Adventures off the map

The people of New Guinea are used to seeing unusual creatures. The Indonesian island is after all home to the planet’s smallest parrot and largest rat and they live happily side by side with fang-toothed frogs, singing dogs and kangaroos which live in trees. However, for those native tribes of West Papua which happened to come across Skyreholme’s Will Millard, as he embarked on an adventure deep into a little known jungle with only limited equipment and a vague idea of the route he was going to take, it was enough to make them stop and stare.

“Since the 1960s, the country suffered from a long drawn-out conflict and as a result they are nervous of foreigners,” says the 29 -year-old.

“Where we were was so far off the beaten track I’m not sure they knew quite what to make of us. Let’s just say it’s not every day they see two white guys with oars poking out of backpacks the size of bath tubs.”

The Leeds University graduate wasn’t entirely flying by the seat of his pants. Will had his first adventures in West Papua back in 2007, but his last expedition was his most daring yet. Along with an old school friend, Callum Fester, and a grant from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, the aim was to rediscover the path of an ancient trading route, walk it and then two months later return home.

It might have sounded simple on paper, but when you add in a jungle, poisonous snakes and river which not even the locals dared to canoe down, it quite quickly turned into a real mission impossible.

“Three years ago I spent a lot of time studying and walking a route called the Great Road, which runs across West Papua from east to west,” says Will, who is a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

“However, I knew there was another trading route, which had certainly at one point run north to south, so that’s what me and Callum set off to find.”

Walking in temperatures topping 45C, a few days in, the pair found themselves in front of a river, which they had hoped to paddle gently down.

“It wasn’t quite what we expected,” says Will, a master of understatement. “We tried to inflate our rafts in a side stream, but even there they began bucking hard in the flow and we knew we were going to really struggle to stay in control. When you go to somewhere like West Papua you always know in the back of your mind that things could go very wrong. However, that was the first time that I suddenly felt very exposed and vulnerable.

“Because a lot of the journey was going to be on foot, there was only so much equipment we could carry. We didn’t have helmets, we didn’t have life jackets and when a young boy who had been watching us came up, gripped my hand and said, ‘My brother don’t try to go down the river, it’s too fast here. You will both die’, it did make us wonder whether we should turn back there and then.”

They didn’t, and as they continued on their journey the fast flowing river ultimately became the only way they could navigate through the increasingly thick jungle.

“We’d gained a bit of confidence and while it was hard going on the water, we thought we’d be okay,” says Will. “However, one day all of a sudden we came round the corner and saw a giant wall of water and a whirlpool big enough to turn a ferry over. We had no option but to bail out.

“Looking back I know we were incredibly lucky to have surfaced unscathed. As we sat on the bank, we knew we had no option. We had to turn back. It was probably the hardest and easiest decision we ever made.”

Abandoning plans to paddle downstream, Will, who has become something of an expert on the area – and in raising awareness of New Guinea, which is home to one third of the world’s languages and 10 per cent of all animal and plant species – continued on foot. However, after walking for 10 days, coming face to face with a venomous snake and surviving on daily ration packs the equivalent of just 800 calories they again met a dead end.

Worse was to come. Having noticed their limited drink supplies had larvae wriggling at the bottom, Will fell down a gully while trying reach a stream and much-needed fresh water.

“It was a bit of a nightmare, but I guess it comes with the territory,” he says.

When they finally emerged into civilisation, Callum decided his jungle life was over and returned to Britain with the hope of securing a place on a teacher training course. Will, however, stayed on and while he never did find the ancient trading route he set out to map, he did manage to record new information about another area of the province.

“I felt quite guilty because the second half of the trip went really smoothly. Poor old Callum had really endured four weeks of hell and suddenly I was there having the easiest time.

“On the coast I came across Indonesian traders selling rice and, perhaps more confusingly, kitchen tiles and it was a 
real insight to how these communities exist.”

While Will may have come back to Yorkshire without having found the ancient trading route, he did return home with an impressive photographic collection and enough memories to last a lifetime.

“There was one evening quite early on when we stayed the night in a tented community,” he says. “As the sun went down we were sat outside in the company of men who were a cross section of ages, but who were all united by poverty.

“Earning less than £10 a day in a forest hundreds of miles from their homes and families they had all signed up for a three-month contract building bridges in remote.

“We were also thousands of miles from home, but suddenly we found ourselves in the middle of a full and frank breakdown of the Premiership season.

“The conclusion seemed to be that Gareth Bale good, Wayne Rooney, ugly but still good.

“It was 8,000BC when New Guinea separated from Australia and when you’re there you do wonder whether the landscape has changed much. It probably hasn’t, but even somewhere so far culturally and geographically from here can still feel like home.

“I’ve been back a few weeks now and I was up on Simon’s Seat the other day and I know people will think it odd, but it has a lot in common with the highlands of West Papua and just for a split second, I thought I honestly thought I saw a snake up there.

“People keep asking whether I will ever go back, I honestly don’t know, but there are so many other places in the world to explore, that I think maybe, just maybe New Guinea has seen the last of me.”