Yesterday, I had a day that would make mothers everywhere turn over in their graves, and... wait... my mother isn't dead and I'm mixing my idioms. What I mean to say is I had a day yesterday that would make mothers everywhere (and not just my mother, for whom my being in Papua at all is a horrifying prospect, but mothers everywhere) shit bricks.

We're invited up to Sentani, about an hour and a half away, by one of the Australian teachers, Louise, who (along with everyone else here) is notoriously vague, and in order to get there we have to take an indeterminate number of taxis, all of which quote wildly different prices and wildly different destinations as they wave their arms and try their best to speak English while we try our best to speak Indonesian. Unfortunately, the English they know is always oddly translated ('no problem' becomes 'no what-what', 'enjoying the day?' becomes 'walking-walking, ya?', etc.) and my Indonesian consists of numbers and 'where's the bathroom?' (Nick's consists of nothing - he hasn't bothered to learn).

We get there, though, at least halfway, to Abepura, and I'm carsick from hot and bad 90's music and clove cigarettes everywhere, so I ride up to Sentani on the back of Louise's motorcycle - helmetless, though I do have an old baseball cap to shield my non-helmeted head from the dumber ones among the cops. Flying at 60km around Lake Sentani (teeming with fresh, delicious fish, by the way) the cap flies off. 'Oh no!' I yell into Louise's helmet without thinking about how you're not supposed to yell 'Oh no!' at people driving motorcycles unless you really mean it, and she swerves, but regains control.
'What?!'
'I lost your cap!'
'Oh! Well... we'll get it on the way back, she says, just as another motorcycle roars up right next to us, the man in the front holding the cap. When it flew off, it must have flown right into his face. He tries to make a handoff at speed, but by frantically waving our hands, we communicate we want to pull over. Everyone here does the most reckless things driving, but because of that, oddly enough, everyone is an amazing driver.

Louise failed to mention that the 'little walk' up to the waterfall pond was actually a full on hour-long trek through thick, pathless, inclined jungle, so I'm wearing a skirt and flip flops, pushing big-enough-for-a-dog-to-sleep-on banana fronds and chest-high grass and spiky fluid-filled leaves aside. AND THEN WE GET LOST... because there are these two angry dogs barking at us from a small farmed field of cassava, where our path is, and we don't want to walk next to them even though a smiling grizzled old Papuan man is yelling sternly at them from across the field. And it's dusk. And every five minutes Louise says she knows where she is, but then directly afterwards, she takes it back, and a rock falls on my ankle, and it hurts.

Yes, it is worth it. Of course it is worth it. The gleam of Louise's motorcycle is obvious when we're close enough to it to nearly reach out and touch it, and on the way there's butterflies the size of birds and blue bugs with a very odd number of legs (14, maybe?) and the sheer mass of plant and insect life is like nothing I could have imagined before actually getting to see it. Things grow here. Mostly on things that aren't meant to have things growing on them. Like my towel, or our walls. Or a cut coconut. Even in the fridge, it was yellow in three days. Everything is gorging itself on the thick, humid air. I couldn't have picked a more polar opposite place to move to from Colorado.

What else made up the mother's nightmare? Oh yeah, riding back from our getting-lost-in-the-jungle experience three-to-a-motorcyle, holding my feet up off the flying pavement so that my arches cramped, using my arms not to hold on, but to hold Nick's legs up in the air. Going to a fish place where the cook opens a cooler full of fresh fish, lets you pick your particular victim. Drinking a pink coconut drink and staggering, full, onto a taxi which just might be going the right way, but maybe not... and on the way, stopping to shake hands with a drunk guy who, once encouraged, won't stop following us.

It's enough to make my mother's heart stop beating, so let's not tell her, okay? But here's the thing: I've been scared of many things in my tumultuous adolescence, and even into my twenties - closed-in places, vomiting, bad drug reactions, telling people I like that I like them, airplanes, illness (heart attacks in particular) - but I'm not scared here. Not like I was at home. It seems absurd. Why worry about how you will appear to groups of Indonesian teenagers when you're got a motorcycle exhaust burn on your leg that, in a tropical climate, you've got to clean every two hours or else it'll start growing plants of its own? Or, why worry about closed-in places when everyone is friendly enough that a New Guinean border guard taking charge and setting up a special detour on the city bus to your hotel for you is normal?

Sometimes things seem unrelated, but they aren't. They aren't.