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There is no doubt that my trek of Spring 1999 in the highlands
of the Baliem valley in Irian Jaya was the most incredible
experience of my life so far: a real plunge into the prehistory
of humanity. Both Irian Jaya and the rest of New Guinea island
are some of the last places on earth where you can still meet
people living as their ancestors did in the Stone Age.
Of the hundreds of Papuan tribes of Irian Jaya the most distinguished
are the highlanders, who are the only ones to wear a very
unique piece of "clothing", the traditional keteka–a
penis sheath made of gourd. Depending on ethnic affiliation,
the koteka may differ in shape, volume and length, but it
is always worn in "present arms" position.
Irian Jaya, Indonesia’s easternmost province, makes
up about half of the island of New Guinea; the other half
being the independent state of Papua New Guinea. When the
Portuguese first sighted the island, they called it Ilhas
dos Papuas (‘the island of the fuzzy hairs’)
from the Malay word papuwah. Later Dutch explorers
called it New Guinea because the black-skinned people reminded
them of the people of Guinea in Africa.
Irian is a word from the Biak language, and means
"hot land rising from the sea". Under the Dutch,
Irian Jaya was known as Dutch New Guinea and when sovereignty
transferred to Indonesia, it was renamed Irian Jaya (jaya
means "victorious").
The first white men chanced upon the Baliem valley in 1938,
a discovery that came as one of the last and greatest surprises
to a world that thought it had mapped, studied and traveled
its remotest corners. It wasn’t until 1945 that attention
was again drawn to the valley when a plane crashed there and
the survivors were rescued. The first missionaries arrived
in 1954, the Dutch government established a post at Wamena
in 1956, and changes to the Baliem valley followed. Today
Wamena, the starting point of my trek, is a sprawling, haphazard
Indonesian town, but local culture has in many ways proved
very resilient.
The contrast of naked Dani walking on their way to the city
market or heading back to their remote villages (often several
walk days away in the mountains) and the "modern" Indonesian
people driving their noisy motor-bikes or mini buses brought
by cargo plane at great expense, is the first cultural shock
experienced by the traveller when getting out of the airport.
These Indonesian migrants are mostly muslim Javanese people
who run, almost exclusively, the local businesses and the
administration. Very few Dani people actually speak Indonesian,
another proof that these two worlds are still nowadays living
side by side several thousands of years apart and not blending
together.
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