July 26th the road to Pyramid

Birding - wish we had a bird book~

The road to Pyramid is lovely, hilly, not too windy and offers beautiful views of the valley as you climb higher. There are also a large variety of wild flowers and other flowering plants including poinsettia, lantana and colorful coleus. With all these flowers, we have seen many butterflies that always elude the camera.  We enjoyed seeing many birds and Jimmy has developed quite an eye just in the few days we traveled alone. The children always wave and call out either "wa" (greetings) or "da" (bye) also a request for "gula gula " (sweets). We learned to call back "gula gula lego" (sorry no sweets). The Dani are friendly but also quite shy people. In reading about both Archbold's team and the first missionaries, both were greeted by friendly people and only a few times faced hostile groups in this area.

Boys trying to spear fish from their rafts

On the road we went over many interesting basic bridges... You almost wanted to get out of the car and let the car go first alone on the bridge. The discoverer Archbold was amazed in 1938 at the bridges he encountered of bamboo that allowed 20 people to cross on them at a time using only bamboo and rattan with no nails or modern tools. Interesting to see all of life's activities taking place along the river sides.


From Kevin and Beth we learned of the mission retreat center at Pyramid,  "Alpine Lodge", where there had been a Papua missions retreat gathering of all the missions in Papua a few weeks ago. We also found the airstrip that Kevin said they used to fly into with only an 8 minute flight from Wamena.

Pyramid Mission Retreat cabins and church

We continue to see in the town and the road and countryside the juxtaposition between the old and new. The men with the penis gourds and feather crowns in all locations, the bare breasted women just in the fields and only a couple on the roads. The men in shorts with the feather  crowns, beaded headbands, armlets etc.

The women wear clothes of jungle camouflage,so not really very picturesque except from the back when you see their noken bags.  The traffic is very light on the roads but speed is slow with all the pot holes and road repairs underway.

We had dinner with Kevin and Beth at the hotel so they could check out the restaurant. We enjoyed their company and meeting them has made real difference to our trip here. We had been hearing a siren going off at all times of the day, including early morning, and asked them what the siren meant. Kevin said it was to tell the people with all the animals on the runway to get out of there. The weather here has been a nice temperature during the day and drizzly in the late afternoon and evenings such that a long sleeve shirt is needed.

MAF landing strip at Pyramid

We packed up for our Triana flight tomorrow morning, the second flight of the day, if all goes according to plan.  We have another guide Usman, that we have arranged to meet us and take us to some tribes living on Lake Sentani.