Crossing the mountain: Visiting the Dani tribe of Papua

Baliem Valley and the Dani tribe waited a long time to be discovered. It was Richard Archbold who discovered the well hidden valley during an aerial reconnaissance flight in 1938. Literally, he had seen over the mountain wall—some summits higher than 4,000 meters—and broken the seal on a stone-age culture.

Nowadays the tiny 60×30km Baliem valley which lies about 1,600 meters above sea level can easily be accessed by plane from Jayapura, the coastal capital town of Indonesia's Papua province. Reaching Jayapura isn't difficult but flying there takes time. Jayapura is at the very Eastern end of Indonesia, some 5,200 km away from Indonesia’s most Northwestern tip, Aceh province. Put into transatlantic terms, these two Indonesian cities are as far from each other as Dublin from New York.

21^st century Baliem Valley has still remnants of the stone-age, knives made out of bone or bamboo are still in use, traditional pig feasts are still celebrated, some hundred year-old mummies have survived purges by the government, and old fences surrounding the land of the villages are still in use. Stone-axes, the weapon for occasional tribal wars had been used well up into the 1950/60s but then what we would call civilization entered the Baliem Valley and missionaries and civil servants began to transform century-old value systems.

Photo above: Dani watch tower, a witness of times when tribal wars were still being fought.