Back to the past. Инна Витальевна Метельская-Шереметьева

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      As I have mentioned above, there shouldn’t be any problems getting a pass on your own to visit the closed (belonging to the national park) territories in the further part of Irian Jaya. The pass itself costs a few dollars and is given to travelers upon presenting their passport with an Indonesian visa, two photos and a filled-in application form (which is very simple). We decided to use the help of a local assistant. By the way, we kept using the locals’ help and not due to our own slow speed. In an unexplored area still uninhabited with travel agents (somewhere like Baliem Valley in Irian Jaya, the Banga suburbs in the Central African Republic or Napo river basin in Ecuador), the locals’ active help in solving different matters facing travelers allows them to speed up the process quite significantly and acquire some useful contacts.

      Comparing the life of the locals with your own, realizing how much more difficult it is and how much it lacks, a normal and racially unprejudiced person from our European civilization must at least want to help the locals in some way. Of course, I mean material aid here. It is like feeding a hungry child or helping a disabled old man. These are the realities of our worlds, of our and their living conditions. Without blaming the authorities, God or just universal injustice, think simply: if I can share something, I will. But in order not to train the locals to beg and cajole money for allowing you to take a picture, in order to avoid in Irian Jaya what happened in Australia where ‘kind’ Europeans turned aborigines into beggars and drunkards and made begging a full-time job of the locals, we always asked them to do some work for us. Everything is simple – you do work, you get money. And many times we noticed that Indonesians appreciate such earned money much more than donations. I am deviating from the topic though but in this book it is Michael and Alexey’s responsibility.

      It’s not difficult to get a ticket to Wamena either. Theoretically, planes fly to this small town regularly, but in fact the flight schedule depends on how full the planes are. If the quota of 25 seats has been filled, the flight will take place. If it hasn’t, you will have to wait. And while we are waiting for a plane, I will tell you a short story about Wamena and the Baliem Valley – the last outpost of civilization in Irian Jaya – as it is often called in various tourist guidebooks. Unfortunately, it is impossible to determine exactly when the local tribes started full-scale exploration of Valley Baliem. Here, I don’t mean settlement in the valley, but specifically exploration, cultivation and turning it into a certain center of the inter-tribal community. Anyway, when American explorers discovered Wamena in 1938, it was already a rather big settlement with developed farming, which was mostly inhabited by the Dani tribes. Members of the Yali and Lani tribes lived and worked nearby, but higher in the mountains, sometimes coming down to Wamena to exchange handicraft products for food. That is how National Geographic magazine described Wamena in 1941. The word “Wamena” itself is translated from the local language as “a pig for you”. Hunters probably used to catch wild pigs and bring them to the settlement in exchange for cultivated vegetables.

      The Baliem river valley is located 1600 meters above sea level. It is 72 km long, and from 15 to 75 km wide. Visually, it is a huge ravine impossible to cover with your eye, hidden from the rest of the world by almost totally vertical rocks. Stunning views, a rather moderate climate and some rudiments of civilization attracted the first missionaries to Wamena about 10 years after its first publication in the magazine. It was a Danish mission. Obviously, having brought here metal tools, primitive utensils, clothes and books, the missionaries first of all started building churches and schools. They were successful. There are about twenty parishes and four schools in Wamena today. Not all the churches look well attended. Some of their yards are overgrown with weeds and almost all of them are empty. To be more accurate, locals go to church, but they do it probably because their ancestors did it as well. We weren’t able to find out if they perform the same ceremonies – christenings, weddings, or prayers. Although most missionaries left Wamena in 1962, some volunteer pastors still live there, though they are not in a rush to talk СКАЧАТЬ