Islands in the Clouds by Isabella Tree

Sometimes being an armchair traveller has huge advantages. Isabella Tree roams Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya, enduring great discomfort and lots of stress, maggot eating and other nasty conditions but she survives to tell it all to us in great dramatic detail. She has an intelligent perspective on the problems and changes the population of Papua New Guinea is undergoing at the moment, and also presents strange nuances of we would otherwise never imagine eg. the fear of her Papuan friend about crossing over the Irian Jaya, and the welcome he receives there, on the other side.

I have always had a proper left-wing disapproval of missionaries dashing into remote areas claiming to save civilizations by gathering everyone's souls, but reading about how missionaries helped alleviate the fear of headhunters gave me a new perspective. I mean, headhunting is a pretty stressful cultural tradition to have to cope with on a daily basis. Although nowadays youth gangs roam in groups called rascals, raping and pillaging as they go, the product of the violent economic shifts mining companies have generated in the region. Not to be confused with Rascal, co-producer of this site - she isn't part of a PNG gang.

I especially liked Isabella Tree's use of the pidgin language throughout her text - if you read things grammatically they are entirely understandable. For example, " a thumb is nambawan pinga; a toe is pinga bilong fut . . . a generator became a masin bilong makim lektrik". Go on, read that aloud and you'll understand it all. I found myself dreaming in strange languages while reading this book - wonder what that means? Anyway, vastly easier than taking this journey myself. Who knew contemporary travel could still be so adventuresome?

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