Our Next Intrepid Adventure: To Papua on a Motorbike

We have been intending to get to Papua for roughly seven years, ever since Z and I first started talking about travelling together, around the time he turned three.

He was that stage in many young boys’ lives where wardrobe is, at best, based entirely around cartoon characters and, at worst, as here, confined to one increasingly filthy Spiderman suit, removed only when it threatens to crawl away under its own steam and then grudgingly substituted with a Batman suit.

“Where do you want to go?” I asked.

We were in his bedroom, looking at the big world map that hung beside his bunk. Fresh back, pretty much, from an idyllic three weeks slobbing and backpacking around Yucatan Mexico.

That was where it dawned on me that I really enjoyed my son’s company and that a year off travelling might be a really good idea at some point.

“There!” said Spiderman, putting a small, chubby finger on Indonesian Papua.

Christ. I miss those days, sometimes.

Aged ten, his feet are almost as big as mine. And his face shows the angular, high-cheekboned shape of manhood to come.

Though his conversation has, most definitely, improved.

“That’s Papua!” I said. “Why Papua?”

“Because,” he said, “It looks like a dinosaur.”

As, indeed, it does.

If you are three, or if you spend much time with boys of that sort of age, Indonesian Papua looks *exactly* like a T-Rex.

The plan for our first visit to Indonesia, six years or so after that conversation and eight months after we left home for good, was to work our way across the country from Indonesian Borneo, where we entered the nation, east to Papua.

By land and boat as much as possible.

In some ludicrous time frame like, err, two months.

We got sort of side-tracked, to be frank, caught up in the wonders of this crazy patchwork of cultures that sprawls across at least 17,000 islands.

We hung out with hunter-gathering nomads. We managed to dive an undersea volcano. We watched buffalo sacrifice in the Tana Toraja, got caught in an earthquake, released baby turtles into the ocean… Extended the visa to give us more time…

Then -– kerblam! — Z’s birthday was approaching, and we needed to be in Australia with his dad.

We could always have flown to Papua, obviously.

But, well, it felt like cheating.

The problem with planes is that you miss out on all the interesting stuff en route: the whales, the volcanoes, the tricoloured lakes, the sharks, the dragons, the beaches…

And that’s just the stuff you read in guidebooks, not the stuff you hear as you get closer to the place.

Flying is brutal in its efficiency. Though aerial vistas can be amazing, and saddening — the Queensland floods, the deforestation of Borneo — you are, essentially, commuting from one airport to another.

When you travel overland, you experience that gradual –- or sometimes dramatic –- transition of landscape and culture that makes a trip a journey, not a visit.

And you tend to have adventures, too.

And we like having adventures.

Intrepid adventures, when we can.

And so, we have just left Bali, embarked on our next intrepid adventure. East to Papua, take two, biking and boating through some of the 500-odd islands that make up Nusa Tenggara, to East Timor, and thence by boat to Papua.

Why Papua, now? And, given Z’s aversion to squat toilets and mosquitoes, why Papua at all?

Well, first up, some places just have a magic to their name, an allure, a ring of history and legend, if also a waft of open sewer and grinding poverty: Zanzibar, Samarkand, Timbuktu, Xanadu, Nineveh, Papua…

Secondly, I know damn well how it feels to be on the verge of reaching one of those places and not get there.

I went to Mali, years ago, and didn’t get to Timbuktu. My parents, over 40 years ago now, traveled overland to Afghanistan, and didn’t get to Samarkand.

Are they kicking themselves?

Ya betcha!

Most importantly, Papua is culturally and naturally unique. Its highland valleys housed the largest uncontacted culture the modern world has known, whose first sometimes traumatic encounters with gold prospectors (or, possibly, missionaries) are still (just) within living memory.

These people were the first settled agriculturalists on earth. And when the Leary brothers stumbled across them (or, possibly, missionaries located them and kept their existence quiet), they were still using stone tools.

Practices from cannibalism to head-hunting to cargo cults were part of life for some of the older generation, and some, if not all, still exist in the region around Amats.

And the wildlife is just bizarre. Tree kangaroos in every flavour. A type of echidna as friendly as a dog. And, err, giant, savage rats.

The Raja Ampat islands have the most marine diversity on earth, and dazzling birds of paradise, too.

Does Z want to go?

Yes. We’ve talked about it.

He is ambivalent about primitive conditions.

Z would (like most of us, I guess) rather shit in the bush than use a dubious toilet. He is not a fan of mosquitoes (we will be minimizing the risk of malaria with long pants, shirts and pyjamas, DEET-based repellent, permethrin on the clothes and doxycycline, since Malarone, the most effective malaria prophylaxis and so my anti-malarial of choice for Z, is not available in Indonesia).

But surely he remembers that magical moment with the map?

Err, nope.

One of the odd things about reminiscing with one’s child, or with one’s parents, is how the events that loom large for the parent are rarely those that loomed large for the child.

My cousins and I have a firm childhood memory of a family holiday in Spain where my mother saved my cousin L from drowning.

A dramatic event! Who could forget it?

Well, since seeing a small child knocked over by a wave and fishing them, spluttering and screaming, out of the water is part and parcel of Atlantic holidays, my mother could. And has.

Z has a vivid memory from our first trip to Egypt, when he was one and a bit, of being scratched by a cat.

Not a standout in my personal universe, it has to be said.

Anywise, Z is curious.

I gave him the introduction to the Papua section of Lonely Planet Indonesia, he read it, and he’s in.

“I’m not as enthusiastic as you are, Mum,” he says. “But, yeah, I’m enthusiastic.”

Me? I’ve read a couple of the Papua classics, like Throwim Way Leg, Tim Flannery’s extraordinary memoir of researching mammals in Papua around the time Jared “Guns, Germs and Steel” Diamond was there, and First Contact, the story of the gold prospecting Leary boys.

And, yeah, maybe I’m a bit too enthusiastic.

Now, we’re not looking for first contact, an experience regularly staged for ultra-high-budget tourists in the more remote parts of the island.

We want to see how societies isolated by their geography from the rest of the world function only seventy-odd years after first contact.

When they learnt their shell currency grew not on trees but in an unimaginably vast body of water far beyond the boundaries of the universe, and those who went up in planes reported that the pillars of the sky did not exist.

The transformation has been super-fast. There be gold in them thar hills, and lots of it.

We hope to get across the island, too.

A mining company has engineered one of the most spectacular roads on earth, shaving off the entire top of a knife-edge ridge that towers miles above the forest.

It appears they have also barred it to all but their employees, and bribes in Papua don’t come cheap.

Wamena seems to be the traditional place to visit. But it sounds, from conversations, like one of the bigger adventure tourist traps on earth, and you can only get there by plane.

But it does look as though there’s a road that goes across the island, albeit through the foothills not the valleys of the highlands.

So, as they say, we shall see.

Now, I don’t like to overplan.

The best travel experiences are the ones that happen when you don’t plan, the ones that aren’t in the guidebooks, aren’t online, aren’t booked through agents: the GoogleWhack of travel.

Conversely, the worst travel experiences are the ones that happen when you don’t plan.

And I really don’t want to be up sh*t creek without a paddle and a p*ssed-off ten-year-old on me like a numerator on a denominator. (Z has asked me to credit this reference to The Simpsons.)

But we have decided to do it on a motorbike.

“It’s so much more interesting on the back of a bike than in the back of a car,” says Z, who is not generally a fan of mass transportation as found in the, ahem, quieter backwaters of South-East Asia. “You see a lot more and the breeze keeps you, err, coolish.”

I have bought a bike, acquired a license, and so, err…

Here we are! Off on an intrepid adventure.

We are, both of us, sad to leave Bali, where we’ve been, effectively, living for almost three whole months. We’ve made friends and acquaintances, formed routines, acquired locals, and seen a hell of a lot of fascinating things.

I’m excited about the journey ahead of us, but nervous too. It’s a long way by bike and boat. A host of different cultures, different adventures and different experiences.

And, for the first time, I’ll be combining adventure travel, unschooling and travel blogging with paid work for some phenomenally understanding clients.

AKA going the full digital nomad.

Z is “kind of” excited. He’s nervous, essentially, about butt ache from the motorcycle and the prospect of a diet of chicken and rice.

But, push come to shove, we can always flog the bike and jump a mission flight, or turn round and wait for a slow boat to (relative) civilisation.

Yet lying on the platform beds of this big boat, cruising into Lombok, a brief glimpse of dolphins banked, jingly Indo pop all present and correct, and the bike awaiting us down below, it feels –- well, right.

Though, crikey, I hope to God I find a guy to make some panniers for us in Lombok.

The thing is: we’re on a mission. A proper mission.

And it looks like, finally, after seven years, we’re going to get to Papua. Under our own steam, and on our own terms.

Timeframe? Largely TBC.