Descending into the Unknown in Papua New Guinea

Finally, at two in the morning, they reached the source of the Pandi. A waterfall splashed from the ceiling into a creek that traveled downward, deeper beneath the Nakanai Mountains until it joined underground tributaries from other caves and grew to surface beside the village of Tuke as a full-fledged river. That night they bivvied at the cave’s entrance then awoke to ascend the last length of rope and hike the five hours back to Tuke. Meanwhile, with my stomach fits becoming more occasional, I hiked out to catch the helicopter and fly the kayaks in and the cavers out.

From the crowd of dark and boding faces, Britney Spears still looked sweet. She was smiling seductively from the T-shirt of a Kol man who was twisting the point of his machete into the wet dirt. Circled around us were 60 Tuke villagers. None smiled, few were seductive, most held bush-knives and all wanted more money. I sat slumped and despondent on the nose of my kayak and watched as the helicopter I’d just escorted our kayaks to the village on departed in front of an approaching rain. I wished it were returning. We didn’t have more money.

"Three thousand kina,"said a villager we’d never seen before. His eyes shifted uncertainly between Trip and the other villagers. The man pointed to the kayaks, then to the river, then to Trip and repeated, "3,000 kina or no go." A week earlier we’d haggled them down to 1,000 kina. What made this so frustrating was that the village had recently sold the logging rights to their entire region for just 80,000 kina (about $28,000 U.S.). A few months later, they’d wanted to charge us a fourth of that—20,000 kina—just to stay in their village a week and paddle down the river. It left me wondering if the Kol understood the ramifications of their timber rights sale.

We watched Trip nervously from the center of the circle while the man repeated his request for more money. Trip, with a cleft chin, a frock of fiery hair and an eternal streak of optimism that floats well above reality, looked as if he had choked on his composure.

"One thousand kina is all we got,"Trip said. "Take it or we call the helicopter back and nobody gets any money."

While he rummaged through a drybag for the satellite phone, I panned across the villagers surrounding us. The tension had been rising ever since we’d arrived. Our safety felt compromised, though it probably wasn’t. Bush knives can make you feel that way.

"We don’t have any more money,"Trip halted his search and let his words settle in as the man raised his eyes and panned sheepishly across the villagers. He nodded in acquiescence and accepted the 1,000 kina.

In the waning light of evening, rain began to patter against thatched roofs. The villagers took our paddles and swung air strokes, flashing bright and friendly smiles to us. One man asked me if I knew Garrett from the village of Europe. He had come 10 years earlier to explore their land, he said. Meanwhile, Trip and the big man sat and conversed in broken English and Tok Pisin. He told Trip he just returned to Tuke from his job laboring on an oil palm plantation, and boasted that he had helped convince the village to accept the logging company’s offer. He thought Trip might know something of when the loggers would come. He wanted to know if they were really going to build a road.

Trip Jennings negotiates an exploration fee with the Kol tribe

At 6:30 the next morning, I was standing at the top of a cliff band and watching the Pandi flow emerald and deep from the mouth of the cave below Tuke. From the ceiling of the massive opening, water cascaded in gothic rivulets to the water hundreds of feet below. I scrambled down the 70-foot canyon cliff and jumped into the river to receive the six kayaks that were being lowered into the water. Once the boats were staged in an eddy, we fixed headlights on our helmets and paddled upstream into the darkness.

The whoosh of water resurfacing from uncounted underground tributaries echoed through the cavern. Occasionally one of the six of us would holler in pure excitement. We paddled a few hundred feet upstream until the current became too strong to continue, but by shining our lights upstream, we could see the back of the cave. Looking back downstream through the frame of the yawning entrance, I watched a scene insulated by miles of jungle and millennia of time. Kids were whooping as they scrambled down a cliff face and dove nude into the pooling river. A boy cut a switch to swing at the bats that flitted at the cave’s entrance—dinner. Just in front of them, Scott pumped his fist and took the first downstream strokes of the first kayaking expedition on New Britain.

A mile downstream, we finally found what we had come for, an easy 15-foot waterfall near the village. We took turns running the drop again and again, each plunge shedding the frustration of a month of difficult logistics. It was the first sunny day in a week, and we could see Mt. Uluwun erupting in the background, casually spilling out a column of ash like a polite belch. Even the portage of an unrunnable 90 footer just upstream had been surprisingly easy. Cheers rose when Brain Eustis followed Scott down the waterfall. A crowd of Kol men and women watched us from the riverside vegetation. Two boys bubbled with the excitement of watching exotic people doing something so otherworldly as paddling a brightly colored, non-dugout boat down their river. It was like a carnival for them, an event to be remembered. We kayakers enjoyed the drop and the atmosphere, but were eager to get downstream.

Scott Feindel demonstrates kayak technique to a captive audience moments after the kayaks' delivery by helicopter.

That feeling lasts until I reach the bank at the top of the drop Scott had flushed over. The four Kol men are standing on the lip of the drop and watching Trip down-climb the exposed rock on the waterfall’s left side. One man starts yelling to Andy and I in a torrent of Kol. I gather it’s a retelling of Scott running the waterfall but I can’t understand him. His voice is rising in pitch as he’s yelling over the roar of the waterfall. His voice sounds a lot like the sound a dog makes when you step on its paw. I search frantically for some sign of Scott in the three-tiered 85-foot drop. My blood pressure rises.

"Enough! Shut up!"I yell at the Kol man. He looks at me then pauses, as if to consider what I’ve said then again erupts into a stream of Kol and gesturing. Touched with panic, both Andy and I snap again. He slinks back. My mind’s churning with rescue scenarios. Body retrieval scenarios. To escape from this canyon to a place where a helicopter evacuation is even possible, depending on the weather, would take a full day at best. It has been 20 minutes since we last saw Scott. Then Andy taps me and points downstream. Silhouetted by the falls’ spray is Trip. He looks at us and does an odd thing. He taps his head twice. Everything is fine. Below yet another Class V drop I see Scott rise to his feet, he’s standing on the bank with his boat intact beside him.

Ten minutes later Scott scrambles up the exposed rock. He has a tweaked shoulder, a scratch on his chin and an elbow that looks as if it has swallowed a tennis ball.

"I’d expected the rock to be the same stuff we were dealing with upstream, that grabby sticky stuff you couldn’t push yourself off of. But this limestone,"he says, sliding his booty across the rock, "is slippery."

Before he was swept over the lip, Scott started yelling to the Kol men for them to grab hold of him. They of course didn’t understand, and so Scott made the best of his situation: He turned his boat downstream and paddled over the 20-foot ledge into a boil of water forming against the sieve. That decision probably saved his life. Though his boat reeled vertically and he flipped, he was sucked over the 30-foot slot and not under the chock-block sieve. Upside down, he rode out the rest of the rapid until, halfway down, his boat was torn from his body and he swam the last 30-foot slide. A hundred yards downstream, where the water from the waterfall bubbled up into the pool, he surfaced at the lip of the next Class V rapid, caught a breath of air, and was submerged into another 15 foot slot in a slide. Remarkably, he flushed through, grabbed his kayak, and self-rescued.

"I’m fine. See?" Scott flexes his elbow, which is already considerably black and swollen. "But somewhere on the slide, my chin got scratched."A thin red line glows on the left side of his face.

Missin completed, Trip Jennings takes a celebratory dip in the South Pacific beneath an ash plume from the Rabaul Caldera

He’s outwardly composed, but his eyes are distant and flighty. "How you doing?"Trip asks him. Scott pauses. "Pretty good for a ghost.”

From Scott’s drop, the Pandi continues to roll in and out of gorges. The whitewater jacks up when the jungle recedes and the walls rise. The rapids are choked and directed by bedrock limestone. Some we run, others we are forced to portage. We get more comfortable making quick decisions and fall into a rhythm of rigging technical portages with throw ropes and carabiners. At one rapid, we have to slide into the whitewater just above a powerful hydraulic that breaks Brian’s paddle and beats me down even in my weighted creek boat.

When the river flattens and the gorges widen beyond 30-foot slots, it eases into read-and-run Class III and IV. In breaks in the canopy, flying foxes—bats the size of vultures that have been mistaken for pterodactyls—flap awkwardly across the river. Occasionally we see fishing and hunting outposts built of leaves and fallen logs, sitting beside pools. But we see no more Kol people until the next morning. After a night of rain where the only camping spot we could find necessitated that Scott and I stake half our tent in the river, it’s sunny. It’s a good sign that Papua New Guinea might break it’s tenacious trend and let one thing come easy: for all of us to make it safely to the sea.

Sunlight filters through the canopy as the river pulses an iridescent blue. From here to the South Pacific are 30-some miles of easier Class IV and V rapids and the crocodile-infested oxbows of flat water. But neither will kill us. Above the final drop of the gorge is the last Kol man I will see in Papua New Guinea. He is holding a staff and watching us stoically on the banks of the waterfall. I feel an impulse to thank him for letting us survive his river but he doesn’t return my wave. I wonder if he knows that we are just another drop in an approaching wave of foreigners that will change his land, his river and his way of life.