Инна Метельская-Шереметьева: Back to the past

A documentary-fictional tale

From the author

Dear reader,

It is my pleasure to present to you a documentary-fictional tale of an amazing trip which was undertaken by some of my friends in 2005–2006.

At the moment of the events being described in the book, our compatriots had practically not visited or studied the territory of Irian Jaya (one of the Indonesian states on the island of New Guinea). Therefore, the book’s main characters are pioneers in a certain sense of the word. All the facts, events and people mentioned in the story are real. I only assumed the responsibility of completing the images of the main characters, and I had a good reason to do so. During the expedition, the travelers did not make any voice recordings. What I had at my disposal was Alexey Semyonov’s documentary diary, an archive of unique photos and videos brought back from New Guinea, and my friends’ stories, which I enjoyed listening to every word of during long winter evenings. I took a risk and presented these stories with a certain portion of fiction added to them in order to be able to get across to the readers all of the emotional intensity and all those nuances of impressions and experiences which I felt throughout our conversations.

The book is composed of several separate stories of the expedition’s participants. Their interests here were taken into consideration. This is why they are all fully legitimate co-authors of the book “Return to the Past”.

Thus, Andrey and Alexander, in particular, took photos and shot video of those places and tribes which the book tells you about. They recorded the main events, locations and dates along the route. Looking at their own pictures afterwards, they very vividly and graphically described those nuances which had slipped by their cameras.

Following long-standing tradition, Alexey studied the everyday life and ceremonies, as well as explored the traditions and rituals, of the ancient tribes.

Michael was interested in the specific historic, geographic and ethnographic facts and special issues of the native philosophy which exists as if in parallel to our own world, next to it… or beyond it to be precise…

This is why the reader of this book will be able to observe the chronological events described in different chapters as well as a whole range of ‘deviations’ which will help to make the story of the journey more vivid and picturesque, and fill it with documentary facts.

I hope you enjoy the story of the trip to the Vanishing World of Irian Jaya.

Inna M. (on behalf of the co-authors).

Introduction

Since the world managed to fit into a laptop screen and tourist agencies, as if in collusion, promised to provide us with guaranteed spots in a five-star beach heaven during any season, life has become absolutely dull.

You just have to go on-line to look into such an unlimited range of opportunities that was far beyond Mr. Cook’s, Mr. Magellan’s or Mr. Mikluho-Maklay’s dreams. Longing for new discoveries, ravishing dreams of unknown countries are slowly losing their shine and getting quite dusty on the shelves of many modernized souls, deadly pinned by the leading tour operator’s polite but perfunctory question, “What would you like?”

Nowadays, one can easily order swimming in an ice hole in the company of a polar bear, a diving tour down to the Titanic, climbing up the Empire State Building without a safety harness or black African buffalo hunting with a lariat – anything is available. But the stubborn brain rejects this whole sugary excuse for entertainment in the same way it rejects genetically modified soy hamburgers and milk which stays fresh for up to 6 months. We still remember that feeling of true admiration when we hung on every word of our favorite TV presenters who told us about the unsolved mysteries of the planet Earth from black-and-white TV screens. Senkevich. Drozdov. Peskov. And Durrell’s books… as well as Cousteau’s documentaries… What about Brehm’s books which were read to tatters? We still remember the times when we skipped our classes in universities to listen to Bromley’s seminars on ethnography in the Lomonosov Moscow State University and Puchkov’s lectures in the Peoples’ Friendship University. And to believe that today there’s not a single place on Earth which has not been ‘refined’ by Coca-Cola advertisements, would mean to forget – or to betray our childhood.

No, no! I’m not talking about anything romantic here. Because having grown up, become wiser and acquired our own children and rather successful businesses, each of us is quite capable of arranging a ‘first class’ romantic trip for himself and his friends, but what you really want is something real, masculine and off the beaten track. We are four mature and, I would like to believe, wise men, whose cumulative age is just over 180 years old and whose business interests cover commerce, furniture production and publishing. There is even a famous TV cameraman among us. It just happened that for several years already during our free time we have been exploring the less studied tribes and regions of our planet. Our routes very often cross with the paths of Prof. Drozdov and his TV program about animals. Even more often we travel on our own. We wouldn’t risk putting a ‘traveler’ job on our CVs the same as we haven’t turned our hobby into a business (thank God for that!). But having wandered through quite a large number of countries we thought it possible to publish a small part of our impressions, which could be of some use for our comrades-in-arms – travelers and lovers of adventure of all kinds.

Chapter One

Straight for the Pampas!

Andrey’s Story

To word the task correctly is a job half-done. Well… our second-to-last expedition was set in the state of Irian Jaya in Indonesia. It is the western part of New Guinea, which we were lucky to visit last year and which we swore to visit again. We had many reasons to do that. We considered our previous trip to be a reconnaissance mission and a motive to study books carefully, to try and search the depth of the Internet for the missing puzzle pieces of our knowledge and to lay, so to put it, the theoretic grounds for our return. Naturally, we weren’t talking about learning a couple of Papuan dialects or even attentively going through such interesting works by the outstanding explorer of these lands Professor of Ethnography Pavel Nikolaevich Puchkov. We worded our task as a much more modest and practical one. No matter how you wanted to put it, we were rather seriously limited in time for our expedition. This is why we looked for the most interesting facts in all the scientific or would-be scientific works which we went through. In particular, we wanted to make sure that relict species of blue rhinos still existed in the National Park of Ujung Kulon, or that the tribe of the legendary troglodytes, whose remains were found on Flores island, was not a myth created by journalists. Surely, we also hoped to visit once again the lost forests of Irian Jaya in order to see the island’s native residents and their stone age style of life with our own eyes.

Naturally, this last Irian Jaya part of the trip interested us the most. After studying the few existing sources, we learnt that since May 1, 1963 Western Irian (which is an Indonesian name for New Guinea) has been a part of the Republic of Indonesia as a liberated territory. The surface area of Western Irian is 412,781 sq. kilometers and its population is 700 thousand people. Western Irian includes several islands off the south-eastern coast. Mapia, Yapen, Biock, Missol, Waigeo and Salavati are among the largest of them. Out of all these islands Biock is the only one which is slightly familiar to Russian tourists and travelers: divers’ cruises depart from there a couple times a year.