Going Around the World, the other way, August 2001. Part 2. Irian Jaya … it only gets 35 FEET of rainfall a year. It rained.

Well here we are in rainy Timika, Irian Jaya, Indonesia. The Qantas flight had all of 14 passengers and had a FIRST for me -an all female crew – not just the two cheerful “g’day mate” girls in the cabin, but both flight deck occupants were ladies too -and here we were zooting off at midnight for a remote tropical jungle location, but I quickly got myself out of stupid male mode (knowing that 1 would get a slew of intense criticism from some of my female readers here) and obviously I need to tell the tale, so good onya, Sheilas, which is Ozspeak for well done ladies ….

The arrival procedures were tortuous to say the least. It took nearly an hour to clear all 14 of us ! What they would do with a huge mob of 96, as we could turn up with, is something to have a worry about. Everyone’s bags had to be gone through and anything like a drug container looked at hard_ My cellphone was also regarded as suspicious. Oy oy oy.

The luxurious Sheraton Timika was only 2 k’s away and is not your average airport hotel by any means. Built in 1995, it serves as a base for business visitors to the vast local copper and gold mining area here – in fact it is the copper they are after and the gold is a subsidiary operation, to the tune of FIVE MILLION DOLLARS A DAY !!!! And is you want to see GREEN and TROPICAL foliage, then come on over – this place receives an annual rainfall of a cool 35 FEET. It is lush and steamy and it IS a jungle out there and if the hotel didn’t keep on cutting it back, then it would be take us over pretty fast. And right outside my window, there was nice family of wild pigs having a root around in the undergrowth. For the moments when it does stop raining, then the insects sing out and best of all are the butterflies, some of which are really huge, with iridescent cobalt blue wings or black and white blobs.

The only trouble going somewhere that has not had tourism on our scale before is that I have to work VERY hard, so those of you who think I am permanently anchored by the pool with cooling libation to hand, are DEAD wrong. It was a great and sticky runaround trying to put things together in a place that is not very organized to begin with and doesn’t think tourism. And it was WET – incredible amounts of sheer torrents of water coming down for the best part of the first two days and later on the third – not good for glasses wearers. as the moment you walk out of the a/c, then the lenses just fog up in 1.5 seconds.

I was driven off for nearly 2 hours of lurching along a long series of interlinked potholes (here called a road) to visit a remote village which is the scene of an annual arts and crafts show and which we may be able to sked for our visit. Total third world village, half naked, snotty nosed kids in rags and a feeling of real end of the world. There was a large boat tied up in the river, offloading cargo that was the biggest excitement. It was really an larger version of the African Queen, with a lot more rust. Many huge sacks of onions coming ashore. The arts show would be tremendous for the right pax and if it does come to pass that we can be there the right day, then we shall have to be careful how we advertise it so that only the right ones come – Gucci sandals-land this is not. But for collectors of knockout pieces of carving and at prices that are lower than low, then the right ones will be wetting their knickers. Dealers from Jakarta come for this show, so I know that any of our gang could outbid them in a flash – there were things here that would be thousands of dollars in a gallery in NY, which here go for $50. And fortunately there is DHL so they can send their 30 feet pieces of carving home that way. I did see that happen once. A very wealthy and young couple bought a full war canoe on a South Pacific island and had it Fedexed back to the USA.   It was about 35 feet long.   Two pallets on the aircraft. It outside their house before they even got home. What the cost was would have been mind boggling.

Hopefully we shall be able to fix a visit to the copper mine itself – the logistics of this place are beyond belief – how do you run the world’s second largest copper mine on the top of a 13,000 ft mountain in a totally third world country ? Well somehow they do and we shall want to go see. I am hopefully going to come back in Jan by which time we can organize an official invitation, so can go to see them and try to make it their idea that we should come to visit.   (later note:  we abandoned the whole idea of a visit.  Security at the mine would not even think about a gormless group of tourists getting in the way and we were being thought of as spies.) But at least I had been somewhere seriously off any beaten track.