Travel Papua - Irian Jaya

Most of the days we spent in Papua, we ate papaya, rice, sweet potatoe and papaya´s levaes. They cook all together, wrapping the food in a banana´s leave and cooking it under the floor. The floor is heated with hot stones... just like a natural oven!

In the 2006, 100 km far from where this picture was taken, a group of scientists arrived at a place whom they baptized as the Garden of the Eden and they found unknown animals and plants species.

When we got to the Wamena´s airport we saw one person called Mad. He had a hat with crocodile teet, and he came to us saying that he was the guide. He speaks english, indonesian and Dani and Lani, so we decided go with him... really good guide!

Here we are, Mad, Granus and ourselves in the last Baliem Valley trekking day with our best clothes, the koteka (the thing that we wear on our penus), some toothpaste, mud and spit, everything mixed up... we spent two hours in the river for washing all these things up.

Throughout the Baliem Valley three different ethnic groups are distributed in about 30 clans that coexist by the valley, they are the Danis, Lanis and Yamis. With similar habits and their koteka, the fruit that covers their penis. Their faces are really different from the typical indonesian people, they have beard and curly hair and the skin´s color is darker, maybe they have somenthing to do with the australian´s natives.

In these ethnic groups of the Baliem Valley inIndonesia, they incinerate deads so their souls abandon the world of the alive ones, meanwhile the big bosses and the death warriors were mummified. The catholic missionares have destroyed most of the mummies, but there are some left, like the picture one, he was a Dani boss 350 years ago and today is like an oracle that the village´s people ask for advice before every war; everytime that they fight they hang those stems to him as a necklace.

The Baliem´s river has a really big volume, one russian people wanted to raft it some years ago but the Indonesian goverment didn´t leave them because they considered that it was too dangerous. Furthermore if you take a look a the wood´s bridges that we have to cross… just that, it is a scary thing!