion) to the nearest railhead at Tarbes and a cheap motel opposite the station. 

The next morning, September 4th, we jumped on a morning train to Toulouse.  After leaving my big hiking backpack in a left-luggage office of Byzantine complexity and incompetence at the station, we headed into town on foot.  One major objective was to buy myself a new camera lens to replace my much-loved, much-used and now completely broken Nikon 18-200 lens that had seized up as we left Cauterets a few days before.  We tried a slick professional shop that didn’t have the 18-200, but had an even more impressive 18-300 mm lens.  I was sorely tempted, but the prospect of having to buy all new filters (the 18-300 had a different diameter) made me hesistate.

We strolled further into the lovely historic centre of Toulouse, past the impressive Romanesque Church of St. Sernin and past hordes of university students undergoing a frosh week treasure hunt/ritual humiliation.  The main pedestrian drag, rue du Taur (named after a gruesome martyrdom involving a bull), was a buzzing, lively spot and we had an unexpected Asian lunch that went down well.  I made a fruitless sortie to another camera shop, then walked with Terri down to the Garonne River.  I was struck by the bilingual street signs, written in both French and Languedoc (Occitan), the language of a civilization in southern France destroyed by northern knights in the Albigensian crusade.  Toulouse was an important Roman city (Tolosa) before becoming a major centre of troubadour culture and the capital of the Languedoc region.  It’s nice to see that heritage being promoted today in the city.

On our way back to the first camera shop, we blundered into an electronics megastore, FNAC.  They had a sale going on, and had the 18-200 mm lens in stock.  I bought it, got the VAT back and ended up saving a fair bit of money.  Satisfied with my new purchase, we collected my bag from the station and took the subway, tram and city bus out to our hotel near the airport.

Modern Toulouse revolves around Airbus, which has its main factory beside the airport.  Outside our hotel, hundreds of Airbus employees in high-visibility vests were cycling home from work.  We dined on pate, wine, cheese and baguettes in our hotel room and threw ourselves into bed early.

The next morning we caught the bus and tram out to the airport and got on our Volotea flight to Bastia.  I had never heard of the airline, a Spanish-based budget carrier, and it marked the first time that I had ever flown on (or even heard of) a Boeing 717; another money-saving feature was that most of the flight crew were mainland Chinese.  At Bastia airport, we tried futilely to hitchhike to Calvi before finally giving up and taking a long, slow bus-train combination.  During our three-hour wait in Bastia town, we bought a map and guidebook (to replace the ones left behind in Leysin for Terri to bring back from her citizenship ceremony trip), had lunch and then took a leisurely, spectacular train ride to Calvi, only slightly delayed by a large forest fire whipped up by the gale-force mistral wind.  We got to Calvi after dark, found a campground and went to bed.

Early the next morning, September 6th, we crawled out of the tent, packed up rapidly and shared a truly exorbitant taxi with a Canadian couple, Maike and Brendan, to the trailhead at Calenzana.  For a 14 km ride that took about 12 minutes, the fare came to 50 euros.  In Corsica, as in much of the world, there are no poor cabdrivers.

The start of the trek was relatively straightforward, a 900-metre climb up a broad trail through typical lowland maquis vegetation to the Bocca u Saltu, a broad pass.  We had sweeping views down to the northwest coast, with Calvi a far-off citadel and the Mediterranean a still azure blue, yesterday’s gales completely gone. 
Terri on the first day, high above Calvi

After a lunch of sardines and bread, we set off on a long traverse and climb up through pine forests and over granite boulders to another pass, the Bocca a u Bazzuchellu.  There were sections of tricky scrambling and even a fixed chain at one part, making for some challenging manoeuvring while carrying a heavy pack. We took another break there before a final traverse, partly through a long stretch of burnt-out forsts, to the day’s refuge, l’Ortu di up Piobbu.  We were unpleasantly surprised to find almost every available tent site taken; September is supposed to be the off-season for the GR20, but apparently not this year.  As well, we learned that the previous day’s fires and winds had seen the first section of the trail officially closed, so there were two days’ worth of hikers setting out that day.  We eventually found a site quite far downhill from the hut, put up the tent, wandered uphill to the hut to sample some great cake, and then headed back to the tent for a great meal of roesti and sausage.  I was carrying more weight than almost any other hiker on the GR20, but at least it meant that we were eating better than most people.  We had a post-prandial taste of whiskey watching fog roll in, enveloping the granite peaks as the sun set.

First-night sunset
The second leg of the GR20 is where it starts to get serious.  The GR20 is often described as the most challenging long-distance hike in Europe, and it’s not because of horizontal distances covered, or vertical metres climbed.  Instead, it’s because of the relentless technical scrambling on several of the days, and this started right out of camp that day.  We rock-hopped and angled our way up big slabs of exposed rock all morning through a lovely birch forest.  Terri found it hard going, and I didn’t much enjoy having a heavy pack on my back for some of the trickier moves.  We topped out for the day at 2020m, lunched on sausage and peanuts and then headed into the mist for a long, tiring series of short, steep climbs.  We were almost alone, as we were more or less the last people out of camp in the morning after a leisurely breakfast of pancakes.  A party of Belgian students and a lone Israeli medical student caught up to us over the course of the afternoon, trekkers whom we would see over and over again during the coming days.  Finally, with Terri despairing of ever arriving, we slogged our unsteady way down an endless scree slope, rocks rolling underfoot constantly.
Seriously steep terrain on day two

We arrived to a scene reminiscent of this summer’s footage of Syrian refugees arriving in Europe.  The refuge, Carozzu, is located at a spot lacking in flat land, and every likely tent-sized spot was already taken. Just before dark, a young man dragged himself into camp, his knee cut to the kneecap and his wrist broken by a six-metre fall; he was evacuated the next morning after being stitched up by a doctor among the hikers.  We ended up staking out a narrow spot, too small to put up our tent, and sleeping out under the stars on our air mattresses.  Our sleeping bags were soon soaked with dew, although the moisture evaporated by the time we woke up the next morning.  The views of the stars, watching the Milky Way rotate slowly over our heads, were compensation for the lack of space. 
Light coming to the Spasimata gorge
We made a much more timely getaway the next morning, setting off before 8 o’clock thanks to Terri having mixed up some muesli the night before.  We knew that day three was supposed to be quite challenging, and we wanted to give ourselves enough daylight hours to complete it.  The fun and games began immediately, with a swaying suspension bridge, the Passerelle de Spasimata, to cross before we climbed steeply up a long box canyon, a route that involved lots of precarious scrambling on huge steeply inclined slabs of pink granite.  We were in a landscape of pure rock, almost unadulterated by the green of vegetation, tempered only by the crustal clear waters of the pools of water far below us in the bottom of the valley.  It was challenging going, with lots of hands-and-feet scrambling up very steep pitches.  Eventually we reached a tiny lake, near which I watched two moufflon (wild sheep) grazing on the opposite bank, looking for all the world like a pair of Thomson gazelle transplanted from Tanzania.  By the time I reached for my camera, the moufflon had slipped quietly into an adjoining patch of bush from which they did not reappear.
Really?  This is a trekking route?  Day three
We eventually, after almost four hours, made our way to the Bocca Muvrella, a pass with breathtaking views down both sides.  From there on, although we had little net vertical gain left, the day only got harder, with a tough downclimb followed by a rugged traverse to the last pass of the day, another Bocca whose name escapes me now.  At times we had to take off our backpacks and pass them down before climbing down gingerly.  Any misstep, while not necessarily fatal, would have meant a helicopter ride and lots of pain.  It was physically and mentally draining, and even the final downhill to the ski resort of Haut Asco was a long series of careful short steps on sliding scree.  It was a profound relief to walk into the pine forests of Asco and finally swing our legs freely and stride forward at a normal walking pace.  We camped in a beautiful spot that evening under pine trees, and slept the sleep of the dead.
On the way between passes, day three

The fabled fourth stage of the GR20, through the Cirque de Solitude, used to be the toughest stretch of the whole route.  However, in June this year a big landslide killed 6 hikers in the Cirque, leading the authorities to close this route.  The alternatives are a bus ride down and around the Cirque (and the next day’s stage too), or a long climb almost over the highest peak in Corsica, the Monte Cinto.  Shellshocked by the previous two days, we opted for the soft option, and at 9:00 the next morning we boarded a bus for a slightly hair-raising ride down the valley into the lowland town of Ponte Leccio, through which we had passed four days previously in the train.  A brief stop there allowed us to buy steak and eggs for a slap-up dinner, before a remarkable road led us up through the Scala de Santa Regina (“the staircase of Santa Regina), one narrow lane pushed thorugh a precipitous gorge.  It was slightly white-knuckle stuff, with our driver aggressively forcing her way past befuddled German tourists, but we suddenly emerged into an inland highland basin, the Niolo, and hopped off the bus in Albertacce at 11:30 ready to walk.  The other hikers—Celine (one of the Belgian students), Alban (a middle-aged Frenchman from Grenoble) with his 71-year-old father and 68-year-old uncle, and a Swiss student—soon left us behind, but Terri and I didn’t mind.  We were revelling in the walk, through pine forests and open, rocky chaparral reminiscent of Montana.  It was a joy to be able to stride along without constantly looking at our feet.  We barely noticed the 600 metres of climbing, and got to Castellu di Vergio, another ski resort, in enough time to take steaming hot showers and do laundry.  It felt like trekking the way we were both used to.
Terri enjoying the easier walking on day four near Albertacce

The one thing that continued not to feel like trekking was my left hip.  Every night my hip locked up completely, and I could barely get to my feet.  Getting out of the tent was an inelegant affair, as I crawled like a commando through the door, rolled onto my side and slowly got my right foot under me.  Finally, with agonizing slowly, I would straighten my left leg, wincing in pain and hobble around.  After half an hour, I would be able to walk, and during the day my mobility wasn’t too badly impaired, but rock climbing the toughest parts of the route was slow and painful.  I was at a loss what to do; I took ibuprofen and aspirin, but this did little to make whatever was wrong get better, and the next morning I would be doing my imitation of a 90-year-old once again.
A distant view of Ajaccio and its coastline

Col de San Pietru, above Castellu Vergio
The feeling continued the next day as we covered more distance on the map than ever before on wide, easy trails leading to a lovely alpine tarn, the Lac de Ninu.  It was surrounded by pozzini, the flat grasslands so prized by Corsican herdsmen (perhaps because they’re so rare!).
Terri and tiny equine friend, Lac de Ninu
The horses grazing beside the lake reminded me forcefully of a wonderful trip through Mongolia back in 2007.  A sun-soaked picnic beside the lake and we were off for an afternoon of quick walking through a landscape of amazing dead trees looking very Ansel Adams-esque, finally climbing to a cheerful (but still overcrowded) campsite at Mangannu, where we met a number of groups who had walked over the Cirque de Solitude and then done a double stage to catch up to us. 

Day five scenery
Strangely, although it was by far the easiest walking of the route so far, Terri complained that evening of a sore left ankle and shin.  We knew that the next day was going to be our last stage of tough scrambling, so we studied the map for alternative routes, but they involved enormously long marches around the mountains, so Terri decided to tough it out for another day.

It was, as advertised, a long hard slog form Mangannu to Pietra Piana.  We climbed steeply out of camp, up, up, up to a narrow gap in a steep arête.  So far the footing had been fine, but the subsequent series of traverses and short up-and-down pitches was really hard, with lots of scrambling on all fours, hopping across boulderfields and occasionally lowering our packs down in front of us.  With her sore leg, this was a painful day for Terri, reducing her to tears at one point.

The scenery was stunning, looking down on a series of tiny jewel-like lakes surrounded by a chaos of rock faces and rockfalls.  Eventually we made one final traverse, climbed past a tiny hidden meadow, over a final ridge and saw the refuge directly below us.  The clouds, mist and threat of rain that had dogged us all day dissipated and we arrived in bright sunshine at the best campsite of the hike.  Our tent site was below and away from the main cluster, perched on the edge of a cliff giving epic views down the valley and over the next day’s route.  It was a wonderful place to watch the setting sun light distant peaks aflame while sipping some of the local wine sold by the hutkeeper.
Last evening of camping, Pietra Piana

The view from Pietra Piana
Terri’s foot was now much worse, with either tendinitis or a sprain the likeliest culprits.  We decided to avoid the long two-stages-in-one-day march that most of our fellow hikers were planning, and instead follow the river valley all the way down to a roadhead.  It was a good choice, both for the relative ease of walking and for the stunning river.  We hiked past a series of perfect swimming holes, each more perfect than the previous one, and finally took the plunge in a secluded pool.  It was chilly water, but it felt wonderful on our unwashed skin, and the granite boulders lining the pool made it easy to bask in the sun afterwards and warm up. 
Lovely swimming pools on the last day

Eventually we passed a small bergerie where we shared a beer and tasted the local sheep’s cheese before an endless plod past more bathing spots brought us finally to the road at the tiny hamlet of Caniglia.  By now Terri could hardly walk because of the pain in her leg, and a French couple in a camper van took pity on us and gave us a lift to the main highway at Vivariu.  It was a long hobble to the train station, but by 6:30 we were in the old inland capital Corte.  We planned to take a day off to recover and to celebrate my 47th birthday on September 13th, but after a visit to the hospital the next day, punctuated by a dramatic encounter with a histrionic shouting nurse, we were both ordered to cease and desist from hiking for at least a week.  My sciatica, which had been with me all trip, suddenly took a big turn for the worse on that last day, and I was hobbling as badly as Terri.  Our GR20 was over at the halfway mark.  At least we had completed the harder half of the route before quitting.

My overall take on the GR20 is that it lives up to its mystique, but not in the way I expected.  The toughness of the walk is not in its vertical metres climbed, or its horizontal kilometres covered.  It’s in the technical challenges of scrambling and semi-rock climbing with a full backpack, and in the very real physical risk of a slip or a tumble, as well as the mental stress of doing this on every step for hours on end.  The three non-technical days we did (Albertacce-Castellu Vergio on day 4, Castellu Vergio-Mangannu on day 5 and our walk out on day 7) were joys:  easy walking with great views.  I suspect that the southern half of the walk would have been like this too.  The legendary technical stages, origin of the GR20’s hair-raising reputation, are a do-able challenge, with stunning views, but the mental grind of having to choose every foothold and handhold with care detracts a bit from the fun of walking in the mountains.  I greatly preferred the walking we did in the Pyrenees.

The other part of the GR20 that is sub-par is accommodation, with overcrowded refuges that charge very high prices for everything and have dubious sanitation and not enough space (in most cases) for tents.  The GR20 is a victim of its own popularity in this respect. 

Would I come back to finish the GR20 in the future?  Maybe, although it’s not at the top of my to-do list.














An All-Too-Brief Taste of Trekking in the Pyrenees (Retrospective: August-September 2015)

Cerro Castillo, Chile, November 28, 2015

After a couple of weeks of recharging, both mentally and physically, at my father’s house in Thunder Bay, I returned to Leysin in late August.  One thing that didn’t recharge at all was the condition of my left leg, where sciatic pain had only gotten worse, rather than improving.  I had hoped that rest and relaxation would let the problem heal itself, but this proved not to be the case.  I woke up in the morning, or even in the middle of the night, with my left hip so sore and tight that I could hardly get out of bed.  Hardly the best preparation for six weeks of hiking in the Pyrenees and Corsica!

I had wanted to hike the Pyrenees for many years, ever since my late uncle Piet told me stories of hiking the length of the entire range back in the early 1990s.  The Pyrenees sounded much less full of hikers and climbers and cars than the Alps, and somewhat wilder.  I realized that Terri and I didn’t have time to walk the entire length, but the central part, from the Col de Pourtalet to Andorra, looked like a doable three-week project.  We bought Ton Joosten’s guidebook, The Pyrenean Haute Route, and picked a segment of the route that looked like being the right length and difficulty.  I liked the fact that Joosten’s route went back and forth across the Spanish-French frontier, staying away from the lowlands and more-trafficked routes like the GR10 and GR 11.  Terri finally found out about the date of her naturalization ceremony to become a Swiss citizen in August, and we planned our trip around that.  We would hike for nineteen days from August 26th to September 13th, then Terri would fly back to Switzerland from Toulouse, I would stay to do a few days of hiking, and then we would reunite in Nice on September 16th to catch a ferry to Corsica to hike the GR20 for two weeks. 

It sounded like a good plan, and we were excited as we took a day-long train trip from Leysin, via Lausanne, Lyon and Montpellier, to the town of Pau.  We sat in the sun outside Lyon Port-Dieu train station while waiting for a connection, eating sandwiches and soaking up rays, enjoying the sensation of both of us being free (Terri had just finished her final term of teaching) and talking about our upcoming hike.  

Henri IV's palace in Pau
We got to Pau around 8:30 pm, put our heavy packs into our “apart-hotel” and scoured the town for restaurants that were still open.  We found a great little Mexican restaurant run by two Sri Lankans (as you do in a small city in France), then blundered into the sound and light show at the old palace of Henry IV.  We learned a lot about the life and times of one of France’s more exceptional kings, a Protestant king of a largely Catholic country racked by horrific inter-religious strife oddly reminiscent of present-day Iraq or Syria.  Pau looked like the sort of city that might repay a bit more exploration one day.

The next morning, Wednesday August 26th, we were up early and off to catch a bus.  By 8:00 we were on a local bus to the Col de Pourtalet, an absolute steal at two euros for a two-stage trip up the beautiful Val d’Ossau that took almost two hours.  We missed our jumping-off point, and had to wait for the bus to turn around at the top of the pass and start its return trip to get to our trailhead.  We hopped off, shouldered packs and were off, heading steadily uphill up a green, beautiful valley.  Looking back, we could see the steep grey mass of the Pic du Midi d’Ossau rising behind us.  The Pyrenean Haute Route stage we were following started up near the summit in a mountain refuge, and by starting at the road, we were saving over an hour, resulting in a day that was supposed to be 6:45 in length, according to the Joostens guide.  It was supposed to be challenging but doable trekking, with spectacular scenery.  We were quite keen to get going and we stormed off uphill, through a pleasant stretch of forest before the trail levelled off a bit to ascend a valley.  We passed a shepherd’s hut surrounded by sheep.  As we continued climbing, we looked back to see twenty or so griffon vultures circling in the sky, then dropping down near the hut to feast on something dead, presumably a sheep.  The Pyrenees are home to 90% of Europe’s population of griffon vultures, the largest birds in Europe.
Terri heading off on our first morning

Our route continued uphill to our first pass, the Col d'Arrious at 2259 metres, some 900 metres above our starting point.  We sat and ate sandwiches looking back towards the Val d’Ossau before advancing a bit to a pretty lake where we had another snack and turned our attention to the first of the “challenging sections” mentioned in the guidebook, the Passage d’Orteig.  
Reservoir near the Passage d'Orteig
It looked frankly terrifying, a traverse of a vertiginous cliff, equipped with chains.  We set off, missing the path the first time, and while it was uncomfortable at times because of our big packs, almost borderline rock-climbing, it was far less impossible than it had looked from afar.  We breathed a sigh of relief once we had struggled up the last steep section and looked down on the Refuge de Arremoulit.  It was easy walking down to the refuge, built next to a pretty lake (the area was dotted with tiny lakes, filling small depressions in the granite), and we treated ourselves to beer and omelettes there.  It was relatively late, almost 4:00 pm, by the time we got going.  We weren’t too worried, as it was supposed to be about two and a half hours to the next refuge and we had almost five hours of daylight left.

As it turned out, we should have been worried.  Our path led us around the lake and then steeply up a tortured landscape of gigantic shattered boulders.  There was no path markers, and finding the best way up was no easy task, as many of the boulders were loose and threatened to tip sideways under our weight and send us sprawling.  As we made our way up slowly, a pair of women accompanied by a twelve-year-old boy appeared, coming downhill.  They looked concerned that we were heading uphill so late, although they told us that once we were over the pass, the path markers would resume, making navigation simpler.
Path?  We don't need no stinking path!

This turned out to be a bit of an untruth.  We came over the top of the pass, the Col de Palas (2517 m) and looked down into Spain, where a reservoir sparkled blue against the shattered red and black rocky landscape.  We found a few reassuring splashes of red and white paint marking the way, and followed them diagonally downward to the left, towards an immense rockslide.  We could see where the next pass, the Porte du Loveda (2600 m) must be, but it wasn’t clear where the path would lead from the rockslide to the pass.  As we picked our way painstakingly onto the rockslide, we completely lost the paint markers.  It took a lot of time to find a decent way across, constantly searching in vain for the next marker.  A lightly-laden trekker came up behind us, moving quickly, and crossed the rockfall above us.  We tried to follow his route, but it was never clear that we were following a real path.  Across the rockslide, we walked approximately along the path of the other hiker, now rapidly approaching the pass, and tried to keep him in sight to get a feeling for the path. 

It was slow going, and it took forever to find the paint marks again.  We followed them upwards towards the Porte du Loveda, all the while watching the other hiker bound uphill like a mountain goat and disappear out of sight.  He seemed to be following a different route than that indicated by the paint markers, and so when we once again lost the path, after searching in all directions for more markers, we decided to follow the other man as he seemed to know where he was going.  The climbing got more and more precipitous, and eventually Terri decided that we must have made a wrong turn.  I left my pack with her and went ahead to scout.  I found a way up to where the other man had vanished from sight, but the descent on the other side was more or less impossible without a rope, harness and bolts.  On the bright side, though, I could see a well-trodden path descending from further right along the ridge. I came back down and we considered our options.  I thought we should retreat downhill to the lake to camp and try again in the morning, but Terri was all for pushing on and getting to the hut. 

We cast around again, rather like Hash House Harriers, and finally came up with the paint flashes.  They led uphill further to our right and we followed, grateful to have found the right route.  The route grew more and more vertical, to the point where we were more or less rock-climbing with no rope and carrying huge packs.  While working my way up a vertical chimney, the fuel bottle that I had attached to the outside of my pack came loose and fell against a rock, breaking the fuel pump which was projecting from the top of the bottle.  This was a major loss, as it meant that we could not cook.  We had other, more pressing concerns, though, as Terri was barely able to get up the steep slope, even after passing her backpack up to me.  Finally, though, with about an hour of daylight left, we were across the pass and had only the downhill (an hour, according to the book) between us and the refuge.

We set off downhill into French territory again, following paint markings, and began traversing to our right.  Everything went well until we got to another rockslide with no markers to be found.  We cast around again and found nothing, but the only practicable path seemed to lead downhill.  It was a slow, hard descent requiring big vertical drops on each step and treacherous footing on the loose rocks.  All the time it was getting darker, and once we realized that the ground in front of us was heading towards a cliff, we were in trouble.  At this point I was finally able to convince Terri that we wouldn’t make it to the refuge, and that we had to find someplace to bivouac.  I scouted ahead and found a small area that was less steep (I won’t say flat) where we could spend the night.  Terri was just about done, and I had to do a few trips up and down a pretty steep fifty metres of trail to shuttle our bags down.
Our tilted bivouac spot on the first night

It was an uncomfortable night, with both of us exhausted and yet worried about sliding downhill and over a cliff in our sleep.  We forced down a few nuts and raisins, laid down our ground sheets and mattresses and fell asleep.  It was a majestic setting, with a sky full of stars and the moon lighting up the massive rock ramparts on the other side of our little valley.  I awoke a few times in the night from big gusts of wind, looked around to admire the views, and fell asleep again.   If we weren’t lost and tired and worried about sliding downhill (which didn’t happen), it would have been a perfect, memorable night.

In the morning, we ate a few nuts and raisins, drank some water and began the tortuous ascent back up towards the path.  After 40 tough minutes, we were back where we had lost the path previously.  We knew, from observations made as we climbed, that the real path had to stay high and traverse to avoid the cliffs.  It took a lot of wandering in circles to find a distant cairn that led to paint markers.  It was still challenging walking, but at least we knew we were on the right path again.  We circled a long way to the right before starting to descend through another valley that looked like the aftermath of a giants’ rockfight.  Inexplicably, we chose to wander off the path again as two ascending hikers seemed to be following a more direct route down to a large lake.  Needless to say we got lost again when the cairns ran out, but by now we were determined not to backtrack, and managed to find a route to the lake, where we picked up paint markers again.  It was still a good hour and a half of walking to get to the hut, with several ups and downs to avoid cliffs, but now we were back in well-trodden territory, and there were no major difficulties in reaching the Refuge de Larribet, although it took us a total of three and a half hours from our bivouac spot.  The timings in the Joosten book seemed to be highly optimistic, and (at least for us) not a reliable guide to real time taken.

At the hut we demolished more omelettes and beer, chatting to a local hiker, before starting the long trudge down to the roadhead at Plan d’Aste.  We needed to find a place to replace the broken fuel pump, and we had also decided that it was time to reassess our route plans.  It was a beautiful hike along a wide, easy path, past green forests and burbling brooks, and by 4:15 we were at the end of the road, wondering how easy it would be to hitch a lift down to Lourdes.  As it turned out, it was simple; the second car that went by picked us up, bought us a beer in a local café, took us by a hiking shop in Arzeles-Gazost (no luck with finding an MSR pump) and then went out of their way to drop us in downtown Lourdes.  We ended up doing well with hitchhiking in the Pyrenees, which is just as well as there is minimal public transport in a lot of the smaller valleys.

Lourdes was a surprisingly rewarding spot to spend the night.  I knew very little about Lourdes except that the Virgin Mary was supposed to have appeared there.  I didn’t realize what a huge tourism centre it is, rather like (in my friend Mark’s phrase) “Ibiza for Catholics”.  We found a cheapish hotel (having hundreds of hotels brings competition), staggered there with our packs, and then went out to explore.  We passed by the grotto where St. Bernadette had her visions in the mid-1800s.  Thousands of votive candles were blazing in dozens of stands outside, while wheelchairs carried those unable to walk and hoping for a miracle. Food was plentiful and relatively cheap (11 euros for a big steak with chips), catering to the pilgrims from every corner of the world.  We identified tourists from Poland, Italy, Spain, Sri Lanka, India, Nigeria and Samoa, among many other countries.  After dark, we headed to the huge church to watch the candlelit procession.  It was a really moving experience, even for a non-religious person like me.  The sheer number of pilgrims, the heartfelt Ave Maria being sung en masse, the hundreds of wheelchairs in the front rows, the thousands of candles lighting up the square, made for a spectacle to equal Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, the Barkhor in Lhasa, Mt. Kailash in Tibet or the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.
Candlelit procession in Lourdes
The next morning, after sleeping for 10 solid hours and waking up to aching muscles, backs and (in my case) my left hip, we made use of the urban facilities available.  We bought new maps and hiking guides, having decided that the GR10 was more our speed.  I looked around, realized that MSR fuel pumps were thin on the ground, and took to the internet to find a solution.  A French online shop, monrechaud.fr, had pumps in stock and would deliver Poste Restante to any French post office.  I bought the pump and had it shipped to Les Cauterets, where we should arrive in three days’ time.  I was glad to solve that problem, and we headed out to have a picnic in the huge park across the river from the grotto.  We wanted to restart our hiking from Arrens, and there was no public transport leading there.  We caught a bus in the late afternoon from Lourdes to Arzeles-Gazost and then trudged a long way through town, trying to find a spot to hitchhike.  It wasn’t easy to find a spot along a busy, narrow road leading to the Col d’Aubisque, but eventually a thirty-something sawyer driving a cargo van stopped and drove us a long way out of his way to deliver us to Arrens, another very positive hitching experience.  We found a beautiful riverside campground and went out for delicious burgers in the village.  That night was a full moon, and we watched it rise over the mountains, with trees silhouetted against its face.
Full moon in Arrens seen through the trees

We woke to a tent absolutely soaking with dew.  It was our first night in the new ultralight three-man tent that Terri had recently bought, the Big Agnes Copper Spur 3.  Summer was definitely thinking of leaving town, and there was an autumnal nip in the air as we packed up the campsite.  Leaving Arrens, we felt as though we were re-launching our Pyrenees trip.  The GR10, the long-distance path leading from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, was broad and well-marked, leading through hardwood forests.  Sadly a big landslide had wiped out a section of the path, meaning that we had to backtrack, take a detour and walk along a road for longer than I would have liked.  Within an hour, we had crossed the Col des Borderes (a lovely short cycling route that looked appealing) and were headed back down into the adjacent valley and the village of Estaing.  We dropped down to its pretty church and headed upstream along a small river which made for a perfect picnic spot, complete with ripe blackberries growing on the bank.  We weren’t very far from the road that runs up the valley, but traffic was light and the noise of the rushing water drowned out most traffic sounds.  We eventually pulled away from the road and climbed up and down over a couple of small ridges, startling a small snake, a toad and several lizards which were sunning themselves on the path.  
At Lac d'Estaing








We sweated our way up the final slope leading to Lac d’Estaing, where we had a well-earned beer in a small restaurant and chatted with a couple of retired Cognac producers; when we went to pay our bill, we discovered that the other couple had paid for our beers.  We walked for another half an hour around Lac d’Estaing, a shallow body of water surrounded by steep mountains on two sides and a gently sloping basin on the other two.  Since it was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, lots of daytrippers had driven up to the lake, but it didn’t feel too crowded.  We put up our tent in a small campground and then wandered down to have a delicious (but expensive) meal at the lakeside restaurant beside the campground.  After dinner we sat out beside the lake, watching the sunset, drinking wine and feeling at peace with the world.
Lac d'Estaing makes Terri pensive

We got up at 7:00 the next morning, but only started walking at 9:40, a typically lazy start to our day.  My hip, which had been getting sorer by the day, was almost completely seized up with sciatic pain the next morning and I almost fell over as I tried to get out of the tent and stand up.  Luckily walking seemed to loosen things up, so by the end of the day I was much more mobile (although I still couldn’t swing my left leg with the knee straight, meaning that I had to limp slightly throughout the day).  We took our time over a couple of coffees to give Terri her morning caffeine fix before heading uphill along the GR10, climbing steeply uphill away from the lake.  As we walked along, a few groups of mountain bikers came racing past downhill.  Just as we left the forest and passed a shepherd’s hut, my beloved 18-200 mm camera lens, which had been showing signs of not working optimally for a few weeks, suddenly locked up completely, no longer zooming or focussing.  I tried to coax it back into zooming, but my efforts were rewarded by an audible crunch and the cessation of all movement.  After more than eight years of work and many thousands of photos, the lens was no more.  That left me with only my telephoto lens working, which was great for wildlife and birds and details, but not for landscape.  My smartphone has a camera, but it’s hardly the same thing as a digital SLR.  Until I could replace it, my photography was going to be severely curtailed, which didn’t make me very happy.

Terri storming up the Col d'Illheou
We continued steaming ahead toward the 2242-metre-high Col d’Illheou, until just below the top, when our legs got a bit tired and we stopped for a picnic.  The top of the pass was a beautiful grassy meadow, full of well-tended horses, with steep rocky peaks looming above.  Under a cloudless sky, the scenery was perfect and I mourned the loss of my lens.  We meandered around on a long traverse to the Refuge d’Illheou, where we had our obligatory omelettes and beers, before starting a very long trudge down a steep-sided valley towards Les Cauterets.  A spectacular waterfall erupted into the valley partway down, and up above we could see the lifts of a small ski area, Lys.  We eventually passed the bottom of the lift system, where more mountain bikers were barrelling down towards town.  It was a surprisingly long descent into Cauterets, down at 850 metres, and it took us a while longer to find a campground.  We put up our tent under trees on lush grass and then went into town to find cheap eats; burgers and fries and beers did the trick, and we wandered back to our well-earned sleep.

We took the next day off, as the weather forecast called for severe storms.  Our first order of business was to pick up the fuel pump at the post office.  We wandered around the town, a Belle Epoque spa town that now has an appealing atmosphere of slightly faded gentility, then retreated to our campground with a roast chicken and salad feast for lunch.  Afterwards, I wrestled with the stove; the new pump worked perfectly, but the methylated spirits I had bought in the grocery store did not work as a fuel.  A bit of internet searching on the smartphone revealed that MSR stoves run on kerosene, gasoline or white fuel, but not methylated spirits, so we eventually headed back into town and bought some expensive white fuel.  At 7 euros a litre, it’s the cleanest and hottest-burning fuel, but at five times the price of gasoline, I find it hard to justify buying it too often.  I bought the fuel at a wonderful mountaineering and trekking shop called Sherpa, run by a Nepalese guy; it reminded me forcefully of the shops in Thamel where I have outfitted myself for a few treks over the years.  It began raining as we walked back to the campground, and we huddled under an awning and ate bread and pate and leftover chicken from lunch.  It continued raining all night, sometimes torrentially, not making for a restful night.

We began the next day lazily, not even popping our heads out of the tent until 9, when the rain finally showed signs of stopping.  We celebrated having a working stove by cooking up some bacon and eggs.  Around noon we walked into town, where we found we had a couple of hours to wait for the next bus up the road to Pont d’Espagne.  We stuck our thumbs out instead, and quite quickly got a lift with a couple of sixty-something women who crammed us and our backpacks into the back seat of a very small Renault for the twenty-minute drive up a steep escarpment to the trailhead at Pont d’Espagne.  
Lac d'Aube
We thanked them and then headed off uphill through a wonderful Canadian Shield landscape of tumbling streams, granite boulders and pine trees.  We reached a tiny lake, the Lac d’Aube, where we sampled the local speciality, gateau Basque, before heading further uphill, through an enchanting valley of amazing waterfalls, picturesque granite slabs and expansive views out towards higher peaks.  We stopped to picnic on bacon and egg sandwiches in the midst of this idyllic area, then continued climbing into the gathering mist until we reached the Refuge des Oulettes de Gaube at 2150 metres.  We put up our tent, then wandered over to the refuge to escape the cold and damp and have a beer.  When we got back, the mist had parted slightly and afforded us our first glimpse of the massive north face of the Vignemale, the highest peak in the French Pyrenees at 3298 metres, before the mist curtain closed again.  As we cooked dinner, we could hear the intimidating sound of a falling serac and its attendant rockfall; it was too far away to affect us, but it sounded very, very close indeed in the fog.
Vignemale

We had a great night’s sleep, and the next morning we didn’t start to stir until almost 8:00, as it was too cold to want to get up before then.  We cooked pancakes, cleaned up and then started walking around 10:00.  Our day’s stage was going to lead us over the highest pass on the entire GR10, and Terri wanted to get over it before the predicted bad weather appeared.  We climbed steeply up the valley wall, staring out at the Vignemale, now fully visible under clear skies.  We got to the top of the Hourquette d’Ossons (2734 m) by 12:30, and then dropped down into a greener but steeper world on the other side.  We descended to the Refuge de Baysellance for cake and a chat with two young British university students.  We could look across towards Gavarnie and the dramatic peaks behind it, including the well-known Breche de Rolland.  They dropped out of sight as we lost height quickly in a landscape of spectacular waterfalls on all sides, some descending from the glaciers that cloaked the south side of Vignemale.  It seemed as though every five minutes another high waterfall cascaded into view, splitting a forbidding grey rock face with a glittering spout of water.  
Waterfalls below Baysellance
The slopes were alive with marmots, whistling in alarm at our approach  We eventually got down to a dam, the Barrage d’Ossoue, and had another snack beside the water before ambling further down the valley.  We traversed high above the river, cutting through big meadows grazed by herds of cows, although the bucolic peace was shattered by a helicopter shuttling construction materials to a tiny dam.  We passed the Cabane de Lourdes, marked on our map as a possible spot to shelter, but it looked absolutely grim inside so we kept on going.  The next little cabane, the Cabane de Sausse Dessus, was much better, so we moved in, putting our air mattresses in one tiny room and cooking in the kitchen.  We knew that storms were likely that evening, so sleeping indoors sounded like a good idea.  We had the place to ourselves, and it was a lovely location, surrounded by cows and grassy meadows and steep rock faces.  We sat outside, sipping a sundowner dram of whisky before moving inside to cook up miso soup, hash browns, sausages and mushrooms, a veritable feast.  It felt good to sleep under a solid roof that night.

At about 3 am the heavens opened in a Biblical downpour, accompanied by deafening thunderclaps and dazzling lightning.  It made us even more glad to be indoors, although we didn’t sleep as well as we might have.  The next morning we woke to find that the rain had flooded down the chimney in the kitchen, soaking the floor; luckily we hadn’t put anything important on the floor in the kitchen!  We boiled up some oatmeal for breakfast before setting off towards Gavarnie.  It took us longer than expected, two and a half hours, to get to Gavarnie, through a landscape that would have been impressive if it hadn’t been wreathed in dense fog.  We arrived in town hoping to find a computer to use to fill out an application form that we needed for our upcoming Antarctic trip, and ended up in a café with wi-fi trying to type on our tiny smartphone screens.  As we nursed expensive fries and beers, we caught up on e-mail, which brought important and unwelcome news.  Terri’s citizenship ceremony had been changed from the 16th to the 30th of September, which meant that we had to re-schedule everything in our trip.  We had to leave the Pyrenees and head straight to Corsica to do the GR20 before Terri flew back to Leysin, and that meant we had just finished our Pyrenees walk after 7 days of walking, instead of the planned 20 days.  I was annoyed at the Swiss government for being so disorganized, but Terri was more annoyed since it cost her a small fortune in missed flights, new flights and missed hotel reservations. 

I loved the Pyrenees, even if our time was drastically curtailed.  I found it wilder than most of the Alps, and not very busy with hikers.  I would gladly come back to work my way east from Gavarnie to Andorra or beyond, as I felt that no sooner had we gotten into the rhythm of walking than we were torn away.  I also would love to base myself somewhere in the Pyrenees for a week or two of road cycling on the classic passes like the Col de Tourmalet and the Col d’Aubisque.  Two thumbs up to the area, and I hope to be back some day to see more dramatic landscapes!


Monday, October 19, 2015

New Guinea: The ugly, the good and the wonderful (Retrospective from July and August, 2014)

Ottawa, October 19, 2015

The Ugly:  Papua New Guinea

On July 21st, 2014, I flew from Honiara after eleven expensive but interesting days in the Solomon Islands. My destination was Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea.  PNG would be my 117th country, and I was looking forward to it, although it was clear from reading my Lonely Planet that it was also going to be an expensive experience.  The LP also talked about what a dangerous, menacing city Port Moresby is, so I had already bought a connecting ticket to head on to Madang, on the north coast, later the same day.

When I got off the airplane in Port Moresby   , I headed to join the visa-on-arrival queue.  I was one of only two people in the line, while the adjacent queue, for foreigners already possessing a residence permit, consisted of two planeloads of Aussies headed to work in mines and a giant natural gas development in the interior.  They were a menacing-looking group, hard-faced men with bulging biceps, tattoos and shaven heads; I wouldn’t have wanted to run into any of them on a dark night outside a pub.  PNG is full of expats, mostly Aussies, running the extractive resource sector; PNG was an Aussie protectorate for decades before independence in 1975 and Australia still dominates its former colony economically, as well as giving $500 million a year in foreign aid in return for PNG housing boat people who try to reach Australia in a notorious internment facility on Manus island.  A number of top civil servants in PNG have been Australians over the years, although lately relations have cooled noticeably.

As I sat waiting for my flight to Madang, I listened in on a conversation between two Aussie miners and a newly-arrived rookie colleague.  They were headed up to the highlands, to Mt. Hagen, and the veterans were telling blood-curdling stories about how dangerous conditions are for Western expats there.  “If you want to go to the shop to buy cigarettes or groceries, you tell your supervisor and he’ll arrange a vehicle with security guards to take you.  You don’t walk to the shops alone unless you want to end up dead!”  Ordinarily I tend to discount such stories in most countries as exaggerating the dangers, but PNG really is one of the most violent countries on earth, with a staggering murder rate, a tradition of blood feuds and vengeance killings and a culture of raskols (rascals, Pidgin for “gangsters”) who seem to operate with the sort of impunity and gratuitous violence that rival the notorious street gangs of Central America.  I had just listened to a BBC radio documentary about violence in PNG a few weeks earlier, and even PNG cabinet ministers admitted that over the past two decades the levels of violence have gone through the roof.

I caught my flight to Madang, over the steep mountainous interior that has prevented the country from linking together its various provinces with roads.  With few exceptions, long distance travel in PNG is by air as the various provinces are rarely connected by land.  When I landed, passengers rapidly dispersed into various Toyota Land Cruisers, usually with metal screens protecting the windows, and I was left alone.  The airport staff (all six of them; it’s a pretty small airport) became concerned and asked me where I was staying and who was picking me up.  I hadn’t reserved a room, and I had thought I would either catch a bus or a taxi into the city, but there were none to be seen anywhere.  The airport staff were keen to lock up and get home while it was still light, and they directed me to a phone to call the Madang Lodge to come and collect me.  It took them a while to arrive, and the staff were getting noticeably edgy about their personal safety, so they asked someone to give me a lift.  He was a minister in a local church who had come to pick up another church member who hadn’t shown up.  We drove partway into town in his tank-like Land Cruiser before the Madang Lodge minibus showed up and I got transferred.  I don’t think I have ever been in an airport where the locals were so concerned about my personal security, and the LP lists Madang as being the most laid-back, safest city in the entire country.
The waves pounding against the seawall at Madang Resort
The Madang Lodge was listed as the only budget accommodation in Madang, and it did have some rooms for as little as 130 kina (PGK; PGK 130 was about US$ 55 at the time).  Hardly a thunderous bargain, but a lot better than the 400 or 500 kina that some other places were charging as their cheapest rates.  The hotel was located on the seaside, and huge waves were pummeling the headland near the restaurant, making it impossible to sit outside on that side of the hotel.  It was already getting dark, so I took advantage of the gym facilities and the pool to get some much-needed exercise, had some overpriced and under-tasty food in the restaurant and went to bed, where I was kept awake by the short space allocated to the bed, and by a herculean coughing fit by the man in the room next door starting at 4 am.

I had chosen Madang as my first destination as I had heard that PNG’s diving is some of the best in the world.  I was a bit concerned by the pounding seas, but the diving takes place inside the barrier reef that encloses the harbour and some offshore islands.  I was dropped off by the Madang Lodge minivan and wandered into the very fancy (and very expensive) Madang Resort grounds.  I found the dive shop, paid up my PGK 400 (about US$ 160) for two dives, got my equipment and met my fellow divers, mostly a group of professors from a university in Lae, a city just down the coast from Madang.  The diving was pretty underwhelming, with a very lax and casual divemaster, some pretty inexperienced and unconfident fellow divers, not particularly great visibility and coral that was in pretty poor shape.  The dives were short, too, as we dove in one group and a couple of people ran out of air quite quickly, bringing the rest of us up early with lots of air left over.  There wasn’t much to see in terms of fish, either, with no turtles or sharks or rays to brighten the experience.  The divemaster stood on the coral, picked stuff up and generally didn’t set much of an example for his divers.  For the price I was paying, I thought it was incredibly poor value.

I hadn’t booked onward travel, as I had left open the possibility of subsequent days of diving, but the first day of diving was enough to dissuade me from that.  I had an SP Export beer at the resort while contemplating the utter amazement of the local Papuan woman who ran the counter at the dive shop.  “What are you DOING here in PNG?” she asked when I said that I wasn’t working here.  She found it inconceivable that any sane person would come to her country just to visit.  It was true that I hadn’t seen another tourist yet; the numerous white faces I had seen around town or in the hotels were all working here for foreign aid, NGOs, universities or mining outfits. 

I added to my image of the Crazy White Tourist by walking into town to use an ATM (my supply of kina just kept evaporating), talked to Air Niugini about flights to Wewak, my next destination, then tried to find the ferry lines that supposedly ran along the north shore of PNG, Star Shipping and Lutheran Shipping.  As it turned out, the latter was bankrupt and didn’t operate anymore, while Star Shipping’s next ferry wasn’t for another 3 weeks.  This decided the issue:  I bought a flight to Wewak for the 24th (there were no flights before then) and made a tentative booking from Wewak to Vanimo for the 25th, in case my tentative plan to go up the Sepik River came to naught.  Pleased with my logistical successes, I walked to the stand for PMVs (public motor vehicles, the most common public transport in PNG) that would take me back to the Madang Lodge.  It was located just outside a Chinese-run supermarket (as in the Solomon Islands, almost all shops in PNG are owned by Chinese businessmen), and as I stood there, the shutters started coming down on the shop and two local employees started sweeping the sidewalk outside in a pretty lacklustre fashion.  The Chinese owner walked out and started hitting them with a stick; he wasn’t hitting them very hard, but it still evoked looks of poisonous contempt from all the locals gathered around the market.

At this point I made a serious strategic blunder.  My Teva sandals had been falling apart for weeks, with the soles coming loose from the rest of the sandals.  I saw a guy doing shoe repair and asked him if he could fix my sandals.  The strategic error was not making sure of the price beforehand.  I should know better; on my first trip to India in 1997 I had run into an identical situation in which the cobbler had demanded a huge sum afterwards.  I was busy chatting with the local men who were selling various things in the market; they were pleasantly surprised to see a white guy walking anywhere, rather than being driven around in a 4WD.  The conversation was going well; we were talking about the highlands and banditry on the buses that lead from Madang to Mount Hagen, and having a bit of a laugh, when the shoe repair guy finished.  He handed back the sandals, neatly stitched, and asked me for 100 kina (about US$ 40).  For 20 minutes of work, this was an outrageous amount, and I felt like an idiot.  I tried to bargain, but he wasn’t having any of it, and suddenly the atmosphere in the market changed; everyone was looking at me as the rich guy who wasn’t going to pay a poor local worker a fair price for his services.  I decided that with the afternoon waning and people starting to vacate the downtown area, it wasn’t a good time to get into an ill-tempered argument with a bunch of pretty burly guys in a country known for casual violence.  I paid the money, cursed my rookie error and got onto a PMV back to the hotel.

I had another day to spend in my little cell, which passed with lots of reading, juggling, Sudoku and an hour of internet on a horrible connection that cost PGK 20 (over US$ 8), the most expensive internet I had paid for in a long time.  I was starting to feel that PNG really wasn’t worth the tremendous expense.  A bit of working out in the gym, a beer in the hotel restaurant and that was it for the day.

I was glad to see the back of Madang the next day.  At the airport I asked whether I could get American Airlines frequent flyer points, since Air Niugini is partners with Qantas, and American Airlines partners Qantas.  The clerks got a bit confused, thought that I was a Qantas premium member and escorted me out of the crowded waiting room to a premium lounge where I contentedly sat reading my Kindle, sipping tea and juice and munching on sandwiches.  The flight to Wewak didn’t take very long, and soon enough I was walking out of the Wewak airport.  This time nobody warned me of my impending demise, and anyway the hotels I was interested in were directly across the road from the terminal.  The Airport Lodge was full, and the upmarket Talio was insanely expensive, with PGK 520 (US$ 220) for a room made out of a shipping container.  The third hotel I tried, the Surfsite, was truly hideous, with a new building being built directly over the low-rise motel.  PGK 130, the same price as I had paid in Madang, got me a peeling, mouldy concrete box with a decaying ceiling and a broken door.  I asked why the door didn’t lock and was told that they had had to open a door when a customer left town with his key.  Aside from wondering why they didn’t have a duplicate key, I also wondered when this had happened.  “Last year,” I was told.  Not the most dynamic of motel staff, then….
Wewak Beach--the highlight of my PNG experience
I left my hovel behind and caught a PMV the several kilometres into downtown Wewak in search of possible tours up the Sepik, an ATM to replace my constantly hemorrhaging supply of kina, and a decent lunch.  Downtown was a dusty, depressing area, with a 45-minute queue at each of the two functioning ATMs in town and a third bank whose ATM was closed---for the next week.  I stood in line with an Aussie ex-diplomat working for Oxfam who told me stories of how hard it was to work in PNG, and how much money was necessarily wasted on astronomically expensive hotel rooms, flights and meals, along with security guards and new Land Cruisers.  I asked about Sepik tours and was given prices that were so high that I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.  The cheapest offer I got was 3000 kina (over US$ 1000) for a 3-day trip up the river to various longhouses, but only if I could find three other people to share the trip; if not, it would be 5000 kina.  I decided that, interesting as lowland Papuan culture must be, it wasn’t worth that kind of money.  I went by the Air Niugini office to pay for my reservation to Vanimo for the next day, and then wandered in a vain search for a restaurant or bar that was open.  Everything was closed, so I found a shop selling postcards and bought three.  I went to buy stamps, and even there I found a PNG sting in the tail, as each postcard cost PGK 8.70, or over US$3.50, one of the most expensive postcard tariffs in the world.  I caught another PMV back to my hovel, went for a run along the beach, did some decent body-surfing and ate at Talio (the 520-kina-a-night place) and retired early to my room, with luggage and furniture piled against the door, as there was a dubious-looking crowd drinking beer outside the hotel.


Peanut vendor in Vanimo
July 25th, only four days after my arrival in PNG, I woke up early, went for a long run along the beach, had breakfast at the Talio while writing postcards, went into town to mail the cards at the post office, then walked across the road to the airport.  In the waiting room I ran into the first backpackers I had seen in PNG, a Slovenian couple who had planned to be in the country for 3 weeks but who were bolting for the border after only 10 days.  They had spent most of their time up in the highlands, and talking to them I was glad that I hadn’t gone with my first plan to go there.  It had been miserably expensive, hard to get around and far more menacing in terms of street security than the coast.  I also heard a horrifying story about the husband’s former boss coming to Port Moresby for work, getting harassed in a bar by a belligerent local guy and waking up the next morning to find his harasser’s severed head impaled on a stake outside his guesthouse with a sign attached saying “This fellow will not bother you again”. 

Vanimo is the end of the line for the north coast of PNG, with the Indonesian border only 50 or so kilometres away and a road extending right to the border post.  As soon as I arrived at Vanimo airport, I walked out into downtown (the airport is right in the centre of town) and asked around for local transport.  The Slovenian couple had to go try to get an Indonesian visa, making me glad that I was on a year-long multiple-entry Indonesian visa so that I didn’t have to spend another expensive day in PNG.  I wasn’t sure if the border was open in the afternoon (it was about 1 pm), and was assured that it was open until sundown.  We waited for a good long while, gathering passengers to cram into the PMV, and rolled off around 2 pm.  I was premature in thinking that this would be the last 20 kina that I would spend in the country, though.  We got to the PNG border gate and I got stamped out of the country, but the official told me that the Indonesians had closed their border gate early.  Apparently tension was high on the Indonesian side since a gun battle a few weeks before between the Indonesians and guerrillas from the OPM, the pro-independence movement that contests Indonesia’s hold on the western half of New Guinea and whose fighters shelter on the PNG side of the border. 

I thought that I would have to go back to Vanimo, but the driver and the PNG border official both told me that I could take a boat around the border and get an entry stamp in Jayapura.  We drove to a nearby cove where a few boats and a few Papuan travellers were sitting in the shade.  A bit of conversation revealed that for 100 kina (a bit more than US$ 40) I could get a lift to Jayapura.  With seven passengers in the boat, the captain was doing pretty well for an hour and a half’s voyage!  As in the Solomon Islands, there are no poor boat owners in PNG.  The voyage was pretty straightforward, as the big waves that had pounded Madang were nowhere to be seen.  The biggest hazard came as a byproduct of the fact that a big Malaysian logging company has a timber concession in the hills inland from Vanimo and is energetically stripping out the forests as quickly as they can.  The water offshore is littered with floating and almost-submerged logs, and it was a tricky half hour of steering, with one of the passengers in the bow spotting for logs.  I was very, very relieved to step out of the boat in Jayapura late in the afternoon.
So long PNG!  On the boat to Jayapura

There were still two expensive surprises in store for me courtesy of PNG.  The harbour where we put ashore was about five kilometres from the centre of Jayapura, but was where the immigration officer was to be found to stamp my passport.  The office was already closed when I arrived, so I was told to come back the next day.  Then it was time to find transport into town.  One of the Papuans who was hanging around at the dock offered to get me a cab, as there were none to be seen anywhere.  When it pulled up, he and several friends piled into the cab and I was immediately suspicious of a scam.  We stopped off at a little moneychanger for me to change my leftover kina into rupiah, and then headed to the hotel.  I checked in, wondering how much the taxi guy would ask for, and was not surprised when he asked for 400,000 rupiah (about US$40).  While that might be not outrageous in PNG, in Indonesia that is truly ridiculous for a ten-minute ride.  I knew that a one-hour ride to Jayapura airport was only 250,000 rupiah, so I offered the driver 100,000 rupiah.  There was immediately a great chorus of protest, but I had the advantage of being already in the hotel.  I headed to my room and unpacked, leaving them fuming in the lobby, and about ten minutes later the front desk called to say that they were still there and very unhappy.  I strolled back downstairs and put on some theatre, offering them Rp 100,000 or nothing (still far too much, but a bit of face-saving for the taxi driver), and after vehement refusals, I crumpled up the money and threw it at them and went back to my room.  An hour later they were gone and I was free in the streets of Jayapura.  It was a relief to be back to the far more reasonable prices and vibrant street life of Indonesia; I walked out after dark and bought food from a street stall, something that would have been absolutely unthinkable on the other side of the border.

The next morning I caught a rickshaw back to the port where I had arrived (it cost only 25,000 rupiah this time) and discovered that while PNG citizens can be stamped into Indonesia there, Westerners cannot.  I had to backtrack all the way to the Indonesian border post to get that all-important entry stamp.  There was (of course) no public transport to the border, and I was being asked for 750,000 rupiah by Jayapura taxi drivers to do the roundtrip.  I decided that it could be done more cheaply, so I caught public transport (three of the bemos that are such a staple of Indonesian travel) as far east as I could, then negotiated with an ojek (motorcycle taxi) driver to take me to the border.  Everything went smoothly at the border, I was back in Jayapura by mid-afternoon and it only cost Rp 250,000, still an annoying sum, but at least I was finally free of the hand of PNG.

Writing this and re-reading my diary, I remember how intensely I disliked my travel experience in PNG.  I don’t often hate everything about my experience in a country, and I’ve been to countries like Bangladesh, Djibouti, Somaliland, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus that have reputations of not being a barrel of laughs for visitors.  I can honestly say that nothing that happened to me during those five long, hideously expensive days in the country was really positive.  I shudder to think how much money I spent to have so little fun.  It’s not just me, the cheapskate backpacker, who doesn’t have much fun in PNG.  The expats to whom I talk all have the same stories of crazy prices, personal danger, dysfunctional government, corruption, violence and difficult relations with their Papuan counterparts.  I think that if you were really, really rich and didn’t care how much money you were spending, you might be able to experience PNG in a way that would be positive and memorable.  The country should be an eco-tourism mecca, with mountains, beaches, diving and more cultural diversity than almost any other country, but until it becomes significantly cheaper, significantly safer and a lot more organized, there will continue to be only a handful of (misguided) backpackers visiting the country, and tourism will continue to be the province of well-heeled miners and oil workers along with rich Aussies willing to drop US$ 3000 to walk the Kokoda Track (site of famous fighting in World War Two involving Australian soldiers).  Having been there once, I am in absolutely no hurry ever to go back, even to work.


The Good:  Hiking in the Baliem Valley

Once I had gotten my all-important surat jalan (travel permit) for West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya, the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea) for a Rp 100,000 “administrative fee”, I had exhausted the entertainment possibilities of Jayapura and it was time to move on via a short flight to Wamena, the administrative centre of the Baliem Valley up in the central highlands.  I arrived and promptly spent two very frustrating days trying to find a guide willing to take me on a trek into the highlands east of Wamena.  It was a futile quest, as the guides I could track down were either sick/dying, out of town or no longer doing guiding.  It was supposedly high season for tourism in the Baliem Valley, and yet I could hardly see any tourists around, aside from one big German group.  I looked into visiting a high-altitude lake (Habbema) but was put off by the crazy price tag associated with it (US$200 for a one-way motorcycle taxi ride from Jayapura).  Eventually I decided that trying to find a guide was useless and that, as in Nepal, it would be easier to trek completely on my own.  I went to a supermarket, bought some supplies, left all non-essential gear behind at my hotel and caught a bemo to the end of the road at Sugokno, where I shouldered my pack, consulted the Lonely Planet and set off into the mountains that rise on either side of the Yatna River.

Hernius' family in Seima
The Baliem Valley is the best-known of the valleys in the central mountains of New Guinea, an area of high peaks which soar to a maximum height of 4884 metres above sea level (higher than any peak in the Rockies or Alps) and which are cut off from the coast by impenetrable swamps and dense bush.  It was only in the 1920s that colonial officials, who all lived on the coast, even became aware that there was a densely-populated society farming in the mountains, largely using Stone Age technology.  Anthropologists were immediately drawn to study the languages and cultures of the people of the highlands, and the Baliem Valley was the site of a major Harvard expedition in 1961-62 that Peter Matthiessen wrote about in Under The Valley Wall.  The anthropologists documented the life of the Dani people, describing a culture of incessant small-scale warfare, raiding, kidnapping and ever-shifting alliances.  The Indonesian government has supposedly stamped out the warfare, but the people of the highlands are still a distinct group, farming their terraces yam fields, raising their pigs and still dressing (some of the older men, anyway) in nothing but a penis gourd.  I passed a few men in traditional Dani attire, but most of them, along with all the women, were in Western dress, although almost everyone was wearing a traditional string bag slung over their head to carry things.
Smoke percolating through the thatch of a roof, Seima
I was headed towards the village of Kurima, where I knew there was a small village lodge, but since I had only set out at 3:40, I realized that I probably didn’t have enough daylight to make it that far.  I fell into conversation (in my terrible Indonesian) with a guy named Hernius who was walking my way.  He suggested that I come home to his place rather than racing the dark, and I was glad to accept.  In the village of Seima, located at 1650 metres of elevation, Hernius had a traditional circular adobe hut with a thatch roof, but next door he had built a four-room wooden cottage equipped with solar panels.  I ate dinner with Hernius and his wife and children:  rice and greens, a roasted corn cob and a yam (the staple food of the highlands).  Historians believe that the New Guinea highlands was one of the few places on earth where agriculture arose without outside influence, and that people have been farming these steep mountainsides for millennia.  After dinner I sat around drinking tea with Hernius, his wife, two young sons, his older brother, his nephew and his mother.  
Hernius and two of his children, Seima
I wished that I spoke better Indonesian, as I was only able to communicate in very primitive sentences.  I fell asleep in my own room in the cottage, content with finally being out of Wamena and into the mountains.  This is the sort of random encounter with people that I love in travelling; as a result of a casual meeting on the path, I became part of Hernius’ family for the night.

The next morning I arose to a cold and misty village, drenched by heavy overnight rain.  Breakfast was another yam and tea.  I paid Hernius Rp 200,000 for bed, dinner and breakfast (probably above the odds, but so much cheaper than PNG that I wasn’t going to argue the point) and he walked with me down through the village centre where he turned over the money to the village headman, some sort of relative of his.  I couldn’t tell whether he was repaying an old debt, or whether tourism income had to be handed over to the village authorities.  I said goodbye and dropped steeply down to a bridge over the Yatna River (at about 1550 m) to Kurima.  On the other side I encountered pavement and ojeks, suggesting that the road I had left the day before continued in some form from Sugokno to Kurima, a new development since the Lonely Planet had been updated.  On the way out of Kurima, I passed a group of three Italian trekkers, their Sulawesi-born guide and five or six porters carrying supplies.  They had spent the night in Kurima (where I had planned to sleep the night before) and I chatted with Lucia, Gianfranco and Fabio a bit over the next few hours as we hiked.

High up above the village of Wamarek on day two
The trail climbed fairly steeply up to 1880 m.  I had walked ahead of the Italians, but managed to take a wrong turn.  Luckily the guide saw me and shouted across to me to set me right.  The correct trail was a very steep descent, made very slippery by the night’s rain and the worn-out state of my hiking boot soles.  Eventually I reached another bridge over the river, now known as the Baliem, at about 1200 m.  I crossed the river and was rewarded with a 500-metre climb steeply uphill to get to Wesagalep village, perched picturesquely on a steep-sided village between two waterfalls.  Not having done much hiking that year, especially not with a pack, I arrived with my legs running on empty, drenched in sweat and covered in mud.
Wesagalep village

I was housed in the village hall, in a slightly ramshackle room used for storage.  It was dry, but I was glad that I was carrying a ThermaRest as the bed was the wooden floor.  The village kids, excited at a departure from routine, were pestiferous, constantly peeking in the windows, howling with laughter and really annoying when I wandered out to try to do some birdwatching.  I felt dehydrated; I had drunk at least 4 litres of water en route, but in the heat and humidity, it wasn’t enough.  I asked for tea and got a couple of litres to rehydrate.  I was fed a huge amount of rice and greens and a yam which I didn’t manage to eat as I got full of rice.  The old man who was in charge of me sat and watched me as I ate and drank, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and playing Papuan pop music on his smartphone.  I sat in my room as it got dark, reading and trying to figure out what birds I had seen during the day.  I was reading Jared Diamond’s book The World Until Yesterday about traditional societies around the world, and a big part of it was (naturally, for any book by Jared Diamond) set in New Guinea, which seemed appropriate given my surroundings.  I fell asleep to the sound of rhythmic (and highly amplified) chanting somewhere in the village, which was either a traditional ceremony or (more likely) an evangelical church meeting.

Day three scenery: finally some sun!
I was up the next morning by 5:30, and after stretching and drinking cold leftover tea, I left Rp 100,000 (US$ 10) for the old man (who was nowhere to be found) and headed off in lovely morning light, the first time in three days that I was walking under clear skies.  It was a steep climb out of town, and after 45 minutes the old man came scampering uphill, anxious to be paid.  I told him where I had left the money, and he raced back to collect it.  I think he wanted more money, but he didn’t want it enough to chase me down a second time, and Rp 100,000 was all the accommodation and food was really worth.  After 300 metres of climbing, the path levelled off and I came out on a steep field that dropped a long way downhill.  I had loved the peace and quiet of walking in the early morning, surrounded by birdsong and butterflies and lots of primary forest, but the downside was that there was nobody to ask directions.  
Extensive views to the high peaks to the south
I followed the path downhill through neatly tended garden plots until the path suddenly began to peter out.  I was suspicious that I had taken a wrong turn, and was reluctant to go too much further downhill before I was sure where I was.  I sat and breakfasted on crackers and leftover yam and waited to see if anyone might wander by.  Sure enough, a farmer from Wesagalep village showed up after a while, recognized me from the village and gestured that I should come back uphill.  With a mixture of my bad Indonesian and lots of sign language, I realized that I had gone wrong quite a long way back and that I needed to be up on the top of the ridge above the field.  He reached into his string bag and gave me a cooked yam for the road.  I accepted it gratefully, grunted back uphill, halfway back to Wesagalep, found the right path (a barely discernible break in dense vegetation; no wonder I had missed it) and finally joined an obviously main path in the right direction.  Finally, at an elevation of 2140 m, I popped out on top of the ridge, in sight of where I had had breakfast, having lost an hour with my inept navigation.  I was glad that I had set out so early. 

A wonderful stone axe, but there's no way I was going to buy it!
From then on route-finding was much simpler.  I was walking a lot on open ridges with expansive views and a nice cooling breeze.  I took one more short wrong turn past a hut where an old man tried to sell me an old polished stone ceremonial axe that must have weighed 15 kilograms; I can’t imagine anything I would less want to carry around for days in my backpack.  By noon I had dropped off the ridge down a pretty muddy track to an idyllic bathing spot where I ate lunch, had a good rinse and soak, and then cleaned the mud out of my socks before settling in for more Jared Diamond.  From that point on, the trail got drier and easier.  I popped over a ridge, went down a surprisingly dry descent and tried to find Wusalem.  As it turned out, the name applied to a huge area, and every time I came to a village, I would ask “Wusalem?” and be told yes, but then realize that there was no place to stay there, so I must need another village.  Eventually I got to the last place named Wusalem and was told that it was much too far to make it to Syokosimo.  I thought this couldn’t be true, and took a chance on going there anyway.  It wasn’t that far, but it was supernaturally muddy, and I got there in plenty of time (by 4:30) but completely covered in mud.  I felt like an extra from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I found a proper guesthouse run by a pleasant old lady who cooked me good food and gave me endless supplies of boiled water to make tea and instant noodles to rehydrate.  Conditions were positively sybaritic, with a soft sleeping mat on top of carpets, a proper mosquito net and even a real WC.  I managed to wash my body and my truly revolting clothes and then ate enormous quantities of food and slept more soundly than I had for several nights.  I was down in a valley, and although the altitude (1530 m) wasn't much lower than the previous nights, it was much less chilly at night and in the early morning.
Young women of Syokosimo village
The next day, August the 1st, I harboured faint hopes that I might make it back to Wamena that day, but those were scuppered by my tardiness in getting away in the morning.  I only left at 8 am, much later than I had been doing recently, and I was starting to feel a bit lazy after three days of pretty full-on hiking.  I climbed up to almost 1900m through a beautiful, bird-filled forest that gave me lots of excuses to stop and birdwatch or to take pictures of flowers.  
Typical highland hut
I picked up an irritating would-be guide who took a long time to shake off, and then a group of irritating small children at the next village.  It took tellings-off by two groups of adults to make the kids finally stop plaguing me.

The walking for the rest of the day deteriorated sharply, with the path petering out into a narrow, overgrown, muddy track through abandoned farm fields.  I realized afterwards that I could have (and should have) taken a track down to the river to a bridge not mentioned in the LP, cutting out this section of the trail.  I kept slipping and falling in the mud, cursing and swearing at the horrible track conditions.  Finally I slithered down a final descent to Yuarina, slipping on ice-like black mud on newly plowed fields.  I somehow managed to miss the bridge entirely at the bottom, and only after wandering upstream for five minutes did I look back downstream to see the bridge, completely made of wood and lianas, and head back to cross the river.  I stopped just out of town beside the river to eat lunch, watch birds and recover mentally from the horror of the descent.

The bridge at Yuarima: all natural fibres
The rest of the day was comparatively easy, through cultivated fields and fallow patches with essentially no real forest.  The views were tremendous, looking south towards the highest mountains of the range.  There was quite a bit of foot traffic, locals coming back from Wamena via the fastest route.  I was feeling pretty tired by the time I got to Hitegi, so I slowed down and ambled the last stretch into Ugem village, stopping for a quick rinse off in a stream just outside town to try to remove the mud.  
The descent to the road from Ugem
I had a look at my boots as I was cleaning them and realized that their soles were worn down to almost nothing; no wonder I couldn’t stay on my feet on the muddy slopes!  In Ugem, I found a tidy village full of big tin-roofed buildings and a gargantuan church.  The village looked more prosperous and tidier than most places I’d seen on the hike, probably because their proximity to the road means that more money flows into the community.  I stayed in a newly built village guesthouse, very well-equipped but plagued by annoying kids with a very low boredom threshold.


The next morning I strolled out of town quite early in the morning and was down in Kurima (the village I had passed through three days previously) in an hour and a half, accompanied by the oldest son of the family that run the guesthouse.  I was pleased by his ability to show me the right track to Kurima, but less happy about him taking potshots at birds with his slingshot.  In Kurima an ojek driver offered to drive me right to my hotel for Rp 100,000 and I figured this was a good deal.  The ride to Sugokno was adventurous, with me clinging to the luggage carrier for dear life as we crossed streams and ravines, and I had to get off and walk from time to time, but 40 minutes after leaving Kurima, and only 2 hours after walking out of my lodging in Ugem, I was climbing into the shower in my room at the Rannu Jaya II Hotel in Jayapura and trying to wash mud out of my hair and my skin.  My trekking clothes were such a muddy catastrophe that I brought them to a commercial laundry service.  The rest of the day was spent eating and trying (unsuccessfully) to arrange flights for the next morning, which were all booked solid.  I knew, however, that there was an active same-day resale business in plane tickets outside the airport, so I decided that the next morning I would try my luck.


The Wonderful (Part One):  Birds of Paradise in the Arfak Mountains

I had been reading my Lonely Planet attentively and knew that Indonesian New Guinea had a number of wonderful natural attractions, and it was a matter of choosing between a number of good options.  I eventually decided that I would go birdwatching in the Arfak Mountains, just outside the town of Manokwari, and then go diving and snorkelling in the Raja Ampat archipelago off the western tip of the island.  I had been reading Alfred Russel Wallace’s book The Malay Archipelago recently, and the culmination of his years of collecting birds, animals, insects and plants in Southeast Asia were his expeditions to New Guinea in search of birds of paradise.  I am not a committed birdwatcher, but I find that birds are easier to spot than big wildlife, and make a great thing to do while hiking or cycle touring.  I had seen enough great nature documentaries to know that birds of paradise are some of the most amazing birds in the world, so the chance of seeing them up close and personal was too good to pass up.

It was a bit of an adventure trying to get from Wamena to Manokwari in one day.  I got to Wamena airport early in the morning hoping for a last-minute standby ticket.  By 6:20 am the airport was heaving with people waiting for one of the several early morning flights.  The airlines themselves resell returned tickets at more or less face value, so within minutes I had a ticket in hand.  Flights were delayed, and the first three departing flights were all cargo flights, so the crowd was getting pretty restless, but by 8:30 I was on my short hop back to Jayapura.  Amazingly, the flight, which had been sold out the previous afternoon when I tried to buy a ticket, was half empty.  The views over the forested mountains and impenetrable lowland swamps were amazing in the early-morning light.  I was in Sentani airport (the airport for Jayapura, located an hour outside the city) by 9:30, just in time to buy an onward ticket to Manokwari for 11:30.  I was there by 12:30, having spent the flight talking to my seatmate, an Indonesian woman working for a bank who was being transferred to Manokwari for the next three years.

Less heavily loaded than usual:  Manokwari motorcycle
Manokwari is a fairly tidy, peaceful little town surrounded by jungle-clad hills.  I found a great place to stay, Losmen Kagum, run by a pleasant family, and spent the afternoon buying a few groceries, finding the best internet I had seen in almost a month, and walking in the hills up to a Japanese war memorial (a bizarrely unimpressive structure that resembled a half-build public urinal).  I ran into a Hungarian couple back at the hotel who were travelling at a leisurely pace through Indonesia, extending their visa every month, well into their seventh month in the country. 

The next morning found me gobbling down a breakfast left for me on a tray the night before and heading off by 6:15 on an ojek to the Wosi bus terminal.  
Don't put all your eggs on one motorcycle:  Manokwari
It was a case of hurry-up-and-wait, as it took 3 long hours of waiting to assemble the 10 passengers required to fill a 4WD pickup truck for the 2-hour drive to Syobri village.  The drive was an hour of peaceful cruising along asphalt roads, followed by an hour of hair-raising muddy trail-bashing.  I was relieved to get out of the truck and find my way up to Zeth Wonggor’s birdwatching lodge. 

Zeth is a legend in this area, having shown birds of paradise to countless film crews including David Attenborough’s team.  His lodge is basic but functional, and very friendly.  The place was deserted when I arrived, but soon enough a full crew of birdwatchers appeared from their morning in the forest, ravenous for lunch.  
 Feline owlet-nightjar, Syobri
They were a group of 10 people travelling together under the auspices of Wild Borneo, whose founder and boss was the trip leader.  Many of them were professional biologists of one description or another, united by an enthusiasm for pitcher plants, although they were interested in anything that was alive.  I joined two French birders that afternoon in one of Zeth’s hides, constructed near one of the leks where male magnificent birds of paradise dance and display for females in the hopes of convincing them to mate.  Sort of like a nightclub on Saturday nights, then.  It was not a productive afternoon, as we huddled uncomfortably for 2 hours inside this tiny structure of wooden posts and tarpaulins, listening intently and peering out, for exactly one second of face time with the bird, who showed up, looked around and flew off after calling from nearby trees for half an hour beforehand.  I went back to the lodge dispirited, only to hear that two other groups had had far more luck with the magnificent bird of paradise and with the western parotia at two of Zeth’s other hides.
Magnificent bird of paradise (note the tail "wires")

That evening I cooked up some food and then sat around eating and socializing with the Wild Borneo team, who were full of great stories of their trip, and of previous Southeast Asian expeditions together.  At 8 pm, I joined them as they trooped out with powerful headlamps in search of nocturnal animals.  We had a lot of fun, as we spotted three cuscuses (shy, pretty nocturnal mammals a bit like small brown raccoons), 2 sugar gliders (smaller gliding mammals) a nectar-eating opossum and a very beautiful small frog.  We also had a spectacular mishap as Chien, the Wild Borneo owner, fell out of a tree where he was trying to capture a cuscus.  There was a great crashing of branches and tumbling of humans, but nobody was hurt and the cuscus escaped to safety.

Magnificent bird of paradise
The next morning I went back to the same hide by myself and was rewarded by wonderful and repeated views of the magnificent, as the male danced, fluffed himself up, leaned from one side to another, spread one wing and then the other and generally showed off.  His long, curving tail feathers looked absurd, an example (like the peacock’s tail) of sexual selection of a functionally useless feature.   That afternoon I hiked up with a couple of birders from Wild Borneo to a different hide, high above the village in spectacular primary forest, in search of the western parotia.  Unfortunately, this was an almost exact replay of the previous afternoon, with lots of calls, lots of sitting around huddled in great bodily discomfort, and only three 2-second appearances by the male, who didn’t display and disappeared immediately.  At least the walk there was very pretty, with huge liana-draped trees and dramatic tumbling streams. 

Despite only seeing one of the two species of birds of paradise that were possible there, I really enjoyed getting out into the mountainous rainforest and seeing Zeth and his team working hard for the preservation of the birds and the forest.  He had started his working life as a hunter, but had been recruited by a BBC film crew to show them birds and was amazed that Westerners would pay him far more to show them live birds than to bring them dead birds.  It changed his life, and now he searches for new leks, moves his hides around as birds change their preferred spots and works with other villagers to preserve large tracts of primary forest.
Cuscus

I moved efficiently the next morning, hiking out early towards the main road before being picked up by a driver with a very offbeat sense of humour transporting people and a mountain of vegetables to Manokwari.  I paid the same as on the outward leg, Rp 100,000, which, given the beating the vehicles take over the jeep tracks, is probably a fair price.  I picked up the luggage I had left behind at the Losmen, bought an afternoon flight to Sorong and was walking out of the airport in Sorong by 4 pm.  I took an expensive room at the JE Meridien (not far from the Marriat Hotel) and went to bed watching Roger Federer play tennis halfway around the world.


The Wonderful (Part Two):  Diving Raja Ampat

The next day, August 8th, I was a blur of activity, buying my Raja Ampat National Park diving badge, buying a ticket to Jakarta for August 20th, trying to find a place to stay out in the Raja Ampat archipelago, texting them to see if I could get picked up that day, and trying to reserve a place at a posher dive lodge for my last few days.  I caught a lift to the ferry port, bought a ticket to Waisai and cruised rapidly over the sea for a couple of hours, leaving the main island of New Guinea behind.  Raja Ampat (literally “Four Kings”) is a remoted and lightly populated area of small offshore limestone islands that has become famous for its great diving.  Years ago, when I first heard of Raja Ampat, the only real options were incredibly expensive liveaboard dive boats.  Now there are a dozen or so dive lodges scattered around the various islands, most with inexpensive homestays located nearby to provide a range of accommodation prices.  I knew that I wanted to finish my trip at BioDiversity Dive Lodge, but I couldn’t really afford to stay there for the entire 10 days.  I found a much cheaper homestay, Yenkoranu, on Pulau Kri, that offered diving and which only cost Rp 250,000 a day (US$ 25) for my own room and three meals a day (diving was extra).  I settled in for six days of serious relaxation.
Yenkoranu Homestay, Pulau Kri, Raja Ampat

Although Yenkoranu certainly could have been better run (their diving logistics were occasionally a bit slipshod in terms of when they were going out), the location was perfect, on a sandy beach surrounded by dense jungle, with a long wooden pier providing access to the water on the outside of the lagoon and a breezy shaded deck out over the water that was perfect for watching the spectacular sunsets.  
The pier at Yenkoranu
The group of Western travellers that had gathered there was an eclectic mix, with quite a few old Indonesia hands who had either lived in Indonesia or who had visited the country many times.  Raja Ampat is not as well known as places like Bali, Lombok, Java and Sumatra, and so first-time visitors to Indonesia rarely end up there.  There were interesting discussions and lots of great stories told over breakfast or dinner in the communal dining room.  The food was simple but delicious, and the rooms were equally simple but completely functional.  Walking along the beach at low tide made for perfect beachcombing, particularly at the far end of the island, when low tide exposed huge areas of white sand.  It was a picture-perfect tropical paradise.

The diving season in Raja Ampat is really from October to April, so I was in the lowest of low seasons, with all the liveaboard dive boats having moved for the season to the new diving hotspot of Komodo for a few months.  The sea was perhaps a bit rougher than it would be in the high season, but I found the diving really good once you got under the water.  There are lots of sharks, including the strange-looking bottom-crawling wobbegong, frogfish, barracuda and snappers.  I spotted a lovely pygmy seahorse (I had seen them before at Bunaken Island, but this was by far the clearest view I had ever had) and saw lots of colourful nudibranchs.  The coral was in excellent condition, and currents weren’t too strong.  The only disappointment was not seeing any manta rays; we went out to Manta Sandy, but there were none to be seen, so we aborted the dive and went elsewhere (if there are no mantas there, there is essentially nothing to see on the featureless sandy bottom).  I didn’t dive non-stop; I picked and chose among the sites, and was very pleased with what I saw.  My fellow divers were pretty experienced and made great companions, and the dive guides were knowledgeable and great at spotting stuff.

When I wasn’t in my wetsuit, I took the chance to relax a lot.  I did yoga on the deck over the water, juggled on the beach, went birdwatching in the forest, swam lengths off the pier (wearing a mask and snorkel so I could watch the sharks and fish and turtles and coral below me) and read a lot, finishing off a number of books on my Kindle, including Thomas Piketty’s tome Capital in the 21st Century.  The most impressive sights to remember were seeing another cuscus up close one night, and watching a shark feeding frenzy off the end of the pier as the kitchen staff gutted that night’s supper and tossed the remains into the water.  All the sharks I have ever seen while diving have been either patrolling or sleeping; I had never seen sharks hunting and attacking fish successfully until then.  I have to say that I sheltered behind the pilings of the pier to watch the action, not wanting to become collateral damage.

Sittin' on the dock of the bay, BioDiversity Lodge
By the time I caught a boat across to BioDiversity, on the other side of the channel on larger Pulau Gam, I was feeling pretty relaxed.  BioDiversity, a fairly new upscale resort run by a Spanish couple, made me even more relaxed.  There are only six cottages, lovingly maintained and very tastefully furnished, with very little around them.  The beach and pier are pretty, and the food is excellent.  There weren’t many other divers there, and it was a truly lovely way to finish my summer of travel.  The diving was excellent, although we visited a number of the sites that I had dived much more cheaply with Yenkoranu.  Blue Magic was my favourite site, full of big silvery fish and sharks, although I loved the Frewin Wall as well, a long vertical granite wall underwater.  The last afternoon I went out with 5 Singaporean fellow guests to look for the red bird of paradise.  This was easily the best bird of paradise encounter that I had all summer, with 5 or 6 males dancing and displaying for at least 2 females, with successful mating at the end.  We had great views of the action, although it was essentially hopeless to try to take photos given the low light and high contrast. 
BioDiversity Pier

And then, suddenly, it was time to head back to Leysin for another year of teaching, my fifth and final one.  It was hard to tear myself away from the beaches, the diving, the jungles, the food and the tropical ambience of Indonesia.  It was my fifth trip to this sprawling, diverse country, and will likely not be my last given the existence of Terri’s place on Bali.  I really enjoyed the Indonesian side of New Guinea, infinitely more than my Papua New Guinea experience.  I had always wanted to trek in the Baliem Valley, and diving Raja Ampat had been on my radar for a decade or more.  I am already lazily sketching out a bicycle itinerary running east from Bali to Timor, exploring the islands of Nusa Tenggara, and I could certainly see going back to Raja Ampat someday to do more diving.
Chilled out at the end of a great summer of diving

As I took my long flight back to Jakarta and on to Amsterdam and Geneva, I was already contemplating my next trips.  Travel is like a drug; once you’ve done some, you want to do more, and it consumes your thoughts, your time and your money.  It’s probably a lot healthier than most drugs, though, so I see no reason to curtail my addiction anytime soon.
Yenkoranu sunset