Adventure > Articles > Crocodile Man Meets Kodak Clan

This is as close as I’ll get to flying on a wing and a prayer. Below our tiny Cessna the Upper Sepik River glistens like a jade serpent, twisting and looping back on its own coils. At the controls is a true ‘sky pilot’, a man of the cloth with a little gold crucifix on his collar. His aircraft belongs to an outfit called the Missionary Aviation Fellowship.

The coastal ranges of northern Papua New Guinea and the brilliant green wetlands of its Sepik Plains are now behind us. A tiny airstrip appears up ahead, shaved into the dense jungle of the riverbank like a reverse Mohawk. As soon as we touch down at Ambunti village, Alois Mateos, the proprietor of Ambunti Lodge, meets us and leads us to his 10-metre dugout canoe. Basically, it’s an oversized, hollow telegraph post with an outboard motor bolted to the blunt end and six wicker chairs lined-up down the middle. We settle into our cane thrones, pour on enough sunblock to emulate a solar eclipse and then set off looking like a major visitation from the Bwana Vista set.

Alois turns the canoe upriver. The haze from village cooking fires smudges the reedy shoreline beyond which a chaotic topiary of jungle rises to meet clouds of a similar complexity. After an hour’s travelling he spots a gap in the pitpit (swamp sugar cane) reeds of the bank and steers us off the main current into a tributary lake system. As we chug past, white egrets rise from the banks like skittish ballerinas and palm cockatoos in pairs squawk us on. Our destination is Maliwai village, a settlement of several hundred people that’s hidden in the margins of the river and time. The wood and thatch houses of the village face a large common on which children play gleefully anarchic football; as we come ashore crowds of kids and clouds of mosquitoes — natnats — greet us with equal enthusiasm.

Clement, our guide, hands out the mozzie repellent; the youngest kids are much taken by the sight of us applying our ‘whiteness’ from a tube. They giggle and tumble beside us as we make our way to the village haus tamburan, the spirit house. Here, guarded by a sturdy palm-trunk fence, is the sanctuary of men’s business and clan totemic images — both the cassowary and crocodile are sacred in Maliwai. A six-metre-high decorated pillar dominates the facade of the wooden meeting house. In its forecourt, beside a giant, crocodile-headed garamut drum sits a bearded old gent enjoying a contemplative evening cheroot.

He smiles in greeting, but his reverie is banished by a blitzkrieg of flashbulbs. Crocodile Clan meets Kodak Clan. Perhaps he is recalling that — according to Sepik custom — should a woman intrude into a haus tamburan she may be put to death. Since half our company is female, that would take care of probably three cameras, but women of our protected band, the Tourist Tribe, have long been exempt from such a fate. Not that we guys are beyond similar dispatch. Up this way there used to be a great deal of headhunting; in fact, according to custom, a human skull should be buried beneath each corner pole of a haus tamburan.. The people of Maliwai, as with almost everyone we encounter on the Sepik, are cheerful and frank, welcoming our brief intrusions. Many are keen to have visitors drop in and buy the carved artefacts that are one of their few sources of cash income. Come dusk we chug back downstream to Ambunti. Overhead the sky is a cocktail of ruby hues served on the clouds stirred not shaken.

In the morning we begin our 200-km downriver adventure. Alois guns the 40 horsepower outboard as we settle into our wicker whatnots. We’ve shrouded ourselves against the equatorial sun by donning more headwear than an Agatha Christie dame in the desert.

The Sepik, one of the largest rivers in the world in terms of its water flow, starts its 1120 km journey in PNG’s central mountains, then travels via a long westerly loop into and out of West Papua before meandering eastwards again through PNG to reach the Bismarck Sea below Wewak on the north coast. Muddy and broad, it picks its way across the plains, changing course at will, leaving a maze of dead ends, ox-bow lakes, swamps and lagoons. This is no place to be a lone navigator unless you have a month of Sundays, a wallet stuffed with kina and a PhD in maze-craft.

Beside the river in Korogo village sits a massive two-storied, thatch-roofed haus tamburan that, we’re told, took three years to build. It’s over 50 metres long and has an upper floor given over entirely to the works of local carvers. Within this adumbral ‘big house’ art gallery, huge carved and painted faces, totemic figurines, penis sheaths, birds and ubiquitous wooden pukpuks (crocodiles) throng the gloom. Giant masks extend their tongues in proto-KISS grimaces. Prices start at around 20 kina (approximately $20) for works similar to those we have seen in overseas boutiques at 10 times the mark-up. The fertility carvings are as striking as they are lustily inventive: noses, feet, genitals and most of the other nooks and crannies of the human apparatus are an inspiration to the erotic imaginations of these artists. Although a prude might view such art as primitive porn, within the Sepik belief system of sympathetic magic these figures are simply life and art imitating — if not stimulating — each other in a circuit of celebration and increase.

In one big house we are shown, but cannot photograph the ‘orator’s chair’.. Alois explains that during a major dispute (the most frequent disagreements are over land or sorcery) antagonists may be required to sit in this magical chair which, according to belief, permits only the truth to be told by whoever occupies it. Should a liar persist in dissembling, he or she is soon reduced by the powers of the chair to a sweating, trembling — and therefore guilty-as-hell — mess.

Sorcery and crocodiles are deeply woven into Sepik lore. It is believed that a sorcerer temporarily blinds his enemy with dust or smoke, turns himself into a crocodile, eats his foe, then returns to human form. A guide tells me that when a crocodile fatality occurred on the river in 1993 and sorcery was suspected, police were dispatched to arrest the crocodile.

We enter the Middle Sepik. Floating islands of water hyacinth, stilt villages, kids paddling crocodile-prowed dugouts, herons, sago makers, canoe builders, baby crocs in pens ... the river’s gallery is endless. Naked kids slide noisily down waterslides they’ve carved in the mud of the steep riverbank. We divert from the main river and slip through a reed-thronged channel into the lush Chambri Lakes, where we put ashore at Aibom village, which is noted for its baked clay pottery. Like many corners of PNG, Aibom has discovered the silver lining of its so-called ‘under-developed’ status and is now cautiously exploiting its attraction to adventure travellers, ecotourists and collectors. The distinctive grinning faces on the decorated Aibom clay pots prove irresistible to half our group. When these join the proliferation of carved masks and figurines that my companions have already gathered, our canoe looks like the garage sale on Noah’s Ark. ‘Come back anytime,’ the villagers call as we depart.

Downriver we overnight in a comfortable community-owned guest lodge at Tambanum village; with a population of around 1000 this is one of the largest settlements on the Middle Sepik. The lodge has mosquito nets and showers, and because it is built on the opposite bank of the river to the village, doesn’t intrude into Tambanum’s traditional life. I sit on the veranda at dusk drinking a beer. In an earlier colonial epoch this view across the broad grasslands that run down to the river might have been pure ‘I had a farm in New Guinea’ stuff. However, it wasn’t author Karen Blixen who once lingered in Tambanum, but anthropologist Margaret Mead — she seems to have lived almost everywhere in Melanesia. I understand why as I sit and watch a graffito of stars scrawl itself across the giant dark of the Sepik night.

With the coming of the Karens and Margarets, plus the rules and creeds of the outside world, values on the Sepik have changed. Henry, one of the lodge-keepers, tells me that in the past decade no young men have been initiated in Tambanum. The pattern of the scars or cicatrices — imitating a crocodile’s ridged scales — that we have seen on the upper torsos of some older men indicate them as initiated members of the crocodile clan. I ask why there are no new initiates. ‘Because our haus tamburan, where the initiation ceremonies take place, has fallen down and another one cannot be built.’ Again, I ask why. Henry hesitates, then speaks frankly. Tambanum cannot build a new spirit house because, according to tradition, each corner post must have a human skull buried beneath it, and in modern PNG thou shalt not confiscate thy neighbour’s head.

In the morning we cross the river and stroll through the village, a settlement noted for its fine carvings. As we approach each peak-roofed house, in front of it appears — so unobtrusively that it seems done almost without human assistance — a little menagerie of carved wooden stools, crocodiles, cockerels, figurines, snakes and masks. Too dignified to thrust their wares at visitors, the people of the Sepik let their art sell itself. And it does. We now have so many carved turtle stools that our luggage, when lined up, looks like, well, a herd of turtles.

Villages such as Korogo and Tambanum can no longer be called ‘primitive’ (whatever that may once have meant). Their culture now incorporates totems, sorcery, clan systems, Christianity, satellite television and Rugby League football, making them simultaneously pre- and post-modern like few other places on earth. At Aibom I talked State of Origin football with Rex, a young giant whose crocodile clan cicatrices and sheer size would give a front-row forward of any rival rugby league clan fair reason to get out of his way. Rex’s cousin has just completed four years’ training as an aircraft pilot in Australia, something of which his village is enormously proud.

Forget attacks by sorcerers, pukpuks and natnats, a midday sun that’s like a walk-in microwave, the voracious mud at the shoreline, even the threatened sinking of our good canoe HMS Garage Sale beneath its burden of wicker and wooden what-nots. None of this is much worry. Our greatest blight on the Sepik is Western medicine. The anti-malarial antibiotic doxycycline — which most of us are taking — has the unfortunate side effect of making our skins hypersensitive to the sun. By the end of our safari most of us have developed lurid ‘photo-toxic’ blisters on our faces and hands. The perfect tropical medicine: contra-indicated for the tropics.

We climb back into our canoe for the final three-hour ride down to the roadhead at Angoram town. At first the wind is high, tearing the river’s glittering surface into a muddy windchop. Ahead of us tawny brown kites dive, feasting on a swarm of grasshopper-like binatangs. A villager who has hitchhiked a lift with us whips out his slingshot, aiming for the kites. He misses. Stilt villages drift by. I see an alien creature on the bank in the distance: a car. Overhead is a plane. A church steeple pokes above the native trees. We fall silent, with the river mirroring our dugout thoughts.

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