How Green is This Valley

Time has stood still in the pristine, majestically beautiful Baliem Valley in West Papua.  For  this traveler, it is a place to relive fond childhood memories and experience the hospitality of the Dani tribe.

By Fransiska Anggraini

I grew up avidly reading Astrid Lindgren’s Children of Bullerbyn series. Telling of six children living in a remote village in Sweden, it showed urban kids of my generation the fun of catching fish in the river with bare hands and sitting up in a tree with binoculars pretending to be pirates.

Growing up in the city, I didn’t get to climb trees, let alone float paper boats on a river, as often as I would have liked. But during the times spent poring over the adventures of those faraway children, I developed a soft spot for mountains and rivers (I confess that I have compiled my own list of movies featuring stunning views of mountains and rivers).

Visiting Baliem Valley wowed me in more ways than one, and took me back to my childhood years.  It was like standing in a vast meadow, surrounded by a row of limestone gorges covered in the lush greenery of the valley. Looking down from the top of the hill, a latte-colored river meandered through the mountainous terrain. I have never been to Sweden, but in my imagination, that was just the kind of place the children of Bullerbyn lived in.

Awe-inspiring Baliem is not for the faint-hearted, several times it simply took my breath away and left me feeling so insignificant. Papua, like so many other tourist attractions in Indonesia, offers a rustic experience of being at one with nature, interacting with people still living in traditional ways. The facilities are very basic but the experience is priceless. This is the land where pigs can buy love, the hills are covered with purple sweet-potato blooms, and the (old) men proudly walk around in penis sheaths.

When it comes to the Dani, they are among the nicest people on Earth. They greet each other, even when they’re strangers. They smiled at me first, and when I smiled back, their smiles got even wider. Those were simply the most beautiful, most sincere smiles I’ve ever seen.

I did a four-night-three-day trek in Baliem Valley and stayed in Dani villages. When I told my friends I was going to trek the valley and stay in the villages with the Dani, they shrieked in horror. The comments ranged from the simplest “You’re so brave” to “Thank you, but possibly losing my head is not my idea of fun, so I will let you experience it and await your travel report”.  

Although I wasn’t afraid of the fact that the Dani used to chop off people’s heads, I was rather worried about sleeping in a women’s honai (the Dani’s traditional, mushroom-shaped thatch-roofed hut) with pigs, and the possibility of their fleas creeping into my sleeping bag.

The Art of Sleeping in a Honai

Dani men and women sleep separately in different huts. The men sleep in one honai with their weapons of war, while the women and children are in another with the pigs and cooking utensils. Traditionally, the women get the role of taking care of the pigs since the animals eat just about everything, especially kitchen waste.

The wooden hut has no windows to suit the cool weather of the valley. The floor is carpeted wall-to-wall with dry grass that also functions as a communal sleeping mattress. There is a pit in the middle of the room to build a fire and keep everybody warm.

I was invited to enter a men’s honai by the chief of a village that I stayed in for the night.

Sitting in a smoke-filled room without ventilation is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. After 15 minutes, I had to excuse myself and run out of the hut to breathe some fresh air.

After I had recovered, the chief started to enlighten me on Dani culture. He told me that sex was taboo for women after giving birth, for at least the next two, and up to five years, to allow them to focus on taking care of the children. This situation meant the men could take more than one wife, as many as they could afford. By this, he meant dependent on the man’s ability to present four to five pigs to his intended wife’s parents as a dowry. While in the modern material world status is shown by the car one drives or the branded attire one wears, the social status of a Dani man is defined by the number of wives and pigs he has.

It was a relief that all the villages in which I spent the night happened to have separate compounds for tourists, so I did not have to sleep with the pigs. I still got to sleep in a honai, but the guide took the initiative to erect a tent inside the funny-looking house so I could sleep comfortably. It was a good thing I had equipped myself with travel essentials such as a sarong and plastic bags. A plastic bag came in handy as a pillow, for I simply put all my clothes inside it and slept on it. The sarong worked for everything, from bathing in the ice-cold river to serving as a blanket for sleeping.

Candies and cigarettes are sure-fire tickets to get along with the villagers, especially if one plans to share their village for the night.

Know your options

Baliem Valley is a vast area to explore so, unless one is blessed with plenty of time, it’s nearly impossible to cover it all. Doing proper research into your options is a must before departing.
The southern part offers the more stunning views and those who really want to walk deep into the valley usually choose this route.

However, besides the heart-pounding, pulse-racing mountain views, the other famous tourist attraction in the area is a mummy of a village chief. In fact, there are several villages, all located in the north, offering mummies as a tourist spectacle. The most famous village to see a mummy is Jiwika, where there is a nearby saltwater spring. Since a lot of trekking operators include a trip to Jiwika and the saltwater spring, the northern part of Baliem Valley is more popular.

The villagers of Jiwika now don traditional outfits whenever there are tourists in sight, with the men in penis sheaths and the women bare-chested and clad only in thatch skirts. They expect a bit of cash for posing for the camera, and payment for performing tribal war dances.

Tour operators usually package the war dance performance and traditional communal cooking as part of the Dani experience. They would slaughter a pig and cook it the traditional way on a pile of hot stones. Pigs are optional, though, as they are very expensive; they can be replaced with chicken and sweet potatoes for those on a tighter budget.

Staying in the Dani villages is not the only option available to explore the valley. Those who won’t compromise on comfort and hygiene can go back to a hotel in Wamena at the end of the day (also usually included in the package holidays offered by tour operators). The fact that not all villages have a bathroom or a toilet means one has to be prepared to bathe in a river and be content to use the bushes as a toilet. The north route, therefore, is more suitable for those who opt to go back to a hotel after a short trek, since there are few decent roads for cars to traverse in the south.

The trails range from pebbled roads to well-used footpaths with some steep and slippery spots.
Landslides are fairly common, especially during the wet season so detours can be expected. Be ready to clamber over a string of stone walls and totter precariously across a series of hanging bridges with raging rivers below! Having a guide is essential, since there are no clear maps or signage. As almost no English is spoken in the villages, the guide can be useful to bridge communication between trekkers and locals.

The weekend after I got back to the chaos of the city, I invited some friends over to my place. I was determined to prove them wrong about the Dani. Over a couple of bottles of wine, they went “ooohhh” and “aaahhh” when I put the pictures into a slide show on my computer. It was hard not to utter exclamations at the stunning photographs of the Dani people and the valley they inhabit. As green as the valley, that was the color of their envy. And that was exactly how I felt whenever I finished the last page of Children of Bullerbyn.

How to get there:

From Jayapura flying is the only way to access the Baliem Valley, through Wamena. Several major airlines fly via Makassar to Jayapura from Jakarta. Trigana Air (021 866 03959) flies several times daily from Jayapura to Wamena. Foreigners, including KITAS holders, must obtain a travel permit letter to be presented to the chiefs of the villages along the route. The guide will take care of the travel permit procedures at the main police office, so provide them with copies of your passport and recent photographs.

Trekking operator:
Adventure Indonesia: www.adventureindonesia.com. Email: advindo@cbn.net.id

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