 |
The Bird's Neck: find Australia, go north, western
end of the island. |
Wednesday,
10/17:
Leg
one on my trip to Windesi is an 8-hour ride on a Pelni ship down to Wasior. The
boat’s scheduled to leave at 9am, so
Ibu Ice and I agree to meet at the terminal at 8. I arrive a few minutes early.
Apparently the ship was late leaving Sorong last night, so it won’t be here til
9, with a 10am ETD. I find a seat and read my New Yorker. At 9am Ibu shows up – she apparently knew about the delay
ahead of time, in that mysterious way people here have. It’s 11 when the boat
arrives – this being Indonesia,
it counts as on time. Once aboard we find a crew member selling spaces in one
of the staff cabins – regular berths were sold out when I bought our tickets,
but the crew often make an extra buck by selling their spaces, and all four
bunks in the cabin are filled by normal passengers. There’s a/c, so I’m happy.
At 12:30 we start off, and I pass
the time watching a bootleg copy of a movie where Jessica Alba pretends to be
an Iban tribeswoman in colonial Malaysia.
Right. (Side note to any Iban specialists: if you’ve seen ‘The Sleeping
Dictionary’, I’d be curious to know how accurate it is with the language. Some
bits were entirely Malay – selamat malam, anyone? – others were recognizably
related, and in some parts they could’ve been speaking Naavi for all I could
tell.) Ibu tells everyone within hearing that I’m a student from America, that
we’re going to Windesi so I can study the language, that I’m going to Raja
Ampat in November and flying home in December, and that I know other people
studying in Fakfak and Wooi. I’m the only Westerner on board.
 |
| The good ship Nggapulu |
It’s
a long ride but not a bad one, and about a million times more comfortable than
an international flight of the same length, since I get an actual bed. A stroll
through economy class more than justifies the 300K I spent on the room – think
steerage on the Titanic but with probably more BO, plus all the kids, of which
there are seemingly hundreds, have plastic noisemakers their parents bought
from the vendors on deck to keep them entertained. I go outside for the view
and head back in when a drunk harbor worker starts trying to make conversation.
Around 8pm we pull up to the Wasior
jetty, and eventually one of Ibu’s family comes to pick us up and bring us back
to their house, where I promptly pass out.
Thursday:
 |
| On the johnson. |
This
being Real Papua – not my fancy-pants rooming house for western researchers
with its flush toilets and real beds – we slept on the floor. Combine this with
the fact that just before going to bed I saw a big grey rat scurry across a
shelf in the main room and you’ll understand my reaction first thing in the
morning when Ibu lightly brushed her hand across my foot to wake me up. She
thought it was hilarious. If Manokwari is the equivalent of the state capital
in the US, then
Wasior is a county seat, small-town but sprawling, more than a village but not
a city. We take a stroll around the neighborhood and then head to the
waterfront for our ride up to Windesi. The craft is what’s known around here as
a Johnson: 15-foot long wooden
outrigger canoe (perahu, or prau) with a motor stuck on the back.
Our stuff goes in a compartment in the middle with some tarps to keep it dry,
and Ibu and I sit on a platform about even with the top of the sides of the
boat. seven or eight other people clamber on, I buy a hundred bucks worth of
gas (round trip), and we set off across Teluk Wondama (Wandamen
Bay) and north up the coast.
Despite the heat it’s pants, long sleeves, and a baseball cap to keep from
getting fried, and I spend most of the trip huddled under my umbrella, aka
portable shade. At one point we pass some flying fish. Three hours of turquoise
waters, emerald islets, and jungled shores later, we hit Sombokoro, where we
stop by the foraging station to buy some smoked fish. Not in the sense that lox
is smoked fish – the whole scaly thing, tied in rows to sticks and set over a
campfire til golden brown. There’s also smoked sea cucumbers, which to my eye
looked an awful lot like big dried-out turds, but thankfully we pass on those.
Another half hour in the boat and we pull up to the harbor in Kampung Windesi.
 |
| A rather cleaner crab. |
The
man with the boat is Bapak Aukila Karubuy, Ibu Ice’s younger brother, and it’s
his house we’re staying at. After a long, hot boat ride I’m about set for a
mandi, and they direct me to a little concrete outbuilding out back. There’s a
concrete cistern full of mountain spring water for my bath (not tiled like at
home, but I’m not picky), and next to it, rather than the plain old hole in the
ground I’d been expecting, but a nice porcelain hole in the ground, like you
see in Indonesian airports and that one restaurant I really like in Florence.
(No, really.) As it turns out though, this loo has been plugged for ages (‘sudah lama’ – weeks? months? years? You
pee towards the channel that drains the used bathwater out a hole in the side
of the building; for anything more substantial head towards the neighbor’s
facilities); and I discover this when I lift up the bucket sitting in the bowl
and out of a stinking puddle crawls what I first take to be a large spider, but
soon realize is a small, shit-covered land crab.
Welcome
to rural Papua, Dorothy, you’re not in the city anymore. (And I say this only
because, if this were the city, it really would have been a spider.)
 |
| The stove. |
As
it turns out, Pak Aukila is the kepala
desa, something like a small-town mayor but hereditary, and half the
village residents are uncles, in-laws, and cousins. Indonesia has way more
administrative levels than the US so I’m all out of analogies, but Windesi is a
distrik – one step down from a kabupaten like Wasior, but still a sort
of government center overseeing several villages – it’s got the only high
school in the area, so teenagers come from the whole area to stay with
relatives in Windesi and study, and there’s a police station and a Pus Kes Mas (government medical clinic).
Plans are under discussion for Windesi to become a kabupaten itself, in which case it might get things like cell
reception and 24-hour electricity, but not yet. As is, the lights turn on at
night, provided there’s gas on hand for the family’s generator; water runs down
bamboo pipes from the mountain; and the cooking is done on an iron grate above
a campfire, so everything from the rice to the drinking water (boiled) tastes
like wood smoke. Not that that’s entirely a bad thing, particularly if you like
lapsang tea. There’s one small gas stove, but burning oil and cooking oil are
both expensive out here. The kitchen is a thatched-roof structure out back with
a raised dirt floor and no walls, and most of the day is spent back here,
talking, cooking, or just sitting. Dinner that first night is papeda, a kind of
brownish gluey mush made out of sago starch, with smoked fish and the local
sambal, which is made by pouring boiling water over chilies, shallots, and
garlic. I reaffirm my prior belief that I don’t like either papeda or smoked
fish, but the sambal is delicious. I thank god I had the foresight to pack
granola bars.
Friday:
When
traveling in rural Indonesia,
it is advisable to bring earplugs, an eye mask, and a camping pad. I had the
first two but not the third. In Wasior the lights and the television both
stayed on until the power cut off around 4am
– and remember here that the doors are curtains and walls don’t reach all the
way up to the roof, so sound carries; in Windesi it was (thankfully) just the
lightbulb, and only til one or two in the morning. I’m told that’s pretty
standard practice around here. Even without a tv going the generator made a
bloody racket – no recording after dark for me – as do the chickens and the
frogs and the crickets and the dogs and all the other various village/jungle
creatures. And again for a bed there’s a concrete floor with a woven mat on top
and a pillow, and an old mosquito net strung over top. Still, I’ve slept worse.
 |
| At the van Balen monument. |
The
big event for the day, after getting me registered with the local police (the
joys of being a foreigner in West Papua…) was a hike up
the hill to the Van Balen monument. Van Balen was a Dutch missionary and amateur
linguist who came to Windesi in either 1888 or 1889, depending which source you
believe, built a school, spread the good word, and learned enough of the
language to publish some stories, wordlists, a hymn book, and a bible
translation in 1915. (The bible and the hymnal at least are heavily influenced
by, if not entirely written in, the Wondama dialect, and even worse have Dutch
spellings, with ‘oe’ for ‘u’ and ‘j’ for ‘y’, but where would the holy mystique
be if it were easy to read?) One afternoon a man brings by an original copy of
the bible, which I have a photocopy of at home – the pages are all detached
from the spine and bugs have eaten holes through it, but it’s still clearly
treasured. Van Balen apparently stuck around for rather a while – he returned
to the Netherlands in 1913, though Windesi wasn’t his only stop in Papua – and
he’s still well-remembered here, with his old school (from the looks of it
surely rebuilt in the last hundred years) used now as Sunday school for the
kids and a monument, with a giant cross on top of course, where his house used
to stand. On the way up Ibu Ice, her younger sister, and her sister-in-law
point out to me every tree, flower, and bug along the path, since the purpose
of the trip ostensibly is to
lihat-lihat,
to see all the plants and animals and such that Ibu’s been describing to me and
get a sense of the place and how life is there, and I duly take pictures of all
of them. This is also where I discover that those land crabs like to climb
shrubs and chill on the leaves. The eco-briefing is awfully thorough – my
dictionary will pretty much double as a naturalist’s identification guide if I
get all these into it. The monument at the top is interesting, and photos are
taken in front of it with me and each one of my guides, individually and in
combination, but the best part is the view out over the bay, filled with little
islands, thickly forested and jutting up out of the water, for which the word
‘cerulean’ is entirely justified. If I were to construct my own paradise on
earth, it would look a lot like this. But minus the mosquitoes, papeda, and
surprise shit-crabs. Details.
 |
| View from the hill. |
After
lunch (rice and veggies, with a little of the smoked fish as I can get away
with), the afternoon passes as will many other afternoons here: I transfer my
photos to my laptop and record a handful of locals debating what each tree and
grasshopper is called in Wamesa and what the correct Indonesian translation
might be, then sit and listen a while as they debate the kabupaten proposal and chat, and eventually pull out my latest John
le Carré to read by headlamp after the generator kicks out for a while.
Nothing like a good British spy novel to pull you through a long tropical
evening.
 |
| A nudibranch, I think. |
Saturday:
Today
it’s announced that we’re going out to Motarai, the only one of the little
islets in the bay with a beach instead of a steep rocky rise, so after lunch
the whole family piles into the Johnson and we motor out for the afternoon.
Again, the stated reason is so I can see all the native fish and mollusks and
collect their names, but nobody objects to an afternoon on the beach. Even 50
feet of from shore the water isn’t more than four feet deep, and the kids all
scamper barefoot over top of the corals while I paddle gingerly by with my
camera and look for soft sandy spots to set my feet down. The fish are small at
this depth but as bright as you could ask for, and there’s some of the most
spectacular nudibranches (nudibranchi?) I’ve ever seen, and best of all with
the water this shallow there’s enough light for some really good snapshots. No
lionfish here, but Gladys points out a duribabi
(sea urchin) that’s like no urchin I’ve ever seen – a foot and a half wide
across its circumference, flat and blue with pliable but mean-looking brown
spikes, shaped like a many-pointed star, it undulates its way across a lump of
coral on the bottom. Those spikes aren’t for show – apparently if you step on
it it won’t kill you, but it will definitely make you cry. This from a group of
people who don’t look like they cry much. I watch my step.
 |
| Kids & coral. |
I
make friends with the kids by doing handstands on the sandy bottom and lending
out my goggles, and I’m rewarded by a new discovery: seaweed. Apparently if you
unearth the root, peel off the bottoms of the leaves, and scrape the skin off
with your nail, it makes a favorite snack. I try this and take a bite. Starchy,
crunchy, salty, sweet, and not half bad, though I won’t be giving up my granola
bars any time soon.
After
a quick sojourn on the beach to point out some more trees, I’m led to the other
side of the island to look for shellfish. Apparently the water between Motarai
and the neighboring islet of Wapupi is a hotbed of mollusk diversity, and I’m
to see all of it. The shore is littered with giant clamshells, the kind you see
for sale for way too much money in kitchy souvenir shops down
 |
Hunting for shellfish.
|
the Jersey Shore
and Florida, the size of my hand or bigger. If they weren’t so damn heavy I
could start my own clamshell soap dish importing business right here and pay
for my airfare that way. The kids help me collect some of these and a few other
pretty types. In the water the snails are as varied as promised, though maybe
not as plentiful, and we find a more traditional orange-and-black sea urchin,
which I’m told the Wamesa don’t eat but some neighboring tribes do, cracking it
open to get at the orange eggs inside. By some cosmic/linguistic irony, it’s
the giant clams, not the sea urchins, that are called uni.
Once
back on the beach, the snails are photographed, catalogued, then promptly
tossed on the coals of a campfire, bashed open with rocks, and eaten. The first
one I try – If I could eat fried tarantulas I can eat this – tastes for all the
world like lobster claw. The second is so rubbery I toss it back in the water.
The third is smaller, smoky and tender. All I need is garlic butter. So that
was my afternoon snack: seaweed root and fresh roasted snails.
 |
| A recently deceased cuscus. |
Back
at the house they show me the much bigger, foot-or-more-long conch shells
called tabura that used to be used as
horns to call people together, as well as the traditional drum made of wood and
soa-soa (lizard) skin, and pretty
soon they pull out their van Balen-translated hymnals and sing through some
songs in Wamesa. (Yes, Claire, my recorder was on.) At one point a man walks by
holding a dead cuscus he’s trapped in the forest, and they call him over so I
can take a picture. Apparently cuscus tastes just like chicken, though I never
got the chance to test this firsthand. At (my sadly cuscus-less) dinner I learn
to make ikan kuat, a traditional
Papuan yellow fish stew with plenty of turmeric and lemongrass, and dabu-dabu, the local sambal. Then some
more le Carré to round out the evening, and bed at 9 as usual.
Saturday
night, 1am:
I
wake up when a roach falls down from where it’s been climbing on the mosquito
net and lands on my chest. My reaction when I sit up and see what it is wakes
up Ibu Ice. (To wit: I shriek like a little girl.) She shoes the cockroach out
from under the bed, and then, because the roach apparently wasn’t enough
wildlife for one night, knocks a crab off my leg and crushes it. Fucking Papua.
Sunday:
 |
| Little house in the jungle. |
Sunday
morning it’s quiet, and when it’s quiet in Windesi you can hear how close to
the jungle you really are. (About 5 feet, when sitting at the kitchen table.)
At any given time there’s crickets chirping their hearts out, and usually a
cicada like a buzz saw – Papuan cicadas must be the loudest insects on the
planet, and they’ve interrupted more than one of my recording sessions. And on
top of that are any number of birds, squawking and tweeting and hooting, and if
you’re lucky you can hear the hornbills fly by, not because of their calls but
from the whooshing of air as they beat their wings, which Wikipedia describes
not inaccurately as sounding like the steam escaping from the stack of an old
locomotive. So after breakfast, at around 7am,
I walk down the path past the edge of town, hoping for a little solitude – a
rare commodity out here – and a chance to record some of the cacophony. Orpa,
the five-year-old daughter of my hosts, decides to follow me, but she’s quiet
enough I hardly notice, and somehow content to wait patiently while I stand
there with my recorder in the air for seven minutes. Anyone interested in what
Papua sounds like at 7:30am just
outside town can find the file
here. Turn up the bass and you might even hear
the hornbills fly by in the second half. (I can’t, but hey, you might.)
 |
| Orpa. |
And
because all orang baik hati
(good-hearted people, roughly) go to church on Sunday, at 9am we go to church. Ibu Ice’s Pentecostal so I’m
expecting a rollicking, hand-clapping party of a service, but the church here
turns out to be plain boring generic Protestant, and the service isn’t even in
Wamesa. Since I don’t know any of the hymns and can’t understand much of the
sermon, I zone out trying to remember the lyrics to old songs from my summers
at sleepaway camp. And in the midst of that I realize: it’s the Girl Scouts’
fault I’m out here. There I was all young and impressionable, spending my
summers sleeping in platform tents on a wooded island in the Adirondacks,
singing old hippy folk songs about wandering the wide world and reading books
about a girl growing up on a sailing ship plying the South Pacific at the turn
of the century (Cradle of the Deep by
Joan Lowell – the James Frey of 1920’s San Francisco, her “memoir” turned out
to be rather less than factual, but it’s still a damn good story) – is it any
wonder I ended up in a place like Papua? So thanks, Eagle
Island, and if I catch malaria out
here I’m sending you the doctor’s bill.
Excitement
for the afternoon is a stroll a couple of kilometers into the jungle, where a
bend in a shallow stream makes a swimming (more accurately, wading) hole. The
kids leap in from the banks, dash around barefoot on shore, and build a fire to
roast bamboo shoots as a snack; I sit on the rocky bottom soaking in the cold
water and probably catching some horrific endemic parasite. (Note to self: stop
watching Monsters Within Me on Animal
Planet and just enjoy the damn stream.) Apparently cenderawasih (birds of paradise) come here in the early morning,
but unfortunately I never got a chance to see. Next year. On the walk back we
pass a man dragging a (dead) 6-foot cobra on the end of a stick. And this,
children, is why we stay on the paths and always let somebody else walk ahead
of you. No, you go first, really, I insist.
 |
| Me probably catching a parasite. |
Forest
walks though are pretty much the only thing I don’t go first at. Papuans are
just about the most hospitable people on the planet, and Ibu Ice and I are
honored guests. Once they notice I’m not eating much papeda, suddenly the
staple carb switches over to rice and instant noodles, with nary a bit of sago
to be found. When dinner’s ready, I serve my self first; once I’ve taken a few
bites then Ibu can fill her plate. Only when she’s done does the rest of the
family eat. Tea is placed in front of me whenever I sit down. If I stand up
with a plate in my hand to bring it over to the washing area someone will swoop
in and walk it over for me; I never manage to get close enough to attempt to
wash something myself. It’s all a little disconcerting, to be honest. Really,
no need to get up, I can make my own cup of tea! They humor me with small tasks
when I ask to help in the kitchen, and laugh riotously when I insist on helping
Ibu Ice hang up the just-washed laundry, half of which is mine. God forbid I try
to help with the washing itself; that effort as squelched early on.
The
only way I can reciprocate is with thanks and gifts. I’m looking forward to
seeing Chris’ face when I hand him my stack of receipts at the end of all this
– coffee, sugar, and cough drops are research supplies how exactly? But they
are. In return for their time and hospitality, to make up for all the food I
eat and space I take up, I bring them things that are hard to get or expensive
out here: coffee, tea, sugar, cigarettes, and pinang (betel nut), a mild narcotic which they chew non-stop; even
the children get a taste. I bring some Yale postcards to show where I’m from,
and some photos of family and friends. Whenever I pull out my recorder, I also
open a bag of candies – as I learned last year in Bintuni, Halls cough drops
(citrus, blueberry, watermelon) are a big hit. I teach the kids to play Frisbee
and leave one behind, with crayons and a coloring book. And as a parting gift I
draw from my pre-departure Yale bookstore shopping spree and give the family
bright blue and purple plastic cups, pens for the students, and a pack of
batteries. In return, since there’s always an in return, they give me a bag
made out of bark cloth, made from pounded tree bark, which used to be used for
making clothes and bedsheets as well. I'm looking around and trying to think
what I can bring from the States next year that would be useful, and other than
maybe a solar-powered lantern and more Halls I'm coming up empty. The most
pressing need (that a single person like myself could help with) is affordable
gas, and that's not terribly portable. Everything else, all the things I'm used
to having around, aren't really needs, just icing. Nothing like a week in a
village to make you feel like a spoiled-ass Westerner. (And smash some
illusions. Oh, so you grew up in an Ecovillage with an energy-efficient
dishwasher? We have three lighbulbs, which only run 8 hours a day. Bam.) So
next year it's postcards and cough drops again, and maybe some tempeh from the
city. And there’s also the prestige of having a Westerner come and stay with
them and having the neighbors see me hanging out in the back yard. Pak Aukila
says that by visiting I’m ‘bringing blessings’. Can’t do much better than that.
 |
| Leaving Windesi |
Monday:
Monday
morning I do some last-minute recording, and after lunch we pack up our things,
spend half an hour taking photos of me with all the family members in various
combinations and permutations, and take the half-hour boat ride out to the
island village of Sombokoro. The men in Ibu Ice’s family have been kepala desa in Windesi for generations;
her mother was a daughter of the kepala
desa in Sombokoro. Royal blood here, on a local scale.
Sombokoro
is nowhere near as fruitful as Windesi, though it’s even more full of uncles
and in-laws and cousins. The first afternoon we sit in the living room for a
few hours while the men smoke our cigarettes and chew our pinang (savu in Wamesa)
and argue politics – apparently some people want to move to another part of the
island split the village into two. My eyes quickly glaze over. A kid walking by
notices the bule sitting in the house
and pretty soon every child in the village is crowded around the windows and
door to get a look at me. Eventually Ibu Ice either gets sick of the discussion
or takes pity on me – she’s the only woman in either village ballsy (or bossy)
enough to take part in
 |
First glimpse of Kampung Sombokoro.
|
the political talks – and shortly before dusk we go for
a walk to see the rest of the village. It’s small; there’s maybe a hundred
people living here, tops, and a five-minute stroll takes us to the other side
of the island. Dinner is rice and fish. No lights, since there’s one generator
for the whole community and they guy with the key is in Wasior, so they hang
some gas lamps. I string up my mosquito net – they don’t supply one because
they claim there’s no mosquitoes. It appears I’ve attracted some from a place
where there are, since I wake up with bites despite my net – and go to sleep.
(On a raised bed! With a (thin) mattress! No more bruised hip bones for me!)
Tuesday:
I
stroll down to the beach to watch the sunrise over the mountains across Wondama
Bay. Breakfast is rice and the
smoked meat from a wild forest pig someone has hunted down. Awesome. Ibu Ice
and I take a walk to her mother’s grave, then go back to the house to record
her uncle telling a traditional story, and by 9am it’s back on the Johnson for
the trip back to Wasior, and from there home to Manokwari. Rumor has it there’s
a ship on Wednesday, though nobody really knows for sure. Maybe Friday, maybe
Saturday; we’ll see. Eighteen of us pack into the boat, including Pak Aukila,
who’s driving, and a handful of kids. About 50 feet off shore, the engine dies.
A little fiddling and it starts up again, runs for a few minutes, dies again.
Repeat until we’re around the corner of the island from the village and a
hundred yards from shore, when it just stops dead and won’t start. The anchor
is dropped, and more intensive dismantling of the engine ensues. Twenty minutes
later it’s showing signs of life, only to quickly fail again. Drop anchor one
more time. There’s no cell reception and the village can’t see us from here, so
there’s nothing to do but fix the damn thing. I set my little thermometer out
on the deck and the mercury reaches 52°C (a balmy 125°F) but only since that’s
as high as the numbers go. Under my umbrella it’s a cool 34° (93°F), and I’m
wearing long pants, socks, a baseball cap, and a light hooded jacket to ward
off third-degree sunburn. I stick my feet in the water, socks and all, to try
to cool off. Either the heat or the swell is getting to my stomach so I take a
Dramamine. Luckily, in Papua they can fix anything, and an hour and a half
after first leaving shore we’re en route for real. The drugs make me sleepy so
I curl up under my umbrella, turn on Verdi’s Requiem on my ipod, and doze.
Something smells strongly of smoked fish, though whether it’s me, my clothes,
the people around me and their clothes, or somebody’s packed lunch I couldn’t
tell you. And from now on Verdi’s Requiem will forever be associated in my mind
with the smell of smoked fish.
 |
| Dawn on Sombokoro
|
Passing
Wasior’s main jetty we see a ship docked, the Perentis company’s Cenderewasih
Pasifik III, much smaller than the Pelni
ship we took out but anything that floats’ll do the trick. People seem to think
it might be going to Manokwari, instead of the other direction to Nabire, Serui, Biak,
and Jayapura. It’s probably leaving tonight! Maybe at 3! or 5! or 7! After that
last boat ride I’m tired and grumpy and anxious to get home. Eventually, after
we’ve settled in at yet another relative’s house on shore, somebody’s
dispatched to the harbor to check. Actually it leaves tomorrow, around 4pm, but jam
karet (Indonesian rubber time) and all so probably more like 6. And it’s
slower than the last ship too, so it’ll arrive in Manokwari Thursday morning.
Oh, I dunno, around 12 or 1. AM? No, PM. Maybe. It’s an old boat. Still, it’s
the only boat there, so an uncle/cousin/in-law drives me down to get tickets.
The nice cabin is already sold, so again I buy us bunks from the crew. No a/c
this time, but the window opens. Good enough.
Back
at the house – a wood hut on stilts this time, traditional Papua, rather than
the ground-level concrete structures we’ve been staying in – my talent for
being in the wrong place at the right time is once more reaffirmed. (Mom- do
yourself a favor and skip to the next paragraph. I’m fine.) In the last year
I’ve managed to just miss an earthquake in Indonesia,
an earthquake on the east coast of the US,
a volcano in New Zealand,
and any day now another hurricane in the Northeast. As placid as Manokwari
often seems, I’ve picked a field site in a region with an active, often violent
independence movement, as well as an active, even more violent, military/police
response. This morning there was a student demonstration at Unipa, which led to
violent clashes with the police both on campus and in the surrounding
neighborhood of Amban, where I live. The police used their guns and unknown
numbers were injured and/or arrested, with at least one killed. Virgine, my
host sister, was in bio lab on campus when they heard the gunshots; the
students ran from the building and had to use back roads to get home, since the
main roads were blocked by police. I was safe a few hundred miles down the
coast and nobody I work with was injured, and hopefully this won’t make it
harder for me to get my visa renewed next week. There’s usually advance notice
for protests, so I plan to be well out of town for the next one as well.
(Steve, next time one of your students asks if fieldworkers face any real
hazards, direct them to this paragraph.)
That
night the poorly-ventilated cookfire billows smoke through the house, and lying
on the floor to go to sleep I’m half convinced I’m going to die of carbon monoxide
poisoning. I’m too tired to care.
Wednesday:
 |
| Leaving Wondama Bay |
After
an uneventful morning of sitting, talking, and reading, and 3:00 we finally head down to the harbor and board the
ship. As promised we leave around 5, and I head to the back deck for a breeze
and the view. I’m watching the schools of brown-and-burgundy jellyfish churned
up in the wake when I see a flash of silver off to the side and turn to see
three or four dolphins leaping beside the boat. The 12-year-old girl in me
squeals a little. They disappear before I can get my camera out, as do the
jellyfish. I watch the sunset and enjoy the wind til it gets dark, then head in
to my bunk for an evening of illegally copied romantic comedies and (legal,
delicious) fried bananas with sambal. Just after 5:30
Thursday morning we’re awakened by a knock on the cabin door – we’re in
Manokwari.
Postscript:
Back
at home I immediately take a mandi, then spend the rest of the day enjoying the
real mattress, air conditioning, and relative quiet of my own room, catching up
on a week’s worth of unread emails, sorting recordings and labeling photos. All
of my things, dirty or not, go straight in the laundry – after a week of
cooking over a campfire, everything – my clothes, blanket, towel, hair – reeks
of wood smoke. The next day I go downtown to buy some apples (fresh fruit!) and
swing by the spa for a $15 creambath,
an hour-long deep conditioning treatment, which is (more importantly)
accompanied by a head, neck, and back massage. Feeling recuperated, I spend two
days writing this post. Tomorrow it’s back to the office, then a trip to the Kantor Immigrasi to get my visa
extended, and a week later off to Raja Ampat for my fall break. And not that
you’d know it here, but happy Halloween!
 |
| Windesi Bay |
Gingerbread a la
Papua
