Welcome to Maikmol

We stop dead in our tracks. Two men are sprinting towards us, one priming an arrow on his bow, the other brandishing a spear. They are splashed from head to foot in white war-paint and are naked but for the leaves covering their genitals. They brake in front of us, and, scowling and hissing, start lunging with their weapons. Nadya and I take a step backwards. Two women, one wearing a parrot-feather coronet and waving a bunch of marigolds, are hard on their heels. As the scouts retreat, we advance tentatively down the path to the village and hear singing voices. Some fifty people have gathered at the gate, a temporary construction of bamboo decorated with flowers, and they are of all ages and also plastered in white. A little boy takes two steps forward and holds up a sign. "Welcome to Maikmol."

This is the fourth day of our first hike in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Our party is larger than expected. Paul Riss, the guide I communicated with via email from Australia, said we might trek into the mountains in Jiwaka province, see birds of paradise, and get an impression of village life, hiring a local guide and a couple of porters to carry our food. I said one porter would suffice, and we agreed on wages (100 kina [$40] a day for Paul, 50 kina a day for the local guide Joe, and 25 kina a day for the porter). Our core team appears, however, to have swollen from five to nine: Nadya and I, Paul, Joe, Richard (Paul's son), Jonas (Joe's son), Jonathan and Thomas (tourism and hospitality students), and Simon (a lad handy with a bush knife). Sometimes, we are as many as twenty -- curious villagers tagging along behind. Extra mouths to feed when it comes to mealtimes stretch the 5 to 6 days of provisions we have brought, but Paul sweeps these concerns aside: "The others will feed themselves," he assures us. It amazes me that, apart from foot-and-a-half-long bush knives, the Papuans carry nothing -- not even a water bottle to refill at creeks. We have been sweating our way through dense tropical rainforest, the path often clogged with mud and obstructed by moss-cloaked logs.

Nadya and I walk through the floral gate. The two warriors who had challenged us suddenly seize me under the arms, and, before I can protest, hoist me into the air. Two sturdy women do the same with Nadya. They carry us -- backpacks and all -- down a flight of dirt steps into the village square. There, they set us down, and girls put flower garlands around our necks. "When did they last see white people?" I ask Paul later. "Have they ever seen any?" The first whites to penetrate the Papuan interior were Australian gold prospectors in the 1930s. Almost ninety years ago. Surely many Westerners had walked the trail to Maikmol since. We are not that far from Mt Hagen, the hub town for Highlands tourism. Neither Paul nor Joe can tell me when the last "whitepella" passed this way, but a villager says a German bug collector came twenty years ago.

The village chief gives a speech and then the town councillor. Wishing to attract visitors, the councillor informs us, the people of Maikmol built a zoo some years back, but none came. Some of the animals escaped, others died, and the zoo fell into ruin. Our arrival, he insists, will breathe new life into their zoo. We sit down on benches and wonder how, while our hosts bring us pineapples and peanuts. An old woman gives Nadya a cassowary-feather bilum (a shoulder bag) and hugs her around the waist. I give a speech. We donate 50 kina to the zoo, saying, after seeing the empty cages, that building nature trails to see birds of paradise and bird-wing butterflies in the wild may be more of a pull for many Westerners. They might prefer to see the male Lesser Bird of Paradise with its cascading, yellow-and-white tail plumes perform its courtship display in the forest canopy -- as we did this morning.

David, a short, cheery pastor, puts us up in his hut for the night. Nadya and I are just nodding off after a dinner of kau kau (sweet potatoes) and boiled banana when David starts playing his guitar and singing about Jesus (Christian missionaries followed the gold prospectors into the Highlands). In the new day, as we depart Maikmol, I ask Joe what the villagers made of us. "They slept with their eyes open," he replies. "They believe white men need no sleep and wanted to see what you got up to in the night." Pastor David was amazed, apparently, that we slept under his roof. "When white men come to eat and sleep with us, it means that soon Jesus will return," he told Joe. "The world will come to an end."

Tony