Q: Initially you didn’t receive a very warm welcome from the Mek. Were you worried that the whole expedition might fail before it had really begun, and were you prepared for such a greeting?

Olly: When a man, naked save a curved vegetable and a beard charges at you wielding a stone axe and shouting something you don’t understand, you’ve got to ask yourself whether you’ve booked the wrong camping holiday.

Fortunately we had experienced something not dissimilar in Kombai-land, except this time I was rather pleased that we didn’t have a master archer pinning us down. In this part of West Papua, I was pretty confident that the greeting, whilst hostile in appearance, was most probably just a protocol of introduction, to remind us that we were on their turf.

If I knew that the sweet old lady screaming at me was saying: “if you come in here, I will cut your stomach open and eat your insides, then I will throw the rest of your body down the hill” I may have been a touch more frightened.

Sometimes it’s just a whole lot safer to just smile in the reassuring knowledge that you just haven’t got a clue what’s going on…

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