The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  Spies, Mead, and Covarrubias helped refine an idea that has not died since. Their reasons for being here were all different, however. Spies came to Bali in no small part because it was easier to be a homosexual, but during a 1939 witch hunt that swept through the Dutch Indies he was tried and imprisoned. Shipped out of Bali as an undesirable alien at the height of the Pacific war, he was drowned when his prison ship was bombed in 1942. The cells were not unlocked as the ship went down.

  Mead, on the other hand, had been sent to Bali for a curiously specific purpose—to investigate the cultural roots of schizophrenia for the fearsomely named Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox. Bali had seemed to her a fertile place to research such a thing. Repression, she theorized, made the Balinese very susceptible to forms of schizophrenia. Over a period of two years, she and Bateson devised a new method of research using film, photography, and text accounts, and a desire to compare their results with another subject area led them to think about comparative research in Papua. Bali, then, led to Papua.

  Under the influence of Spies, one suspects, Mead and Belo became obsessed with the Rangda witch dance and its accompanying trances. The altered state of trance could be analyzed from different angles, its roots in the Balinese psyche could be conjectured with great finesse. But Mead’s interests reinforced a conception of the Balinese as an archaic and static people with no real history to them. There was much talk of a “steady state” and an unchanging but dynamic harmony. “Here the ahistorical nature of anthropology,” writes Vickers, “relegated non-Europeans to being people without history.”

  Mead’s letters from her adopted village of Bojong Gede crackle with the freshness of unexpected discovery. It is a traveler’s pleasure. Perhaps an anthropologist has to be a good traveler first. But as I walked around the Spies house I thought back to the exhibits in the airport and the nauseatingly ubiquitous gamelan music in the phony artisan shops all over Ubud. Bali was not unchanging or harmonious. Its depth had been flattened out, its demonic edges funneled into spectacles, and this had happened not in spite of the serious traveler and the serious anthropologist, but because of them.

  It rains all the time in Ubud in November. I could no longer train with the pack, so I spent hours trudging up and down Monkey Forest Road, all the way down to the Monkey Forest itself, past a slew of empty luxury hotels and open bars where, between eleven and midnight, little crowds of foreigners gathered to watch jazz bands and R & B outfits. The rain turned the football field into a marsh. At night, the temples lit up and the dances went on as always; along Raya, the boutiques filled with krisses and scabbards, handmade quilts and shadow puppets stood like stores in New York or Paris along the high sidewalks, but bestilled and perceptibly melancholy. Sellers have finally outstripped buyers to such a degree that a polite desperation has set in. Every store is stuffed with artisanal merchandise, much of it excellent, but no one will ever buy so much replicated authenticity dragged from the past, or from an idea of the past. I remembered Mead’s account of a young peasant who came to her house one day trying to sell a badly made sculpture. After she had given him some tips as to how to improve his technique—a technique that as a Balinese he might have been expected to know better than she—he came back almost every day thereafter with his gradually improving product. Even when she clearly had no intention of buying anything, he came. He came because it was a hope, or else because it was something to do, and because it was a contact with a foreigner and contact with a foreigner is always interestingly unpredictable. The same kind of contact happens by the minute in Ubud. The whole town is a theme park based on a version of Bali that Europeans invented, but inside the park two peoples still tried to make something mutually lucrative happen. The old conceit of coming to Ubud for spirituality had clearly worn thin; the Westerners no longer really believed in it. I had the impression that the Balinese too no longer believed in what they were selling. The monkey dances—the kecak—the “peace and tranquility,” the sublime vistas of rice paddies fading into misty hillsides—it was no longer life.

  The traveler always reaches a point where, fixed in a place for a while, he asks himself why he is there. Ubud has the prettiest hotels in the world. Between them, the paddies opened up like ancient ponds, sleepy under the rain, and there were long moments when I could have stayed there for months on end. But it was no longer life. At the Tutmak, we began plotting Papua, looking at maps, comparing malaria treatments, watching the clocks as if counting down. The other three Europeans joining the trip would soon be flying into Denpasar. It was like a reality show game: we would meet them only at the airport at two a.m. on the morning we were due to fly out to Jayapura. Flights to Papua always fly out in the middle of the night. It is because there is no demand for them and because most of the passengers are going to Papua for business. The gold mine in Timika, the natural gas companies in the capital. It is curious to see: the hordes of tourists gathering to fly off to Bangkok on one side of the facility, and on the other side the dozen or so anxious lost souls gathered in a shabby little side terminal to get on board our three a.m. flight.

  There were a few Indonesians of the earnest variety, clutching threadbare suitcases and smoking intensely in the heat outside. From the parking lot, the three Europeans suddenly arrived, looking incredibly fresh, white, and eager. They were already in jungle gear. The Indonesian cops stared.

  Georg Decristoforo and Theresia Ellinger, a couple in their fifties from the Austrian Tyrol, and a young blond Finn named Juha. They were all three scientists. Georg and Theresia were chemical engineers with the Sandoz pharmaceutical company, a subsidiary of Novartis; Juha designed software for the European Space Agency with a small company outside Helsinki.

  I looked them over one by one. Georg: the classic image of a German scientist. Dark cropped hair, midfifties, spectacles, uncomplaining enthusiasm. I thought of the entomologist in Kobe Abe’s Woman in the Dunes. He alone had brought a GPS device, the latest jungle camping gadgets, high-tech timekeeping machines. He ate everything—taro chips, hot chocolate, tempeh—like a merry vacuum cleaner, smacking his lips and regaling the table with exotic scientific factoids. No disgust, no quease. His lover, Theresia: the classic image of an English public school matron, sturdy and intolerant of nonsense, ruddy high Alpine cheekbones and powerful hands that knew how to tie complicated nautical knots or tent lines. The formidable widow in Woman in the Dunes.

  All three were amiable. No cranks, no psychopaths here. They had been carefully screened. I asked Theresia what her favorite pastime was. “Vinter mountaineering!” That, and trekking in Nepal.

  Juha was more my age. I quickly understood that he and I were the novices. While Georg and Theresia roamed the planet looking for difficult environments in which to hone their formidable wilderness skills, we lived soft lives. Juha seemed like a romantic engineer, if one can imagine such a thing, but with almost white Nordic eyes suggesting a perpetual question mark, an unmodern irony.

  There are conversations between strangers whose content has nothing to do with their purpose. We must have been there for roughly similar reasons, driven by comparable discontents, and so what we said to each other did not matter very much. Just arrived from Europe, the others were feeling the heat. They were tense, apprehensive. Meanwhile, something had quietly snapped inside me, a bond connecting me to the comfortable infrastructure of travel itself, or else to the hopes that always hover around a voyage. It is in airports, in any case, that I always make a final reckoning with the life I have lived up till then as well as the unknown place that I am about to enter. If, like me, you think you are going to die every time you fly, you do this—it is like saying the Last Rites to yourself.

  Beyond the shabby glass doors lay the airport car park. Its anonymity appeared far more obvious than it had been two hours earlier. The Trigana propeller plane was already there and it had a frayed look about it, like a dog that has seen too many winters. Rain beat on the wings and the flight was delayed for three hours. In th
e waiting room, a Papuan sat smoking pencil-thin cigars, his brown suit clashing with a pair of trainers and a large gold ring. He stared through the windows for hours and did not move a muscle. Eventually, we too fell into morose silence. For the last hour no one spoke a word.

  THE NAKED TOURIST

  For centuries, Europeans and their offshoots have searched for hidden valleys, lost kingdoms, vanished islands, and sunken civilizations. I don’t know whether the Japanese or the Indians share such obsessions and travel in order to exorcize them. But if they do not, and the pathology is indeed unique, then I assume that something about us is proved. After El Dorado and Atlantis, for example, there was Shangri-La, supposedly a Tibetan word for paradise. It entered the vocabulary of English in 1933 when the British writer James Hilton published a novel called Lost Horizon. Hilton invented an isolated Himalayan kingdom of unsullied peace and harmony into which a band of Westerners stumble after surviving an air crash. Hilton’s vision inspired President Franklin Roosevelt to name what is now Camp David “Shangri-La.”

  But Hilton was careful to add that the path to Shangri-La could not be retraced, nor its location found on any map. Hilton himself never visited China or Tibet and seems to have made the place up, but that has not stopped China from recently declaring the invention of a new “ecological tourist region” to be called “Shangrila,” a denomination long hotly contested by two miserable Chinese cities, Zhongdian and Deqen. Whichever place gets to call itself Shangrila is assured a windfall of tourist dollars; people will flock there, drawn simply by the name. It would be like a tiny municipality in the Amazon being called El Dorado.

  How strange that a notion achieved purely in the realm of religious ideas should translate itself into real geography. It is like those medieval maps that coolly indicate “Eden” as lying somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. Just as pilgrims made their way to a postage-stamp-sized garden called Gethsemane—but with the difference that Eden existed outside the mythical histories that give the world its various shrines. The physical visiting of something that exists only inside the realm of ideas—is this a Western folly?

  It is certainly Christian. The Greeks had their Garden of Hesperides located tantalizingly just beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and therefore out of reach. But only Christians had Eden as a place of primordial innocence, an innocence to which we must return. By now, it is hardwired into us.

  Every travel book employs the insidious device of the writer peering down through his airplane window and seeing this or that land, which is always made to look otherworldly. I have flown into hundreds of cities and countries, looked down through a thousand porthole windows to see surprising vistas hurtling toward me out of the mists. But only flying into Timika did I feel a continual unease. Papua is almost always shrouded in clouds. Its soaring mountains rise out of the sea, the forests seeping down to the rivers where there is nothing, just fingers of sand and a color of stewed tea. You fly over fogs, under which the tops of trees move in horrifying slow motion. Along a valley there is a little road, visible between rolling mists, and on the road there is a man walking; you see him, even from the air, and you see his dog ahead of him.

  Near Timika lies the world’s largest gold mine, the sinister Freeport. It is a violent place, cordoned off. Two Americans were killed here a little while back. The rumor is that the Indonesian military staged an attack to discredit the Papuan independents. No one can enter there unless he is employed by the Anglo-American mining company. While the plane is refueling, if you are continuing on, you are not allowed off it. A few armed men sit under the perimeter palms, staring sullenly at the plane. An American gets off, his back drenched with sweat even at dawn. A few Indonesians board and soon we number about fifteen. I notice that everyone looks each other over rather carefully. There are no women, apart from Theresia.

  After two hours in Timika, we went on to Sentani, the suburb of Jayapura that houses its tiny airport. The skies cleared. Thousands of palms clustered around headlands and coves and clearings at the top of the hills. Jayapura is actually built around islets and islands, straddling the sea. It’s an Indonesian city with minarets and traffic jams, but few outside of Papua and the shantytowns of Java are much aware of its existence. The immigrants here are Javanese, beneficiaries of the UN-sponsored “transmigration program” that has dispersed millions of settlers from overcrowded Java around the rest of Indonesia. An old Dutch quarter manages to survive.

  At Sentani, the mood is different, for the mountains come much closer and only one bedraggled highway runs along their base. It is Papuan, not Javan. The iconography here is Christian and pagan; huge white crosses dominate the hillsides. There is no sign even of a city.

  The airport is flanked by towering tribal totems and sculptures. You must walk across the airstrip toward the soft green mountains that tower above it, the heat already shot through with a smell of petrol and fragrant mud. Inside the terminal, there is the faint scent of a different humanity, the Papuans crowded around to gawp at the aliens coming off the runway. They are dressed, but some wear chicken feathers in their hair. They watch you with a cool, unmoved fixation, as if you were a walking traffic accident covered with your own blood. These are urban Papuans, runaways from the dark interior. Walking into this terminal I felt like Lévi-Strauss contemplating the deck of his first ship into the tropics:

  Over and above those heroes—navigators, explorers and conquerors of the New World—who (before the era of journeys to the moon) undertook the only total adventure open to man, my thoughts turn to the survivors of a rearguard which paid so cruelly for the honour of keeping the gates wide open. I mean the Indians, whose example, through Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire and Diderot, enriched the substance of what I was taught at school. Hurons, Iroquois, Caribs and Tupi—I was now on my way to them!

  I called it the Blue Hotel, and perhaps it was the only one in Sentani. It stood on a side street among flowering gardens, in the shadow of the mountains. Here we had to wait while Woolford extracted our permits for travel into the interior from a reluctant and corrupt police authority in Jayapura. The place was blue throughout; the spartan rooms had buckets in the bathrooms, no running water, and cots for beds. It rained ceaselessly, and the banana trees rocked gently up and down like handheld fans.

  A Russian air crew flying cargo planes sat down every night to their own table, laid with Bulgarian jams and chilled butter. It was rumored they brought Papuan whores back to the $4 rooms. Salesmen from Papua New Guinea in cheap suits munched their toast in the restaurant where the TV played a dubbed Life of Chopin over and over. In the corridor outside, frogs sang in a small pool filled with halfdead fish. Sometimes it was the only sound, the frogs rasping with the rain. The salesmen watched the tortures of Chopin on Mallorca with George Sand with steady but utterly empty eyes. Extraterrestrials, white men, pianists.

  During the day, I read or walked around the mud streets, taking photographs of the gardens. Come sundown, it was time to go to Sentani’s only halfway salubrious restaurant, Mickey’s. Sentani is where Papuans and Javans mix uneasily. Its streets are trash and pools; candles set on tables of betel nuts serve as streetlights. The sidewalks are spattered with great bright red pools of spittled betel juice. When the Papuans drink a few beers, they totter along with a hint of belligerence, their eyes bulging.

  At Mickey’s, the Russians also had their special table. Each time they came in, swaggering in their airline caps and T-shirts, I wondered to myself why white men are so unable to dress in our age. How much more elegant the Korowai men looked in the few photographs I had seen, naked but for a penis-sheathing acorn or hornbill bill—Papuans call their penis gourds kotekas, and it is often their sole item of fashion. How much better dressed. The Russians glared around them. A badly dressed man glaring is a scary item. Occasionally, a Papuan walked by, hair alive with chicken feathers. But no bow, no arrows. The forest has been banished from Sentani. These Papuans are tamed, reduced to a predictable urban paupery.


  One morning, we drove into Jayapura along a winding road that hugs the edge of a vast lake. There were houses raised on stilts above the water, more giant white crosses, an abandoned hotel that must once have catered to the PNG salesmen crowd. But then you are suddenly in the city, which is Muslim, minareted, tense with uncertain moods. The border of PNG is only a few miles along the coast; Al Qaeda does a lot of cross-border traffic in drugs and weapons. Yet Jayapura itself is unexpectedly pleasant: a breezy Dutch city built around and over a series of steep hills. It is filled with Papuan markets, where you can buy masks and kotekas. The coffee shops are large and lurid, and filled with brooding young men with nothing to do. It was here, however, that our little band began to coalesce. As I had suspected, our motives were not dissimilar—I think I could say that in each case it was a desire to get out of the known world, and we all have our private worlds that are all too known. What lies beyond it? Is there a beyond at all?

  On the one-hour flight to Wamena, you notice that there are no roads into this interior; the plane rises above glaciers and volcanic ridges—Mount Carstensz here is the seventh tallest peak in the world. Some of the peaks are almost at the same height as the plane, snarling spirelights obscured by whorls of mist. The plane shudders and rocks. A Götterdämmerung panorama opens up, the heads of volcanoes suddenly appearing through banks of tinted mist, and far below valleys as intensely green as pond alga, bordered with walls of ice.

  The first aviators who ventured here in the 1940s were the first non-Papuans, as far as we are aware, to penetrate into the Baliem, which might as well have been renamed the Lost Valley—for rarely has an actual place conformed so startlingly to a cultural fantasy. The Kremer expedition had reached the lower levels of the Snow Mountains in 1921 but had been forced to abandon its biological specimens. Richard Archbold, the Baliem’s official “discoverer,” was a mammalogist and private millionaire working for the American Museum of Natural History who flew this same path in a huge Catalina seaplane christened the Guba—the same plane that had been modified by Howard Hughes for salmon expeditions in Alaska. His discovery of the Baliem was a total surprise. He saw the Dani watchtowers, the prehistoric terraces, the river snaking through the valley’s bottom, and his report prompted the Dutch to send a small military expedition to the two nearby alpine lakes of Habbemaat and Meervlakte, with Archbold assisting. Fifty-six Dutch officers and men and seventy-three Dayak porters from Borneo were accompanied by thirty convicts—the Archbold Expedition, as it is known, was to study the area between Mount Wilhelmina to the south and the Taritatu River to the north. Leaving from the two base camps at Lake Habbemaat and the Taritatu, two patrols were to meet up in the Baliem Valley.