It's drizzling the kind of jungle drizzle that's just enough to slicken the ground, but not quite enough to turn all the red dirt into a full-on mudslide. It is, however, enough to turn the area between my rubber flip-flops and my feet into a sea of orangish paint, impossible to grip. Each step up is a struggle, not only to push myself up the nearly vertical cliff, but to keep my feet in my shoes. There is a Papuan man and his three children going much slower than they otherwise would be, trying to politely make sure that we don't die. The man speaks little English, and when he does speak, I am easily distracted by his bright red teeth and his knife, which he uses to slash plants out of the way as we ascend. Both of his sons, from what I can gather, are named after Bob Marley. His children, running ahead in their bare feet, sing the Sonata in G Minor - honestly, they do. It's extremely incongruous.

We found the family because we decided to just get on our bike and ride until we dead ended near the jungle. When we dead ended, they were just coming around the corner, saying something about a beach. "Can we follow you?" Nick asked. The man nodded vigorously, though I'm fairly sure he had no idea what he was agreeing to.

Let me just say that if this were a hiking trail in the United States, it would be illegal to hike it. There are times when the grade gets so steep that it is necessary to climb on all fours. There are areas where a drop of over 2000 feet is an inch away from the trail, which is often, as I said before, paintlike in consistency. One slip and you would fall, straight down, impeded only by the occasional spiky-leaved plant, into, if you were lucky, rock outcroppings, but if you were unlucky, the rushing river that runs through the bottom of the canyon and would break your fall only long enough for you to catch your breath before it would then plunge you over the edge of one of its countless waterfalls, which are all at least twenty feet tall.

The final descent to the beach might as well be made on your ass for all the time I spent falling down. But then you're there. It's a tiny bay, but far west of the bigger Jayapura bay, so it's completely clean, and fed by a mountain stream, so marginally cooler, too. It's only accessible by the path from hell, so the only people there are people who live around there, people who get their food from the ocean and the surrounding mountains. Unfortunately the bay is also inhabited by sea urchins, and so now is the last joint of my middle finger and the middle of the bridge of my foot.