Sepik river tour

I've been meaning to write this for a long while now... but other things always seem to get in my way. But I did promise my tour guide, Joe, that I would post information and pictures from our tour on the internet, and I hate to break a promise (he deserves a bit of credit too!). So here goes...

Mel and I were in PNG in November/December 2007, it was my fourth trip there and her third. I'd heard a lot about the Sepik River, and was really keen to check it out, so before we went I got online and booked a 5 day tour through PNG Frontier Adventures. They offer a bunch of different tours, and we chose the Upper Sepik because it offered more wildlife, more scenery (there are actually trees growing on the sides of the river) and more remoteness, and also because the middle Sepik is what everyone does, and we wanted to be a little different. It took a while to hear back from the tour company, as email contact with everyone in PNG can be a little dodgy at times, but they were really helpful, giving us heaps of information and tryng their best to cater the trip to what we wanted. They hired a local tour guide, Joe Kone, for us, and he met us at Wewak Airport when we arrived, along with one of the guys from the tour company. The next morning the adventure began...

Day 1: Wewak to Wagu, Into the Wild

Timmy, our driver, and Joe picked us up from the house in Wewak where we were staying, in a very new looking hired 4WD. Actually, we had never seen anything quite like it since being in PNG and it didn't feel too much like the start of a frontier adventure... still it was cosy and we both got to have a bit of a snooze despite the incredible speeds Timmy achieved while weaving all over the road avoiding trucks and buses coming the other way. The road inland from Wewak winds up and over a beautiful green mountain range before dropping down into the wide, wide flat floodplains of the Sepik. The drive took about 3 hours, including a couple of stops for market food (love that fresh corn!). Then we got to the little riverside town of Pagwi. Pagwi is the highest point on the river with road access from Wewak, and we were heading up river from there.

Mel and I sought out some shade under a tree while the boys loaded up our canoe. We were already beginning to reconcile ourselves to the incredible laziness of being on an organised tour. After all, we had paid very big bucks for this tour, and the boys wouldn't let us do any work anyway, so we learned to put up with it. It didn't take long to load the canoe and say goodbye to Timmy, and at last we were on the water!

I'm not so good at estimating distances, but I guess the river is a few hundred metres wide around Pagwi, and apart from a few fibreglass boats around town, all of the river traffic is in dugout canoes, most of them paddled, but a few with motors (like ours). Our vessel was a big dugout canoe, about 7m long with a flat bottom, just wide enough for me to sit frontways or sideways if I wanted. The crew was Joe, his son Jeremy and a young guy named Pascal, who was the driver of the boat and the source of much of the entertainment of the trip...

The river was smooth and flowing fast. Mostly the edges of it are lined with wild sugarcane, though occasionally the jungle makes its way to the shore. The cicadas were deafeningly loud when we got close to the shoreline. We passed a lot of traffic going both ways on the river - people out fishing or travelling to and from markets. We never saw another foreigner on the whole trip. Our first stop, about two hours from Pagwi, was Ambunti, the main centre for government services on the Upper Sepik which is where the crew and their families live. Mel and I played with the kids while the boys loaded up more gear.

We jumped back into the canoe and took off up a side river. About 3 hours from Ambunti, we reached Wasui Lagoon, a massive lake system that was full of waterbirds. It took a while to navigate across, and the Sun was starting to go down when we pulled into Wagu village, where we were staying for the night. A local man has built a beautiful big guesthouse on the shore of the lake, and we were shocked to discover that he has even made a flushing toilet for his guests! Yep, this really was the wilds of PNG!

Before bed we had a little swim in the lake, which was delightful until I started feeling little bites on my arms and legs. The next morning I asked one of the locals about what might have bit me and he told me about some recently introduced fish. They are called "Piranha".

Day 2: Wagu to Buknowi - Beautiful Birds and Killer Crocs

We got up early in the morning for a canoe trip across Lake Wasui with the guy who owns the guesthouse and Joe. They took us up into the forest where we went looking for birds of paradise. We saw, and heard, loads of different birds, but we were almost giving up on the birds of paradise, when they finally appeared. We saw maybe 3 or 4 males all flitting from tree to tree doing their courtship displays. I'm fairly sure that it was the Lesser Bird of Paradise that we saw, which is hardly an appropriate name for the amazing creature, with it's beautiful long white and gold tail feathers that it twists and throws around in its display... we only had little point and shoot cameras, so no good photos of the birds, I'm afraid. But seeing them do their displays in the wild was an experience I will never forget. We walked back down to the canoe, where we noticed some nice fresh crocodile tracks leading into the water.

Back at the village we had a little tour of the place before leaving. As well as seeing a pet cassowary chick, we also got to see the village crocodile farm. It's a small walled enclosure where they put young crocodiles that they catch in the lake. Then they feed them up until they reach a certain size then kill them and sell the skins to the big crocodile farm in Lae, and from there they are exported to Europe and Japan.

As we headed out from Wagu we got hit by a little tropical rain storm... Joe brought out umbrellas for Mel and me, but the crew just had to struggle on for a while, til Joe saw a little house on the side of the lake and we pulled in for a bit of shelter. There was just one young guy living in the house, taking care of it for his family and growing some pot for himself while he's at it. He had a bit of a fire going, and we all warmed up and dried off and waited til the rain stopped.

Back on the water again, Joe said he wanted to take a shortcut back to the main river. There are channels called barets that were dug by the river people thousands of years ago as shortcuts across loops of the river, and one of these barets led from Lake Wasui across to the main river. The water was low, it still being early in the wet season, but Joe was confident that it was still deep enough for us to get through the baret. But Joe didn't know everything about the river...

When we finally got into the little channel, we found it was not quite as deep as he'd thought, and Joe and the boys had to keep jumping out of the canoe to push it through shallow muddy sections. In the deeper parts they could paddle and sometimes even use the motor. Still, I was very impressed with the baret, here was a channel that would be around 2 metres or more deep in the wet season, running for at least a few kilometres through swampy land that had been dug by hand God knows how many years ago, just as a shortcut for travellers. It makes you think a bit about the history and the society in those parts.

It was a relief to finally get back out to the Sepik River where Pascal could put the motor down and really open it up, and we were skimming across the surface of the silky river again. Another hour or two later we were stopping at Buknowi village, which is where Joe and his family are originally from.

Mel and I had got out of the canoe and were standing on the river bank, chatting with the kids, when a lady quietly walked up and sat a big crocodile head on a stump next to us, then pried open the jaws and put in a little stick to hold them in place so we could take photos. It turned out that the lady was one of Joe's sisters, and that she had speared the crocodile from her canoe on the previous night. The next day she showed us the skin of the crocodile, all spread out and salted ready for sale.

On the way home from PNG I read an article about the crocodile farm in Lae, one of the largest in the world. There are thousands of crocodiles there, and the article said that the farm does not need to buy skins from individual hunters or farmers on the Sepik, such as Joe's sister or the villagers at Wagu, but that they always do buy the skins when they are offered because they realise it is an important source of income for the villagers. They also have a good crocodile conservation programme, so on the whole I was quite impressed. The skin that we saw in Buknowi is potentially worth around 300 kina for the villagers, which is a huge amount for them when you consider that we bought a large finely carved stool for only 10 K. Another important aspect of crocodile hunting is that it keeps the croc numbers down around inhabited areas - it seemed in our experienced that every man, woman and child in those villages bathed at least twice a day, and if crocodiles had the confidence to approach their villages... well, it's not hard to imagine. So on the whole, I am very impressed with the crocodile skin industry in PNG, and if any of you ever buys a pair of croc skin shoes, or a croc skin bag, you have my wholehearted approval.

Day 3: Buknowi to Amaki - Singsings and Haus tambarans

After a nice riverside walk in Buknowi, we headed further upriver to Maio and Yessan. Both of these villages have haus tambarans, or spirit houses, which are a bit of a feature of the Sepik region. Actually, the parliament house of PNG is built in the style of a Sepik haus tambaran. The ones in the upper Sepik area are a little less impressive than in other parts, but it was still good to see them and learn a bit about how they use them for meetings. In Yessan, the men gathered and performed a little singsing for us, while the women gathered outside and laid out some bilums (string bags) and necklaces for us to buy. The prices were far lower than we would have paid in town, but nothing really caught our eye and we only bought one bilum. Across the river in Maio they had much nicer bilums and carvings and we bought a few things there to take home. Carvings are also a feature of the Sepik, but again, they are much less impressive in the area we went to than they are along the Middle Sepik. From Maio we went for a bit of a walk with some of the local boys, over the hill and down to a small tributary river where Pascal and Jeremy were waiting with the canoe. We set off up this smaller river for what was probably the highlight of our whole tour.

The river was a bit lower than Joe had expected, and it was had work getting the big canoe up some of the rapids and over the logs and other obstacles, and I really thought he would give up and turn around at any moment. But he didn't. And after hours of toil, we finally reached our destination, the beautiful village of Amaki.

Amaki is a large village, there must be at least a few hundred people living there, but it is quite isolated. In the dry season their river can be too low for transport, and their only contact with the rest of the world is by a 3 day walk into the hills. We got the distinct impression that they have very few foreign visitors, especially women. A crowd gathered immediately as we arrived, and the women and children threw flowers over us as we got out of the canoe, then they crowded around watching. Some of the older women would sit with Mel, stroking her skin and her long hair (theirs is short and fuzzy), and sometimes patting her on the chest and saying "gutpela meri" ("good woman"). We were in a house at the top end of the village, right next to their haus tambaran, which was far bigger and more impressive than any we had seen so far, but we didn't get to see it till the next morning.

Day 4: Amaki to Ambunti - building friendships

Two of the local elders met us in the morning and took us to the haus tambaran, where they explained a bit about the carvings and paintings inside, and the role of the building in their society. They had only just built it last year, with some financial assistance from a German man who is connected with a museum. Or something. Not all of the stories were completely clear to me, though I'm fairly certain that the German man had a big belly. We loved it in Amaki - loved talking and playing with the children, loved sitting with the old people, loved watching them with their pet hornbill. But later in the morning, we had to leave.

Going back downstream was much easier, partly because the flow of the river helped through obastacles, and partly because two local lads had hitched a ride with us and were helping out with maneuvring the canoe. We got back to the main river in good time, then after a stop at Yambon village, where we saw Sago making for the first time, we made it back to Ambunti in time for our evening swim and a nice dinner prepared by Joe's daughter.

we felt like we had gotten to know Joe and the boys a bit by now, and we were really enjoying sharing some jokes and stories with them. Joe especially enjoyed a story I had read in the paper a few months earlier about two boys in Cairns who had beaten a large crocodile to death. He thought it was a great story, and made me tell it a few times, though he was a little mystified as to why the boys might be in some kind of legal trouble over it. After dinner we sat out in the dark chatting with Joe and his wife, and with Pascal's parents, who we stayed with that night.

Day 5: Ambunti to Wewak - farewells

We had a fairly relaxed start to the day, playing soccer with the kids while the boys loaded up the canoe again. Joe's wife gave us a couple of gifts - a beautifully woven basket and a carved stool for Mel's mum. I had bought a carving for my mum when we were at Amaki, and so they thought we really needed something for her mum too. Both families, and some other friends, gathered at the little wharf to say goodbye, and a few of the girls joined us for the canoe ride down to Pagwi.

As we pulled in to Pagwi we saw Timmy waiting for us with his big smile and another comfy air conditioned 4WD for the drive back to Wewak. His driving was, once again, alarming, but as with many things in PNG, we just smiled and said maski and enjoyed the ride.

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Booking through PNG frontier adventures (they have a website that's pretty easy to find through google), the tour cost the two of us around 8000 kina. We felt it was money well spent because we knew we were going through a reputable company who would take care of us. However, if we or any of our friends were to go back to the area again, we would simply contact Joe directly and arrange things through him. Joe was a great guide - from morning to night he was looking out for us, and his knowledge of the local people and wildlife was excellent. Joe also has a good understanding of Westerners, and so he did a great job at bridging the gaps between us and the locals. I would happily recommend him to anyone.

Joe can be contacted via email - joesephykone@yahoo.com.au
I'm not sure how often he checks his email, but I think he tries to every week.

and his written address is
Joseph Kone
C/- Ralf Stuttgen
PO Box 154
Wewak, East Sepik Province
Papua New Guinea

good luck to anyone planning a trip to the Sepik!