The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  The rain eased off. Farther on, the forest darkened; thorned vines swung down from on high. “Forests,” Joseph Roth wrote, “are where a landscape hides its secrets.” And here the secrecy was stifling. Near-invisible trails ran like silken threads from tree house to tree house, and along these lines the Kombai walked with an unconscious assurance, like sleepwalkers—as if they could have walked them with no eyes. As we went along them ourselves, I wondered merely what they meant and where they led. How many tree houses were thus connected and how many paths were also used by other peoples, like the fearsome Korowai next door? The paths ran along crests, down ravines, across swamps, across fields of primeval ferns taller than me, and glades of carellia trees. Delicate pitcher plants with crimson lids dotted the borders, their vases filled with dead flies. Very rarely, a cream-white orchid sprouted out of a tree in imitation of a road sign. Soon, earth’s largest butterflies ventured out into the drier air, huge black creatures as large as small birds, like angels in medieval frescoes. Attracted perhaps by the heat, they settled on our heads.

  My breathing was now so strained that I had to slow my body against its will. During rests, I felt my pulse hammer inside the temples. I became addicted to Yanbu’s pipe because it was a calmant. If I smoked and counted to two hundred, my heart rate came down to a peaceable level and I could breathe again. With his bevy of instruments, Georg was able to tell us a few things: that it was 101 degrees in the shade, that the humidity level was 94 percent, and that on the GPS map the area we were in was marked “no data.” And there were very few places in the world that were marked “no data.” Thus, in the viewfinder of our omniscient technology, our dubious paradise did not even exist. We were nowhere, anywhere—wherever we happened to be. The Kombai didn’t have a name for this forest. It was The Forest, and there was nothing outside it.

  By three in the afternoon, the terrain had changed. We now slaved up the sides of mossy ravines slippery as glass, carpeted with leaves, then slid down them toward stagnant streams: an obstacle course carved out of salmon-pink mud, trip-wire vines, and hidden snakes. Impotent rage began to well up in me, for in nature the “developed” man quickly becomes a helpless child, dependent upon people whom we have been conditioned to think of as helpless children. The inversion of roles is not flattering. Indifferent to our sufferings, however, the porters chanted Kombai songs, and I could hear them far ahead, keeping rhythm with each other like rowers as they slipped through the forest. Their easy relentlessness spelled dementia for the rest of us. I was soon at the far rear of the column with Penus, who kept me alive with jokes and kept my soaring pessimism at bay.

  At the end of the afternoon, however, we began to slow. The forest thinned a little; tall spindle-thin palms emerged into a visible sky. Yanbu yodeled into the forest ahead. We were at the edge of the first tree house. Like echoes of Yanbu’s voice, the same cries came back. Understanding the moment, everyone fell quiet and the cries drifted back and forth, a jungle opera sung in falsetto.

  Woolford had taken an English investment banker along this same trail the year before. This tree house, therefore, would not be a pure first contact. It didn’t matter. The scene was surreal enough. We were on the edge of a sun-flooded clearing piled with the debris of hundreds of shattered trees. It looked like the site of a meteor strike, without the crater.

  But from its center rose a gabled thatch house on sixty-foot stilts, a wondrous sight, like a smaller Ark stranded in the treetops by the Flood. Its bamboo walls were covered with shields painted white and ocher red. It swayed in the wind, smoke puffing out of its door. A naked man stood below it, his bow drawn, his hornbill koteka quivering. He looked mildly homicidal.

  To one side stood a long house of sago thatch, the ceiling festooned with mouse skulls. The naked one came creeping toward us, his bow suddenly drawn tighter, his face contracted with a kind of haggard anxiety. The sugarcane arrow was a yard long and delicately barbed, finely carved with mouse teeth and painted with white bands. In one dexterous bow hand he held a kind of sandwich made of sago stuffed with fat white capricorn beetle grubs from the sago’s interior. A “sago burger” we would later call it. Ever ready for an anthrotourist frisson, Georg volunteered to carry the plastic bag of Indonesian tobacco.

  From a distance, we noticed that the naked one was shaking. Georg reached out to touch his hand. The Kombai extended his, shaking like an epileptic, then quickly withdrew it and violently shook his head. They tried again. The fourth time, their hands grazed and the tension subsided as quickly as it had arisen. The Kombai straightened up, loosened the arrow, and poked into the bag of tobacco. Quite unexpectedly, he smiled with a line of rotten teeth. “Nari,” he said.

  We stepped forward, half whispering nari, nari, nari and passing our hands over his. Our antagonist turned charmingly friendly. He pointed at our penises with a little smirk and said, “Ringi bangus?”This caused a moment’s confusion but was swiftly translated: “Shall we wrap your dicks?”

  We inquired into the specifics of this operation. It involved folding back the foreskin of the peccant member and pushing the whole organ inside the body. The first time you did it, apparently, you passed out with nausea, but it would certainly get you “in” with the Kombai. Only after the reinsertion could you get the apparatus to be small enough to be wrapped. The results were elegant, no doubt, but after a ten-second conference we decided to refuse. The man tutted and shook his head. That was not the spirit. And he had offered to do it for us.

  “All right.” He sighed, eyeing the tobacco bags. “Come in anyway.”

  Behind the tree house, a trail dropped across a stream to a long house buried in the jungle. A dark tea-colored river curled past it. Here the porters pitched camp—tents for us, the house for them. In seconds, they assembled a crude table with benches fashioned out of branches and bamboo twine, a miracle of forest engineering that they repeated every night. To one side, we saw the house low on the ground where the women slept (only men sleep in the tree houses). Still rattled, Georg, Juha, and I swam naked in the cold little river, and the extreme whiteness of our bodies looked surpassingly strange in that dark water. White ghosts. The Kombai later confessed that they didn’t want to touch us because they thought we might be incredibly cold. I wondered, though, how Georg had felt handing over the tobacco to our first forest Kombai. Had he been suitably unnerved by this planned brush with the exotic?

  “I could see the whole thing was ceremonial. But that look in his eye—it was incredible. I’ve never seen a look like that. I don’t even know what emotion it was.”

  What did he think it was?

  “At first I thought terror. But it was more complex than that.”

  What is more complex than terror? I thought.

  “Paralysis?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.”

  “But he’s seen a white man before,” Juha said.

  It seemed such a quaint phrase: seen a white man before.

  “Did you see his knees shake?” I said.

  “I wonder if he would have killed me if I’d done something unexpected.”

  Georg shook his head and fell silent. His beard was now darkening his face and, like all of us, his hair was getting a little wild and Robinson Crusoe–like. Brilliant lemon butterflies sat absurdly on his head. Of all of us, he had the most persistent, childlike curiosity, which I suppose is the irresistible curiosity of all scientists. I wondered if his trip to Papua was the outgrowth of a sixties romanticism that Juha and I—being too young—didn’t have. Or whether it was just the result of a relentless exploration of the planet that had reached its apogee here. Why, for that matter, do we pursue a relentless exploration of the planet when the thing that most interests us ultimately is ourselves? Where would he and Theresia go from here?

  “It’s a good question,” he admitted moodily. “Underwater, perhaps.”

  At dusk, we set up candles on the table and waited for the onslaught of the evening mosquitoes. “Encephal
itic malaria,” Georg began to say, raising a scientific finger. But we knew all about encephalitic malaria.

  Feral yells echoed through the forest. Without warning, two phantom figures suddenly emerged from the trees, daintily chiseled bodies adorned with white hornbill kotekas and bird of paradise feathers woven into their hair, mouse tails tied around their heads. Saying not a word, they glided aloofly past us, lighting their way with a sheaf of burning grass. They shot wide-eyed looks at us, but principally at the hard, lucid flames of the candles. When they shook our hands, I saw the white ringworm coating their shoulders. I thought they sniffed us a little, to see what our smell was: human or other.

  During the night I woke in my tent. The porters’ fire stabbed against the trees and the night was filled with the laughter of small children. Boogie-Woogie Baby and Josiah playing tag. The harps twanging monotonously. It was remarkable how much laughter filled the Kombai nights. Somewhere nearby a man was singing, a rippling rolling of vowels and tones that must have been thousands of years old, proof—if we are in Rousseau mode—of the claim that human speech might have originated with birds. The Kombai seemed never to sleep and their sounds never relented: laughter that runs on and on without shape, songs that never stop and that drive you mad.

  For centuries, primitive cultures have been at the heart of both utopian thought and tourism—at least since Montaigne wrote “On Cannibals” and Rousseau his 1755 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. “Nothing is more gentle,” Rousseau famously wrote, “than man in his primitive state.” After Cook and Bougainville first visited the South Sea Islands in the mid-eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophes thought that the truth of human nature could now finally be revealed by an empirical study of primitive societies. In his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, tardily published in 1796, Diderot eloquently made the case that primitive cultures like Tahiti were joyful because they were sexually free, unburdened by neurotic artifice. Tahitians, he argued, were noble because they allowed themselves to be changeable, just as Nature is. And so it was into this mythology, surely, that Mead came as a young woman, however bright and novel her journey to the South Seas must have seemed. An expectation had probably been raised inside the unconscious. And the culmination of that journey, for her, was Papua.

  I was careful to bring her Letters with me, because there is no substitute for reading the most renowned work on Papua while being actually there. Mead had not worked in this region—most of her Papuan fieldwork was done on the Sepik River in the north, a river that straddled both PNG and Irian Jaya. No two Papuan peoples are the same, and though I didn’t know the Sepik, I could tell from her descriptions that it was a very different topography and landscape. It was impossible to imagine a wide-open riverscape white with elephant grass inside a suffocating jungle like this. Mead is a great travel writer because she is not a travel writer. Her images stay in the mind: the tiny babies painted with pink clay like roses against their mothers’ dark skin; the children similarly daubed, their faces red and their bodies yellow; the shaman’s dance among dead crocodiles after a hunt; the mud heads sculpted by the village children along the banks of the river. During night feast, “men of importance standing up and ordering the moon to come out, so that there would be no rain.” The land is rendered with small, accurate strokes:

  To turn suddenly from the quite unbelievable proportions of the Sepik into a narrow stream which flows between high banks, on which thinly leafed trees are set like worn-out sketches against the sky, where the lotus leaves are green when they lie flat and pink when the wind catches them, ruffling them up off the water which itself has a changeable pink and green powder on its darkness—this is to find oneself in a land to which one might conceivably belong.

  I could not feel anything like this about the rain forest because there was no openness, no expanses of water here. But the people were like bolts of pure nervous energy in this stifling context, and they could not but remind me of the Iatmul among whom Mead lived on the Sepik in 1938, in the village of Tambunam:

  These Iatmul are a gay, irresponsible, vigorous people, always either laughing or screaming with rage. The two types of behavior are more or less alternating and seem to give them about equal satisfaction. Children learn to yell for every satisfaction, and later they decide it was the yelling they enjoyed. When anyone loses his or her temper, the bystanders stand about, grinning from ear to ear, feeling reassured that this is a world in which people can lose their tempers HARD … For they are not cruel or stingy or greedy. They have no infanticide, they look after their poor and orphaned, they share their food and betel and tobacco with a lavishness which their food supply hardly justifies and they lose their tempers all over the place, without guilt or shame.

  During the long journey from Dubai to the Kombai, I had found myself slowly falling in love with the young Margaret Mead of the 1930s. Perhaps it was the effect of having her constantly there at night, by candlelight, and now when I was alone in my tent rested on an unrolled length of tree bark that served as a replacement for a damaged and useless Therm-a-Rest mattress. I read with a headlamp, with the shapes of orb-weaver spiders silhouetted on the netting, and the solitude was greater than anything one can conceive in the century of ubiquitous electric light, because the forest was so dark that nothing shone through it, and even the fire of the Kombai a few hundred yards away was just a dull orange reflection against their faces. A book—the murmur of writing itself—has an amorous intimacy here; it’s an artifact hauled into the place where it doesn’t belong. (The Kombai found books baffling. Were they stores of tobacco sheets for smoking?) But a book by a woman is not the same as one written by a man; I asked myself if I could “fall in love” with a female writer. It was not quite possible. It had never happened before, except, if I am to come clean, with the New Zealand writer Keri Hulme, a writer I love and whom my peers so often affect to despise. It cannot be helped; few writers have a real voice, and when one does, the effect is nothing less than amorous. It is not that I especially admire women writers as a group or feel any need to express solidarity with them—that tedious bromide is irrelevant. It is just that Mead has a voice in the act of travel.

  Nevertheless, I had to wonder if her picture of the Iatmul, like that of the Samoans—like my frivolous impression of the Kombai—was nothing more than a lyrical Diderotian mistake. If you happen upon a land in which you could conceivably belong, a fierce drive is unlocked from inside your tight, disciplined ego, a new passion: a yearning for belonging, I suppose. It is this that makes your responses to lands and peoples—and readers—amorous. But it doesn’t necessarily make them accurate.

  After a storm, during which tons of leaves were shaken down onto the tents, the morning cleared. A drenching heat poured from the white sky, the giant trees singing like telegraph poles.

  Georg and Theresia took out their reference books and with them scanned the forest canopy with gingerly sensitive and academic vigor. They were admirable jungle companions—tough, stoic, and open to subtle moods. After hours of harsh bushwhacking, Theresia finally spotted a rare lizard, an emerald tree monitor, scuttling up a tree so far above us that the naked eye couldn’t detect it. “Schön!” she exclaimed. “Where?” the porters shouted. “There!” from the innocent scientist. The porters rushed to surround the tree and began scampering up after it on liana straps.

  Theresia turned to her lover. “A beauty!”

  Georg looked through a book to see if he could find it listed. Varinus prasinus prasinus?

  They followed the climbers’ progress through the binoculars as they laughed their way up to the canopy. A few seconds later the lizard came tumbling down. “Oh dear,” Theresia moaned, turning quite pale.

  The boys jumped on the dazed reptile and gaily beat out its brain with sticks. Holding it up by its tail, they showed it off—a huge three-foot specimen with jewellike markings—while blood dripped off its tongue. Dinner, it appeared. Theresia picked up her walking stick and moved on, with a repres
sed indignation, I suspect, and even a twinge of rage. Cockatoos—those beautiful creatures—would prove an even more anguishing problem. The boys liked them roasted on spits. Birds of paradise? Excellent cooked on hot stones. What to the educated Westerner is a marvel of Nature to be cataloged in a digital camera is to the Kombai a wood-smoked snack.

  This forest was dense: quick-stick thickets with gray-green bark, yemane trees, and wet leech limes. Gum trees soared up to its canopy, merging into eaglewoods—an exotic tree that in recent years has become a source of income to tribes in the interior of Papua. Known as ud in the Arab world, it yields the world’s most valuable incense. In Singapore, it trades for hundreds of dollars an ounce. In Indonesia it is called gaharu. Like cocaine, it spawns a dark black-market trade. The Papuan rebels, known as the OPM, sometimes kill gaharu collectors in the remote forests, considering them traitors and profiteers. The Kombai were not collecting gaharu yet. But it was probably only a matter of time.

  Shaggy pandanus glittered in little glades of ficus trees. Yanbu sliced through barbed vines and primeval ferns with a machete. We slithered along fallen trees, stopping in the rivers to drench ourselves and refill the bottles, shaking them up with iodine tablets. The word for crocodile, boya, hovered on the lips. Then there were stillnesses that lasted hours. The trees moving as if in a trance, the tops waving sadly. The loneliness of the world’s deepest forest. You hear nothing but your own heart and then, out of nowhere, the rustling of water far away, sliding over fallen trees. A dreamlike fear. You think back to Hansel and Gretel, the forests of our past. It is a form of travel into the remote past, into our primitivity before we settled down to fields and houses, and time began. There is a barbarian core to us. One could say it is the core that is still alive, still sending out its pulses through the psyche. But it can be fully reawakened. For soon I could hear it inside my mind, a running voice full of violence and tempest, longing to hold a bow, keeping pace with the psychic electricity of the Kombai.