T A B L E_T A L K Spending one night in Bangkok? Get tips on visiting Thailand in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk ___________________ Check out barnesannoble.com's fabulous selection of travel book bargains! ___________________ R E C E N T L Y This week in travel Wanderlust's selective guide to travel-related news from across the globe (01/15/99) Beijing's Backingham Palace By Mary Elizabeth Williams From back rubs to bowling to B-movies, this Chinese spa has it all (01/14/99) New York serenade By Pico Iyer An ex-Gothamite returns for five days -- and finds that attitude has its charms (01/13/99) Cold front By Mona R. Washington An ugly encounter on a Viennese metro colors a winter's day (01/12/99) Behind the red curtain By Jeffrey Tayler A night at the official Communist Party hotel in China leads to everything but a good night's sleep (01/10/99) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		-----------------------------[ P A R T  O N E ] An adventurer journeys farther than expected------------- -------------into a land of penis gourds and pig sacrifices. BY CRAIG NELSON | Most third world people see American movies and TV shows and are completely inspired. They just can't wait to get California ranch homes and Aprica baby-strollers and Star-Tac cell phones and unlimited Internet access. There are a few left in the world, however, who live as they've always lived, maintaining their traditions against all odds, fighting for the life they prefer against whatever schemes their government or the Red Cross or the United Nations may hatch to drag them into modern times. These are people who want nothing to do with the 20th century -- in fact, most of them want nothing to do with the 19th, 15th, 11th or fifth centuries, either. You can think they are traditionalists, maintaining their ancient culture in the face of global homogenization, or you can think they are anachronisms, refusing to accept modern benefits, from housing to nutrition to medicine. Whatever your opinion, these compelling and remarkable beings from another time are now quickly vanishing from the earth. Whenever I get the chance, I like to go look at them. On the other side of Indonesia from Sumatra, Java and Bali is a tribe of people whose habit is to ignore any and all visitors -- as well as everything else from the 20th century. These are the Dani, a Neolithic bunch who live in the isolated Grand Baliem Valley, completely sheltered from the rest of the known world by the towering Snow Mountains of central New Guinea. The Dani never saw another human being but each other for 9,000 years until 1938, when a plane crash-landed in their valley, and the pilot excitedly radioed back that he'd discovered a new "primitive" people -- who happened to know all about crop rotation and terraced farming and erosion control. The Dani never used metal until steel was brought there in 1959, and even today, they still don't seem to think it's such a great advance over a good stone adz. I had to see them. I arrived at the capital city of Jayapura at dusk, and drove the long road from the airport to town. On the right was beautiful Lake Sentani, with its velvet lumps of islands and fishing villages built on stilts, while on the left were the pens and troughs of the local ranching industry, which specializes in the skin (for shoes, bags and belts) and the meat (for curing Chinese asthma) of crocodiles. New Guinea is so exactly on the other side of the world from my home that they share time. I'd look at a watch, switch the a.m. and the p.m., and know exactly the hour back in Manhattan. For some reason, this made me happy. It turned out that Jayapura's best hotel, the Matoa, was sold out, so my reservation was ignored, and I was shuffled off to the second-best, a hellhole so egregious I've completely forgotten its name. The shower in my room was a bucket of icy, fetid water, the street noise from the room's windows was deafening, there was so much light coming through the flimsy curtain I might as well have turned on the overhead, and the lumpy, misshapen bed had bugs I'd never seen before crawling all over it. You can buy a ticket to fly from coastal, swampy Jayapura (where I was) to the lush, montane Baliem Valley (where I wanted to be), but getting on the plane itself is a first-come, first-served kind of deal, and they are notorious overbookers. The only solution is to get there when the airport first opens at 5 to be in the front of the line for the plane, and then wait four hours for takeoff. Even with this trauma hanging over my head that night in Jayapura, I was much too much of a wimp to be able to sleep thinking about those bugs, so I wandered outside the hotel to see what was what. The neighborhood was a strip mall of derelict, patched-over concrete, with a shop selling stuffed bullfrogs playing miniature ukuleles. That teeming street noise turned out to be coming from a cloud of aggressive whores and their idle, drunk, taxi-driving boyfriend-pimps, all of whom immediately sized me up for a mark. At that time of night, there was nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, so I decided to hang with these Malay skanks. After politely explaining that I was too tired for a boisterous round of New Guinea sexcapades (and wasn't interested in experiencing the joys of tertiary syphilis), I introduced them to a fine American singalong. They were obnoxious and I was pissed off, so I taught them how to sing, in English, the quaint lyrics to that Rolling Stones classic "Bitch." They taught me an equally nice song in Bahasa, and we had a fine old time drinking and carrying on in that sweltering, turbid Hades. It was now 4 a.m., and time to get packed and ready to drive back to the airport, so I went to the hotel's "restaurant," where a waiter brought me "breakfast," which turned out to be some kind of meat soaking in some kind of grease with a roll so hard you couldn't bite it, served with "coffee" unlike anything I've ever put in my mouth before or since. I was the only person in the place (no surprise), hadn't slept all night and felt like hell. The waiter was lonely, so he came over to sit at my table. Like everyone else in Indonesia, he wanted to know where I'd been in his country, so I told him all about Borneo. He also wanted me to explain in detail why Jayapura was the best place of them all, but this was a riddle I couldn't answer. Then, suddenly, his eyes lit up and he asked, "Do you love Jesus very, very much?" New Guinea has been overrun with crazed missionaries since the 1950s, busily converting as many heathens as they could get their hands on. I knew what I was supposed to say, but just couldn't do it. Instead, I muttered, "I like him OK." "Oh! Too bad," the reactionary fundamentalist coffee-shop waiter admonished. "You won't go to the Happy Place when Everything ends." "No. I'll be left behind with the Buddhists, the Muslims, the Jews and the orangutans," I said, as though we'd be having all the fun. "Oh, yes," he replied, overcome with regret. "The poor orangutans." I drove back past the lake and croc ranches, still in darkness, and arrived to be fourth in line for the plane. The airport floor was more comfortable than the hotel had been, and sitting there, keeping my place, I kept drifting in and out of consciousness as the waiting room mobbed up with eager travelers. Finally, as a storm grew over the Snow Mountains, a mere dozen of us were let on a tiny plane, and we took off through black clouds. The view was obscured, but every so often, there'd be a break, and I could look down to see that the coastal swamps had given way to ragged mountains, and here and there, a tiny, meandering valley with a river and a few huts in it. We broke through in landing to approach a wide, shining-green bowl -- the Baliem Valley. N E X T+P A G E | Bare breasts and penis gourds - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTOS BY CRAIG NELSON