TNJ Air Niugini Magazine Feature

The Baining tribesmen dancing around the raging bonfire are almost naked but for their huge white face-masks. One by one they leap into the fire, staying there as long as possible. Gyrating amid the flames, they seem made of asbestos.

 
We have spent days slashing our way through some of Papua New Guinea’s thickest jungle, crossing the Baining Mountains of East New Britain Province to reach the remote village of Mondrabat.
On our arrival, the villagers build a huge bonfire in their clearing. With nightfall, the spectacular fire dance begins, then continues into the small hours.
 
I awake next morning in this jungle plateau settlement so remote that its people still barely use items made of metal. The first spectacle I see is almost as extraordinary as last night’s fire dance — our trek leader talking on a satellite phone while a tribesman holds up a thin aerial.
 
Neither of these extremes matches the experience of the Australian soldiers who dragged their starving bodies through these jungles in early 1942. Retreating from Rabaul ahead of 15,000 Japanese invaders, they were attempting to reach evacuation points on the south coast of the Gazelle Peninsula. Of the 1600 men, barely 300 made it back to Australia.
 
Our adventure starts with meeting our Baining guide, Weekli and four porters, and our leader, Peter Gosling, 35, a lanky, Brisbane-based adventurer. Soon we’re slogging through the green crush of jungle, summiting one ridge after another. Below us, it’s all mulch and boot-sucking mush; above us, stained-glass sunlight filters through the tree-top canopy.
 
Following a track southwest across the Baining Mountains that the “Diggers” took, we have the luxury of tents, rations and bug repellent. They had little but the clothes they walked in as they traversed 120 km of merciless, crocodile-infested terrain. “We had a quinine tablet for breakfast, a fag (cigarette) for lunch and quinine for tea,” wrote one survivor.
 
We trek without speaking through the green trance of the jungle, hearing the thrum of hornbill wings high in the canopy. Weekli slashes a way forward with his machete. Ridges drop to cool rivers that we ford fully-clothed. No matter. I just stand in a sunny spot for five minutes and soon start to steam dry.
 
We camp overnight at Braham, a settlement of six huts, three families and their cassava and taro gardens. The mungies (kids) are fascinated by the stuff we “whiteskins” carry, like freeze-dried food and battery-powered headlamps. As we sit around the fire, a Baining man begins beating a bamboo pole on a baseboard. Other voices join in, with haunting, chanted harmonies and rising cadences. “What kind of songs are they?” Peter asks. “This village is Christianised, so these are church songs,” says Weekli. “Nothing like the church I went to,” quips Peter.
 
Next morning, Peter, who loves his high tech gizmos and has been plotting our progress by GPS, announces that even here a dozen satellites are in range. Via his sat-phone he reports our position to his partner in Brisbane. “One time I even had a group of Baining women sing to her over the phone,” he recalls.
 
With a quick “mamramas” (thank-you) to the villagers, we plunge back into the jungle, padding on through sun, mud and rain. We cross logs felled across rivers; wobbly, narrow moss- and vine-covered trunks where the last thing you want is for the man in front to stop. Ahead of me, Weekli pauses. “Keep going!” I yell, before my fate becomes a vertiginous topple into to the river below. For every descent there is a clambering ascent back to the next ridge. I drink litres of water to replace what I lose in sweat. The Bainings, padding along, casual and barefoot, don’t even break into one.
 
The Diggers’ trek in 1942 was agony. As one officer wrote of his men: “The mosquitos and insects drove them mad at night, for we had no nets. Boots began to give out ... Those who could, marched on foot, tattered skeletons of men who often staggered and fell as they forced themselves westward.” Many died of malaria and dysentery while the survivors fought off hostile Molkolkol natives.
 
Camped for the night beside a river, I fall asleep to the industrial shrill of insects, the rattle and thrum of rain. With morning, the porters spot puk-puk (crocodile) tracks but seem unconcerned. We press on through the jungle, wading as though at the bottom of a green ocean.
 
Late on day three Peter calls “Three creeks to Mondrabat.” Rain has made the trail treacherous, with the steep descents becoming real knee-cappers. Such are the joys of the jungle. I would never swap these soaring, un-logged forests, the avenues of bamboo or even those hitch-hiking little bludgers, the leeches between my toes, for a month of natter and lattes back in the Comfort Zone Café.
 
We reach the Mondrabat “men’s house” where they are preparing huge white masks for the fire dance. Made of tapa-like cloth, then moulded into giant heads with enormous eyes, these creations — and not much else — will be worn by the men. Barefoot, their only protection from the heat will be palm fronds bound around their shins.
 
Come night, Mondrabat is all blackness but for the jitterbug lightning of fireflies. Then the bonfire flares. Six ghostly women file into the clearing, wreathed in long white fronds and wearing bug-eyed masks. They circulate slowly around the fire, shuffling to the beat of hollow poles and men chanting.
 
After the women, the bonfire is re-stoked. Suddenly, a glistening, near-naked jester leaps into the clearing, following by six masked young men. The drummers quicken their pace. The dancers circle. One plunges into the bonfire and prances there as long as super-humanly possible, until twenty, perhaps thirty seconds later, he can stand it no longer. Another asbestos-soled warrior leaps into the inferno, followed by another and another.
 
Hours later, and long after I’ve fallen asleep, the dancers, singers and drummers succumb to sheer exhaustion. In the early hours I wake for a moment — in a darkened village on a high plateau deep in another human era. The next time I awake it is daylight and a lanky young whiteskin is dialling tomorrow via a satellite. Stone Age meets Phone Age.