• Hike to Monacassat

    April 22, 2019 in Papua New Guinea ⋅ ⛅ 28 °C

    We woke up at 6 am before sunrise. When we woke up finally we could see where we had slept overnight: in the middle of nowhere, there were basically just a few huts, a little school and else just jungle. It was a beautiful morning with blue sky and you could have a great view over the wilderness. We had some chocolate bars and a bit of milk powder with Müsli for breakfast. We got our luggage prepared (mostly gearing up and getting water ready) and started to hike. Where we started the hike there was no more road, this was the last place you could possibly reach with a car and actually even most cars would have problems getting there.
    We walked to a little village where we had a little stop and talked to the villagers. Most of them joined us afterwards to climb up the mountain to visit more villages.
    Now, how did we get here: as Defol didn’t want to bring us to the Black Cat Track he offered us to alternatively bring us to a few other villages and do another hike. He had the idea to in the future bring visitors to the area because back in the days an Aussie soldier in WWII, Peter Ryan, was hiding from the Japanese in this area for several months. There are other very famous military tracks where the Aussies had fought in WWII and he saw an opportunity to bring more people to this region as currently there was nobody at all going there. We were the first ones and basically we were the trial candidates for this.
    The tour was not set up yet however so basically it was just us with Defol and a few locals exploring the area and talking to local communities that have never seen tourists and visitors and especially no white people. So we have been the first ever foreign visitors to the area and the villages. Defol joined the hike with the porters and then in each village held a speech talking to the communities trying to get them to accept visitors in the area (and basically not chop their heads). For that reason, we were bringing a porter from each of the communities we were passing.
    So when we went to the mountains and passed through more villages, we made a stop in each village and talked to the community leaders to get them on board for the plan. In the first village we reached a church that was having a service. Most of the area was of Lutheran religion and some of the elderly still remembered the German missionaries that had come there to convert them. When we walked into that village EVERYBODY came and wanted to shake our hands, hundreds of people.
    It was funny that every village we passed, 20 more guys would just follow us and hike with us, at some point maybe 50 people were joining us creating a massive caravan.
    We continued to the village where Peter Ryan was hiding from the Japanese for more than a year. The village welcomed us with a big self-made sign drawn on cotton thinking we were Aussies and a dance from kids with arrows and bows. Usually we arrived in these villages a lot earlier before Defol as he wasn’t the fittest any more. We continued for hours and hiked a total of 17km that day, finally arriving at a river around 5pm. The river had fast rapids and the little cane bridge was broken. We fixed it, balanced over it and then got our baggage off and jumped in the river. We felt the freshest ever in our lives. We felt so sweaty, hot, humid, exhausted that day and the river had the perfect refreshing temperature.
    Afterwards we got changed again and continued to hike to a little village where we would sleep: Monacassat. Also these guys had never seen Westerners. We had a little hut in the middle of the village that somebody else had freed for us and the whole village came to greet us. We got some fresh ananas and oranges. Again the hut didn’t have anything in there so we slept on the floor. In this one we even all had our own room. We were still talking to the village people again for a few hours before we had a quick pasta. This was the time when we figured that Lio and Tim had even forgotten to bring cutleries, so we had to get innovative.
    Especially Lio bonded with a guy called Anton who, well, was a bit special. In this village the village clown Anton was clearly the Entertainer, he liked us and said “he would join us to go back to Lae” the next day, to be continued later. Afterwards we went to bed.
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