I forgot to mention here that I would be travelling to Wamena for a few days, my last destination in Indonesia aside from the brief layover at Soekarno-Hatta, Jakarta, next Monday. Anyway, that’s where I’ve been.

Wamena is inland about a half-hour propeller-plane ride from Jayapura, pretty much exactly in the center of Papua. My Indonesian-made world map lists its elevation at 4000 meters, but that converts to about 13,000 feet and I doubt its accuracy, given that I had no trouble breathing and the same map also shows Chicago south of Denver and India as a tiny, barely detectable peninsula. In any case, it’s high enough to be cold – actually cold, not fake 85 degree rainy cold – and I slept curled in a down sleeping bag on the dark cement floor of Louise’s room. Nick sweated inches away under a sheet. Periodically, all the dogs in town would break out into frantic barking, and cease seconds later. I tried my best never to have to use the bathroom, because the water tank was filled with cold-hardened mosquitos; not the wimpy langorous ones by the sea, but ones who guarded the water tank like killer bees. When I woke up in the morning, it was always to clouds, hanging low enough, literally, to stretch up and touch. Rickshaws creaked up and down the street. In Jayapura, it’s ‘Mister, mister!’ we get yelled at us whenever we go anywhere. In Wamena, it was ‘Bye-bye! Bye-bye!’ Bye-bye as a greeting.

Since Wamena is so small, it hasn’t stamped out the surrounding tribal culture (and because of this, it’s considered a ‘dangerous area for tourists’ and we had to jump through hoops to get permission to go there). In the market, which looks exactly the same as in any other Papuan city, with everyone dressed in imported T-shirts and mid-length shorts, there are occasional naked old men wearing only kotekas. (A koteka is a horn-shaped wooden penis-covering held up with string around the waist.) Our last day there, Nick and I rounded a corner right in the center of town looking for somewhere to eat when one appeared out of nowhere and insisted upon giving each of us a hug. Then, after sitting patiently outside a food stall waiting for us to finish our milk tea and fish, he made urgent puffing motions with his mouth and then drew pictures of cigarettes all over his arms with a piece of sharp wood. We felt sort of morally wrong about buying cigarettes for an 80 year old tribesman in a koteka, so we caught the next rickshaw home. (We saw him again at the airport, where he tried to make me give him my sweater.)

We went to Louise’s boyfriend’s village, which involved climbing over the airport fence, crossing a hanging bridge over a wide, crocodile-filled muddy river, squelching knee-deep through some pigs’ muddy roaming ground, and stopping in at a cave in the mountains with pitfalls everywhere and an opening into a great yellow lake with about seventeen villagers fishing, but with no fish yet caught. Some children begged to have their picture taken with me. As the shutter clicked, they stood scowling fiercely. They thought it made them look cool. When they saw themselves in the tiny window of my camera screen, they screeched with embarrassment and laughter. Going back, an old man in a koteka careened to a halt in front of us, looking delighted. ‘Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa! Waa!’ he shouted rhythmically over and over as he took our hands. I asked later: it means hello.

Back in town, we were leaving the internet café and noticed that it had started to rain. We were wondering aloud where we might find some food when a Japanese man appeared and asked ‘Do you want a pancake?’ We thought we had misheard him, or misseen him, or both (there are no pancakes in Indonesia; also, no Japanese people) but followed him into this bizarre hidden apartment behind the internet cafe, where we found two cute young Dutch guys cooking cheesy pancakes with strawberry jam and chocolate sprinkles. This was a giant culture shock, but it didn’t stop us from stuffing our faces and cautiously speaking English to the first strangers we’d met all year who could speak it (and perfectly: very European of them). They had just finished getting very sick in the jungle.

That’s it, really. There was an electric keyboard, guitar, bass, and drums at the church down the street, and we jammed with a bunch of church kids, but it turned out awkward because they only knew songs about praising Jesus, and we only knew... well, everything but that. And then Nick had to say a prayer at the end, which only Louise and I knew he invented on the spot, and only Louise and I almost wet our pants from the strain of holding in our laughter – not because the prayer was funny, or that praising God in general is funny, but because nonreligious Nick praising God to a roomful of Indonesians who think all bules are Christian, in central Papua, where nobody understood a word of his prayer, yet bowed their heads solemnly if a little awkwardly, was extremely funny. In an absurd way.