I am digging deep into the red dirt with all twenty of my fingers and toes. My sandals are somewhere about a hundred feet above me, hooked in Nick's belt loop. Two Papuan women are bracing their palms on my butt. Pushing me up as gravity is pulling me down. This is either a path from the beach or a cliff; I can't decide which. "Make your feet like a duck!" Nick yells down at me as the women strain against my butt. They are mostly immune to gravity because they are about five feet tall and sturdy, grounded, with strong toes that curl into any surface like roots. Both of them behind me going up. One on each side going down, linking arms with me, alternating between springing across the rocks and weeds and hesitating, motioning to me with hands that are half-encouraging and half-cautious. "Hati-hati!" they admonish. Three hundred feet of plunging crumbling grey rock two inches away from my slipping left heel.

It is the first day I have been able to carry on a conversation in Indonesian, and it has probably saved my life. Being able to say 'beach', 'I don't understand', 'we will be here for a year', 'bird of paradise', 'I am tall' and other completely random phrases has made us an instant crowd of friends who, upon seeing our growing procession, drop their cassava-farming-implements and join us, forming a parade down the terrifying cliff to the beach. This is my favorite beach - (mostly) lacking sea urchins but with high waves and with a high waterfall that pours down onto the back end of the beach with enough force to wash me completely of the coarse, sticky sand that one finds here and also to wash my hair better than any shampoo ever has or ever will. Standing under the waterfall at high tide, the ocean comes pounding up to my ankles. At high tide, there is no part of the beach that is dry. Have you ever stood beneath a waterfall cascading out of the jungle with the ocean ebbing around your feet?

The villagers have a little orange blow-up basketball. They want to play volleyball with it in the water as they point at things, shout their names in Indonesian, and inquire eagerly 'bahasa Inggris?' How do you say it in English? After 'beach', 'swim', and 'waves', they lose interest, and focus on correcting my water-volleyball technique, which I can't really figure out because there are no boundaries, no teams, no points, and occasionally a big set of waves will come and wash someone out to sea or deposit them roughly on the shore. They are mostly unconcerned about drowning, or about anything, really. I am gearing up to serve in what has been mild water when suddenly this 15-foot wave comes charging up and I don't have time to think about what to do. It comes crashing down right into my left ear, lifts me, wildly flailing and sort of surfing, but mostly just tumbling, and, as the beach rises before me, shoves my jaw and most of my head into the sand, and recedes. Children are rising, unruffled, around me, but my head is pounding so loudly that I feel like the entire ocean has been washed through my ear into my brain. My jaw is out of alignment and clicking. I sway and go down again. Nick washes up on the shore with the next wave and puts his arms around me, which causes everyone to shriek with giggles and to clamber over some rocks, singing a song in harmony and screaming every time the sea sprays over their rock. They are correct, of course, and in five minutes we are up and sharing our peanut butter and jelly, teaching greetings and colors in English because that's all they want, to learn English, and a great bargain it is, in exchange for saving me from plunging to my death about four or five times! Every time Naomi, the first to join our initial beach parade, speaks a word in English that hasn't been specifically modeled for her, she claps her hand over her mouth and collapses in giggles, out for the count for at least a minute. On the way back, I can hear one of the children chanting, "Red, green, purple, yellow, pink, brown, black. Red, green, purple, yellow, pink, brown, black!"

I begin wishing that I could quit my job teaching structured, boring English to rich people and kids with rich parents in exchange for a paltry salary and just teach fun, relaxed English to a village full of Papuans in exchange for food and shelter, and in between, we could play beach volleyball with no rules, get pounded by freak waves, pull the pineapples that grow, with no provocation, everywhere, and generally just wander around in the jungle looking at stuff. I'm not usually that kind of person, but I must admit that that would be THE life.

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.