Q: The Mek are locally well-known for witchcraft. After hearing the story of the blood sucking ‘flying woman’, and following your decision to turn down the offer of buying the pig in the first village, did you fear for your safety?

Olly: Mark and I both felt that the first village were trying it on – they had no real concept of cash and plucked out the largest number they could think of – there must be something in the number 8, because the same thing happened to our soundman, aka The Silver Fox, when he was in the area a few years before – when the locals demanded 800 boxes of machetes. We tried to negotiate with them but sadly to no avail – I think in the longer run, if we had paid the absurd amount of money they were asking for, we would have been in a lot more trouble – because we would have established a ridiculous cash price for pigs in a part of the world that had little reliance and notion of the cash.

As outsiders, we had to take responsibility to minimise the impact of our visit. It was a risky move not to pay their demands as the village could have refused us entry through their land, but fortunately they didn’t. They were understandably pissed off not to get their way and from our side it was upsetting not to be able to share in a feast and show them some greater respect – but hopefully in the long run, we did the best thing.

We were never threatened by the village and I was never concerned for my safety. Sadly our guides and porters weren’t so sure, as they were angling for a sacrifice to protect our path against witchcraft… I’ve heard a lot of a stories trumped up by local guides to try and extort some extra cash out of stupid foreigners, but none quite as surreal as this… but the really surreal thing was that in their minds, there was no question – where we were heading there were women who flew around drinking people’s blood.

Being unable to share in their beliefs of witchcraft did not prevent me from sharing in a healthy fear of the unknown. There was clearly something that was freaking them out…and whatever that was, we were going to encounter at some point…

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