Lives less ordinary
The Sun-Herald: March 4, 2007

Jo Hegerty is made to feel very important in Papua New Guinea’s highlands.

‘The villagers want to know why you came here. They think you must be bigmen from your villages,’ our guide explained. ‘Are you bigmen?’

No, we most certainly weren’t. We felt far from big at that moment, mud stains up to our knees, sweaty, sunburnt and humbled by the hospitality we’d received at this village deep in the Nebilyer Valley.

The day before we’d arrived at Haus Poroman near Mount Hagen, capital of Papua New Guinea’s Western Highlands province and stood on the edge of the lodge property, looking over the prehistoric valley, half expecting a pterodactyl to screech past. We’d be sleeping somewhere down there the next night.

I’ve been on cultural tours before. In places like Thailand and Morocco these ‘village experiences’ have a staged feel, with conveniently-placed snake charmers and kids that charge you five baht to take their picture. But this was the highlands of PNG, where there’s little tourism. The beaten track, if you could call it that, was a long way from here. 

We were definitely off-piste as we followed our guide Simeon down into the rising mist beneath a canopy of spiders’ webs. The trek wasn’t the smoothest of operations; we were carrying ten litres of water in 500ml Mount Franklin bottles and two fat sleeping bags in plastic bin liners, but the prospect of delving into such a wilderness fuelled high spirits. Simeon danced between us offering a hand here, an elbow there, as we slipped and slid down the path.

It was mid-afternoon when we reached Pangapup to screams of excitement. Dark-skinned children in ripped t-shirts fled then crept back for a second look as we scrabbled through the pineapples and tried not to step on the kau kau plants, the sweet potato that makes up the majority of the local’s diet.

Ulg and his family were our hosts for the night and he welcomed us to his home, a tidy clearing with three grass huts – one for cooking, one for sleeping, one for the pigs – and a much needed wooden bench. Stunned and weary, we gratefully accepted the offerings of pineapple and water before being proudly shown to the toilet, a long-drop with three walls for modesty. Spider haven, yes, but what a view.

Takap, an unusually tall woman with teeth to give you nightmares, invited us into the cooking hut to watch her make a string bag, a bilum. The roof of the hut was black with soot from the ever-smouldering fire that filled the small space with choking smog.

Our afternoon at Pangapup was charming in its own, disordered way. I kept imagining how my family would behave if four visitors from another planet popped in for a bit of a look-see; my sister would dress up as a convict and Dad would get me to sing Waltzing Matilda while he got the barbie ready. A good team had been roped in to entertain us and while we sat in the hut, a young, muscular man strutted past in traditional grass skirt and bamboo belt, looking like one of the famed birds of paradise that inhabit the area.

His job was to demonstrate making fire in the traditional way. As he sawed a strip of bark furiously back and forth against a stick, I worried about his arse-grass, as it’s known, catching fire. Meanwhile, his mates stood around offering helpful tips and smoking cigarettes. Some things transcend cultural divides.

We had music that afternoon, although let’s just say that there’s a reason PNG’s highlands aren’t famous for their melodies. A couple of older men earnestly twanged a concert of identical tunes on bamboo Jew’s harps, then finished with a flurry of notes on a bamboo flute. We were speechless. 

To be fair, there’s not much call for a subsistence farmer to be musically inclined. Every man, woman and child at Pangapup eked out a living from the fertile lands around them, travelling miles to sell avocados at the market when cash was needed for a bag of rice. Money was a foreign concept here, the real currency was pigs, and in the centre of the village, 26 stakes driven into the ground each represented a pig that this village owed to another.

With no electricity for miles around, the kids learnt to be adept with the two-foot blade of a bush knife rather than an Xbox control and we grew used to this alarming sight as we toured the village, gathering followers like the Pied Piper.

We shook hands with every adult we encountered and most of the little kids, those who weren’t holding knives or baby siblings. Whenever we stopped to listen to the guide, our flock would press closer, staring up, mouths open, yellow snot bridging nostrils and lips.

Feeling like celebrities, or at the very least some kind of World Vision commercial, we stopped to greet some young missionaries. A gnarled old woman attached herself to my waist and cackled, stroking my arms with hands like sandpaper. She was worried that my soft skin would get scratched in the gardens and told Simeon off for letting us walk through the coffee plantations.

At the social centre of the village was, of all things, a pool table barely contained by grass-thatched walls. Somehow a game was taking place, the players manoeuvring around the card players on the floor, a woman cooking over a small fire and wiggling children peeking over the table’s felt edge.

When we returned to Ulg and Takap, preparations for a mumu were well underway. River stones had been cooked in the fire and a crew of young men, footy shorts tucked up under their grass skirts laid them onto the banana leaves lining the mumu pit. Takap layered vegetables, ferns and chicken in the pit with one hand, keeping the family’s puppy and son away with the other. 

With the pit wrapped up and dinner in the oven, Simeon asked us if we had any questions for the villagers – our fan club had turned up in force by now. When we’d run out of things to ask, Jon asked Simeon if the villagers had any questions for us? They were curious about everything from how we got to work to what we ate for dinner and why none of us were married, until finally, the big question: are you bigmen?

I explained that we were ordinary people who had come to the Highlands because we were interested in the land, the people and the customs. The villagers seemed surprised by this. ‘So what are your jobs?’ they wanted to know. A student, bar manager and journalist each received a little applause, but when the fourth member of our party told them that he didn’t have a job, being on route from an old life in England to a new one in Australia, the response was thunderous. As they shouted and talked excitedly amongst themselves, Simeon explained that the villagers were amazed that such ordinary people would come all this way to see them.