IRIAN JAYA,

the Indonesian western half of New Guinea was for a long time considered as scarsely populated except on the coast. Nobody thought before the last century that people could live deep in its forest nearly devoid of big animals (except the casowary)...

The sea around the island is quite warm and there are beautiful beaches in some places like here, near Jayapura, on the northern coast.

In the interior of the island, things are in fact totally different: tens of thousands of people are living in the high valleys (between 1700 and 2400 m), where there is no malaria and where they have developped their own kind of agriculture, based on various roots and tubercules, some 9000 years BC !!! They have also their own kind of clothes: for the man, it's just a "horim", a penis sheat made from an elongated gourd specialy grown for that purpose, and they have a choice of it in various sizes for different occasions.

One afternoon, while we where far from any village (our camp was then on the shores of lake Habema, at an altitude of 3300 m), the porters asked me if they could try the European clothes which were in the luggages.
It was quite fun and gave the occasion of a nice picture !

During the second visit I made in this area, I had the same guide, porters and cook. As an unexpected consequence of the fact that they considered me as their "chief", I also had to kill the pig myself in the traditional way at the end of our expedition ...