Welcome to the Papua page

Papua is still relatively unexplored - new flora and fauna are still being discovered there. A tourist industry is being developed, but the island is relatively unstable politically from what my friends report. I spent nine years living in Irian Jaya, and I'll try to report my impressions from those nine years. There is so much to say, that I'm looking for the best format to organize all the information and photographs. Stay tuned as I get this all sorted out. In order to make this page fast-loading, I have made all the photograph thumbnails. If you want to see a larger, high resolution version, just click on the photograph. By downloading the photograph to your hard drive and opening it with a graphics editing program like Photoshop, you can see some quite interesting detail in a number of the photos.

Irian Jaya (with the exception of the former province of East Timor) was the last of the provinces to be added to Indonesia. Located at the far eastern end of the archipelago, Irian Jaya has been a problem for the Indonesian government since it was annexed. Many of the Irianese (or West Papuans as many of them preferred to be called) feel that they have little in common with the rest of Indonesia. They look different, have distinctively different cultures from what you find closer to Java, and are sitting on a fortune in mineral resources which have been flowing to Jakarta and the United States thanks to P.T. Freeport Indonesia.

I spent nine years living and working in Irian Jaya; seven of those years were spent living in the highlands. The highlands of Irian are breaktakingly beautiful, sometimes bleak, never easy to live with the cool temperatures at night and the seemingly neverending rainfall. Someone wrote a book about living in the clouds, and it certainly seemed that way a lot of the time. It's probably as close to heaven as I'll get.

The city of Tembagapura (literally copper town) was built in the early 1970s by Freeport-McMoran. It was the first large foreign project allowed in Indonesia after the havoc of the 1965-1966 change of government. Thus, Freeport developed a special relationship with former President Suharto. That relationship has come to haunt Freeport since the fall of Suharto.

The rainforest up in the highlands is thick, mountainous, rocky, and difficult to traverse. Rivers are everywhere. Sometimes bridges were under construction and we just happened to be lucky enough to find one already completed. Sometimes the bridges had to be made as we went. Occasionally, we just hopped across the river on boulders and hoped that we didn't fall in the swift-flowing rivers. This bridge was already in place when we came along. The guys are guides. Actually two of them (Yunder and Yanius - more about them later) were our guides, the other guys just tagged along until they reached their destination.

During the seven years that I lived in Tembagapura, I went out every Saturday for a hike through the jungle. Almost always with Yanius and Yunder, however in this photo we have Agus and Nus. During my first two years, I was almost always accompanied by my buddy Carl. After Carl left, Bruce (another Bruce) came to work in Tembagapura, and he was my weekly companion. Here Carl and I are resting in the village of Banti. During the first two years that I was in Irian, there were no roads outside of Tembagapura proper and the trek to Banti was challenging, especially at the pace that Carl would set. Banti was a small village back in those days. Since then Freeport has built a clinic and a school and houses for the folks there. I haven't been in Banti for five years now, so I'm not sure what it looks like.

There was one trail that we particularly were fond of (actually not me, but Bruce and Carl were)that was dubbed the Killer Hill. This went straight up for over 1000 feet. The guys here are doing their pose as we are just getting started up the hill. I always hated the climb up the hill, but loved being able to do it.

Kids were a constant presence in the villages and liked to travel along with us for a ways. Occasionally they got to be pesty and the guys would shoo them away. Back in my early days in Irian, not many bulai (Indonesian for a white person, usually taken to be derogatory, but used in Irian generally the same way that Balinese kids call foreigners "tourist") were out in the rainforest in those days, so we were always good Saturday entertainment.

I used to run into this guy quite a bit during my first two years in Irian. He always struck me as one of the most dignified men that I've met.

While bridges like this are necessary and seemingly easy to cross if you notice the fellow on the bridge, they were always a problem for me. My lack of balance on single log bridges never improved over the years that I relied on these bridges.

This bridge looks fairly easy to use, but in fact the logs were unevenly placed and the rope that served as a handrail was almost completely useless except as an aid in balancing. Yunder, of course, was always amused that I hated to cross this bridge. If you notice in the large photo, the river is filled with boulders and a fall would be extremely dangerous.

Dugouts like this one are used extensively in the lowlands. They don't balance great either but do glide relatively smoothly along the rivers. This boat had a baby shark still somewhat alive sitting between the man and his wife and child. When I boarded the boat, I almost sat on the shark. Ow!

These boys followed us one day through Banti and back into the jungle where there were a few huts and some folks that I had never met. People were constantly flowing into the valley in search of work with Freeport.

This young man wanted to sell several armbands that he's holding. The bands were made out of a variety of materials. Some of the older ones are made out of orchid fiber; newer ones were made out of colored wire that the guys stole or scavenged from Freeport.

These fellows lived in Kampung Baru. The fellow on the right has a nice pair of Freeport boots. The one on the left has some beads. The fellow on the left actually had a good sense of humor.

These two ladies are out enjoying a nice day in the highlands. The lady in the top of the photo is holder a salt container; the lady at the bottom of the photo has a very nice nokin (net bag). These nokin are used to carry anything from food, babies, and small pigs. The women can carry amazingly heavy loads in these bags and run up the sides of steep mountains with the bags on their backs.

Close to the end of my second year in Irian, this wall was constructed. The rock wall was something that I hadn't seen in the valley before. It was washed away in a huge flood several weeks later.

A view of some huts on the outskirts of a village in the highlands.The insides of these huts were really smoky and the folks and all of their stuff always had a smoky smell.

A woman with her two daughters on the trail outside the village of Waa.

What do you do when you're a single guy living in a mining camp in the middle of the rainforest? We built a place called the Yacht Club. I'm here with the manager of the Yacht Club and two of our employees. We have two young tree pythons that we found on the grounds of the club. I took them up to Tembagapura to show the students at the school and then returned them to the rainforest.

A group photo at Yanius' house out in the valley. The woman holding the baby is Yanius' wife. Yanius has the number 12 shirt on. I'm not sure who all the rest of the people are other than that they were related to Yanius.

These two guys were selling the war vest that the fellow on the left is wearing. The vest is quite sturdy and strong enough to repel enemy arrows. Guys often showed up on the trail on Saturdays to sell stuff to Carl and me. We were both collecting bows and arrows in those days. Carl was especially known for his fondness for boar's tusks.

We built the Yacht Club on the banks of the Kaoga River in Timika. At the time that the Club was built, there was nothing around it. Now this area is being rapidly developed. Sundays were always busy at the Club: guys would come down from Tembagapura to hang out, drink beer, take a swim and have a barbie.

A Dani family in Kampung Baru.The woman's skirt is made out of shredded up plastic - an innovation of the area.

Paulus, Warananus and two other fellows. Paulus and Warananus were two of my early buddies. Warananus was one of the sweetest guys that I've ever met. He snuck into my apartment one afternoon and saw a television for the first time

An Irian hut. I found this one particularly interesting because of the height that it was set above the ground. This is unusual in this area.

Some more Irian huts. You can see how these guys use slash and burn to clear the forest when they build houses and their gardens.

Papua Links

I've decided to start to add a few links to pages about Papua here since this page receives a fair amount of traffic - so there must be some interest about Papua.

 Papua Web , is "an information network for students, researchers, development workers, community leaders, government agencies and others working on issues relevant to Papua, Indonesia (formerly Irian Jaya). The University of Papua, Cenderawasih University and the Australian National University, the project hosts, welcome contributions of research materials to enhance the resources of this website."