1/7. REPORTING BACK, following my off-grid expedition to Papua:

Since my return in December, quite a few friends have kindly asked - they often do! - how on earth I've again avoided succumbing to something terrible. Afterall, I always go alone and without GPS and other conventional backup from the Outside World.
A large part of the answer is that I do have backup - it's just that my backup is indigenous. Just one of the hundreds of kindly souls who've kept me alive is this man, Sawi, who's here indicating a possible (fairly impossible, as it turned out!) route over PNG's Central Range.
But next door, in (Indonesian) Papua, things were trickier - if only because on my first visit, in 1984-5, I was entering a place of nearly perpetual warfare. The indigenous people I was so dependant on were wary of others - and might soon be embroiled in the next fight, as I was about to find out the hard way. 2/7. At the tender age of 24 I thought I was immortal - we all do! - but even so, I was well aware of how badly things could end for me if I didn't have at least one sure ally on my expedition, which aimed to document threatened lowland forests and their communities to the east of Sumo, an isolated mission outpost. So, before I headed off through what was then unmapped terrain, I sought out the only other outsider down there - an evangelical preacher by the name of Taringen, whom American missionaries had brought in from his Dani community, up in the highlands. In this picture he's standing with a crowd of potential converts - the Momwina. Though by and large the only people who ever came to his 'church' hut were fascinated children and bemused ladies. The Momwina men stayed well away.
Frankly, Taringen took some persuading to come with me - he wasn't so sure that heading off with some of his disgruntled potential converts into somewhere that was uncharted, and not yet even visited by a single outsider, was such a healthy option. His wife was even less convinced. Yet he decided to come - whether just because he felt sorry for me, or out of a sense of Christian duty. It was an extraordinary act of generosity and bravery, it seems to me now, looking back.