Yumi Stori Nau

Jean Cole

It was pouring, pouring as it only can in the tropics with the rain clattering on the banana leaves and turning the paths into sludge. We'd travelled in a friend's van to a village at the foot of the mountains planning to climb up to another village where one of the group had relatives. By this time it was almost dark, too dark to find the beginning of the track up the mountain. We did, however, find the local kiap (district officer) who showed us a narrow opening in the bush, and a near vertical path shining with mud in the light of his torch. The destination was at least another 1000m up. The trees and shrubs which looked so helpful as handholds were spiky with thorns and stinging plants, crawling with ants and, for all we knew, festooned with snakes. This was Papua New Guinea. We were tired and cold with the drenching rain and the spirit of adventure abandoned me. 'I'm not going', I said. Barney looked at me with relief in his eyes and said he'd have to stay and look after his wife. The others set off up the mountain and we returned to the kiap's house where the dear man invited us to spend the night.

The couple lived with their two little boys in a substantial wooden house on stilts. It had two rooms and a small kitchen with a tap. There was a large fridge in the main room which had stopped working when the electricity supply had broken down a year before. Mary was no housekeeper but she was warm and welcoming, her generosity commensurate with her ample size. While John lit a fire she lit a kerosene burner and cooked a meal that put our miserable offerings of bananas, peanuts, instant coffee and a packet of biscuits to shame. We ate sweet potatoes wrapped in pandanus leaves and a vegetable I'd never seen before with palmate leaves and red veins. This she held in a tight bunch and sliced fast and finely with a razor sharp bushknife into a pan where she fried the vegetable in oil. The meal was full of flavour and rich in texture and colour - all cooked on a camping stove in two pans.

After the meal, warm, dry and fed, we sat on a bamboo mat in front of the fire with a bottle of beer. Mary began combing the other side of her hair - it takes so long to comb hair like hers that she had stopped after one side and stuck the comb in ready to continue when she had time. Then she said 'Yumi stori nau', 'Let's tell each other stories now'. She was good. She told of fights in the market, journeys over the mountains and witches in the hills. Our Tok Pisin was fluent but we couldn't match her racy style and vivid imagery. She must have been disappointed by our colourless stories. When we'd exhausted the beer and our stock of stories, the couple insisted we sleep on their mattress claiming they often just slept on the floor. We argued for the sake of form but were too tired to be convincing. Nobody needs blankets at 1000m in PNG and warm and dry, we slept well and woke to a sunny morning and a breakfast of tea and the remains of the previous night's supper. We talked and played with the two little boys until we guessed the others might have come down the mountain path to the van.

There was a little stream to paddle in, birds and butterflies to look at and none of the mosquitoes that infest the coast. We were enjoying our wait when the others arrived exhausted, dehydrated and limping. The climb up to the village had been so long and steep that they'd all got cramp. They'd been stung by nettles and scratched by thorns and had staggered into the village at about two o'clock in the morning to find everyone asleep. They had woken someone who had grumpily given them an empty hut but nothing to eat. They spent a cold and miserable night until the village woke at five in the morning. Their breakfast had consisted of cold, grey, cooked plantains which are almost the most boring thing you can eat, no one, not even their relatives, had been pleased to see them and then they had the long slippery scramble down the mountainside. I'd been feeling feeble, cowardly and unadventurous for not going with them the night before but, having heard their story, now rejoiced in my cowardice and thanked whatever deities that inhabited these hills for a night to remember.