Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (10 page)

He showed me one massive crayfish, and I mean it was enormous, weighing over two kilos. He told me it was worth $100. ‘Most of the fishermen use tinnies,’ he told me. ‘They make their catch and then we either fly out and bring it in, or they bring it to us. From there, it’s Cairns mostly.’

‘What about the frozen tails?’ I pointed out a tray of them, grey in colour and packed solid.

‘Like I said, we get them from Daru. They have to be frozen - you can’t import live crayfish into Australia because of the quarantine rules. Fishing is the main industry up here in the strait. A good year will bring about twenty million dollars into the Australian economy.’

He spoke on the phone to the place where the plane was being fixed, somewhere on Horn Island. The longer the call went on, the more nervous I became. We had to catch that flight from Daru at 10 a.m. tomorrow, and missing it was not an option. Sam was concerned, we all were; there was something about how this was panning out that filled none of us with confidence. Greg came off the phone scratching his head. ‘He’s working on it,’ he said, ‘but it’s not just the magneto. He reckons there’s a problem with the wiring harness.’

‘Can we go over there and see him?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘He said if anyone shows up with a camera he’ll ground the plane and walk away.’ He shrugged. ‘Sorry, fellas, he’s just that way.’

‘We’ll leave him to it then,’ I suggested.

 

 

Claudio was looking at a newspaper cutting Greg had pasted on his wall. ‘The Merauke Five’: Australians from Horn Island who were stranded in Indonesian-occupied Papua.

Greg explained that a few months previously, five middle-aged friends had flown their light aircraft to Merauke to check out tourism possibilities. They hadn’t been able to get a visa before they left, but had been told that they could get one when they landed. It was only a day trip and they had planned to be home that same evening.

‘Just a day trip, and months later they’re still there,’ Greg went on. ‘Western Papua is very sensitive; where they landed was an airport all right but it’s also a military base. You see, the Indonesians are trying to dilute the population, trying to filter out the indigenous Papuans and replace them with Javanese.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s a bloody awful situation and those people got caught up in it just by not having the right paperwork. And they’re not young either - the pilot is in his sixties, his wife in her late fifties. They were held in some immigration centre and then in prison. They were told by one court that they could leave, then that decision was overturned by another court. They lost their son too; he’d been ill and since they’ve been gone, he’s died. The authorities wouldn’t let them out to come home and bury him.’

It all sounded very depressing indeed. ‘You know what?’ I said, glancing at Sam. ‘Western Papua sounds boring anyway, there’s no jungle left, all there is are open-cast mines and we’ve seen plenty of those already.’

‘The By Any Means Four,’ Claudio muttered. ‘We don’t want to end up as the By Any Means Four, do we?’

I thought back to the conversation we’d had last night. ‘Claudio’s been there before, haven’t you, Clouds?’ I said. ‘Twenty years ago.’

He nodded. ‘For six months. That wasn’t the plan so much at the time, but the landing strip the rebels cleared was in the jungle and the day before we got there it rained. The plane got stuck and couldn’t take off again.’

‘What happened?’ Greg asked him.

‘Well, the pilot was worried that the plane would be reported missing and there would be helicopters out looking for it. So he went back across the border right away.’

‘On foot?’ I said.

‘Yes, on foot.’

‘And you stayed for six months?’

‘Yes. You see, first I had to learn the language and then of course I had to make my film. I organised a series of couriers to smuggle my tapes across the border to Papua and I didn’t want to leave until I knew they were all safely back in Europe. So in the end I was there for six months.’

 

 

We decided to take the ferry across to Horn Island and see what was going on with the plane. We were concerned. This was the Torres Strait and the place has its own timescale. No one is in a hurry and nothing is ever done in a rush, which is all well and good but we had a deadline to make tomorrow. The pilot who was going to take us to Daru, Lockie, met us at the wharf with Greg’s van. We found out that he was new to the area, so new he only had five hours’ flying time, and had been to Daru just once. Plenty of experience there then, I thought, but it wouldn’t matter because we didn’t have a plane at the moment anyway.

Seriously, though, we were really concerned about making the ten o’clock connection in the morning. To add to our problems, the wind had lifted and it was spitting with rain. Lockie reckoned the engineer was talking about it not being ready before at least 2 p.m. now, maybe even 3, and it was already eleven o’clock. I didn’t have much faith that we’d be flying at all, especially as en route to the airport the van broke down on three separate occasions. It occurred to me that on an island as small as this, the mechanics who fixed the cars would probably be fixing the planes too.

The other issue was the fact that Greg’s plane was a Cessna 210, which could only take two of us at a time. It was an hour’s flight to Daru then another hour and a half to load the frozen crayfish tails and another still to fly back again.

‘There’s not enough time,’ Sam stated, as we tried to bump-start the van for the third time. Or at least I did. Sam sat in the back, the fat fucker, while I was pushing the bloody thing. ‘Well I can’t get out,’ he protested, ‘the camera is in the way.’

He was right about the plane, though. If all went well there might be enough time to get two of us over to Daru before it got dark tonight, but the other two would have to wait until tomorrow. There was every chance that the plane wouldn’t be fixed at all today and to cover ourselves we’d checked out the possibility of flying back to Cairns. But that was way too expensive and miles out of our way, so Sam asked Greg to phone around some of the charter companies and see what our options were. He kindly did that and a little while later he came up with a company who could get us all on the same plane in the morning. I was still keen to stick to the original plan if we could, however, so that at least Claudio and I could fly with Lockie on the crayfish run.

‘So it’s decided then,’ Sam said, taking me to one side. ‘We all go in the morning, you and Claudio on the crayfish plane and Robin and me on the charter with the gear. Failing that, we all get on the charter.’

 

 

 

We had some time to kill this afternoon now and decided to try and find out something about the history of Horn Island. But Greg didn’t know much and neither, it seemed, did anyone else. In fact, until Vanessa arrived nobody knew very much at all. I’m talking about Vanessa Seekee, a really entertaining girl we hooked up with for a couple of hours. Since coming to the island she had become its unofficial historian. She told us that during the Second World War, the Japanese dropped five hundred pounds of bombs here, which is almost as many as they dumped on Darwin, the most bombed site on the Australian mainland.

Vanessa was great company, the perfect tour guide. She took us to an old artillery battery and a slit trench, which is a narrow hole in the ground rather like a foxhole. I had no idea that so much of the war had been fought here. I knew there were Australian pilots in the Battle of Britain and Australian soldiers at El Alamein, of course, and plenty of other places. But here on the islands off the tip of Cape York, I never would have guessed it.

Vanessa took us out to where the old airfield had been. It was jungle now, all overgrown with trees and dry grass, but in among the trees was the wreckage of a P-47 Thunderbolt. This was a beast of a plane that had been used in air combat, but was most effective when the Americans used it to attack the enemy on the ground. It was the largest, heaviest and most expensive single-engined plane in history, at least among those powered by conventional pistons anyway. During the war there had been no source of refrigeration up here and Vanessa told us that when they weren’t flying missions, the aircrews would strip the ammunition banks from the wings and fill the space with beer. The pilot would take the plane up for half an hour to chill the beer off for drinking.

‘People don’t realise, Charley,’ she said, ‘that during the war Horn Island was Australia’s most geographically advanced allied airbase. From here pilots could attack targets in the north and get back again the same day. That saved a hell of a lot of aircraft because it meant that no one had to stay over at Port Moresby. Any plane on the apron at night was a target for the Japanese bombers.’

She told me the airstrip had been built in 1940. The trees that surrounded us now had been cleared and two all-purpose gravel runways laid down. ‘At the beginning of 1942 there were twenty men working here, and by the end of that year, five thousand.’

‘But why is this plane here?’ I pointed out the wreckage.

Vanessa laughed. ‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘There was this one pilot who was a bit of a joker: Wing Commander Lambeth. He took off in this P-47 and decided to scare the living daylights out of the men working on planes close to the runway. Instead of climbing hard as he normally would, he stayed really low and buzzed right over the top of them. The problem was he clipped the tail fin of the first Kitty Hawk, the propeller of the next, then ploughed into a third. Finally he crashed here.’ She nodded to the wreckage. ‘He destroyed four planes in less than five minutes, which is more than the Japs ever managed in an entire raid. He’s fine, climbs out, trips over a tree root and breaks his left thumb.’

I was gobsmacked. ‘What happened to him?’

‘I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be any record and I can’t find out whether he was court-martialled, promoted or shot.’

THE NEXT MORNING we got up early and headed straight for the airport, where we discovered that whether we liked it or not we would have to fly with the charter company. Yesterday Lockie had told us he would monitor the situation, put our names down for the charter plane if the crayfish plane wasn’t ready in time. Unfortunately that’s what happened. It was a shame, but regardless of who was taking us, today we were flying to Papua New Guinea.

My God, just saying the words made me hop about like an excited schoolboy. The nerves had gone, replaced with a real adrenaline buzz. Don’t you just love a bit of adventure? We seemed to have been talking about this section of the trip for ever - long before we finished the last one, in fact. Half the people we spoke to told us it was the most dangerous place in the world. The other half said we’d have the time of our lives.

The plane was a twin-engined Shrick Commander and I sat up front, co-piloting with Will from the charter company, who looked almost as young as Lockie. He had been to Daru at least twice before, so things were looking up. Actually I didn’t care how many flight hours he had; nothing could dampen my enthusiasm this morning.

‘The weather looks beautiful over there, Will.’ I pointed towards a huge expanse of blue, cloudless sky.

‘Yeah, it does . . . but we’re going over there.’ He pointed in the other direction, to the massed, dark grey clouds of a rain shower.

An hour later we landed, just about unscathed, on a strip of tarmac bordered by lush green grass, with smoky-looking mountains rising up on either side. The island of Daru is just a hair’s breadth from the PNG mainland. The immigration and customs people were really cool - a guy took my passport and told me he’d do the necessary while Claudio and I carried on filming. Outside on the apron, we watched as the crayfish plane landed and Lockie swung open the door.

‘Hey, Lockie!’ I called. ‘You made it.’

‘She flew like a bird! No worries, Charley, no worries.’

The truck carrying the packs of frozen crayfish tails had already arrived. Lockie flattened the back seats of his Cessna and loaded the plane to the gunwales. A little while later he was airborne again, winging his way back to Horn Island having landed in Daru for the second time in his career.

 

 

This was a sweat-soaked tropical country and I loved it already. Australia had been fascinating but this was something completely new and exciting. I couldn’t wait to start exploring. We took a short flight to mainland Papua and Port Moresby before boarding another plane and flying across the heel of the island. We landed at Lae, the largest city in Morobe Province and the second largest in the country. Our Papuan translator, Josh, was waiting for us as we got off the plane, and we headed straight for the centre of town on roads that were part tarmac and part dirt. This was a bustling, dynamic place with a great vibe to it. It was also very humid, and after a burst of heavy rain the potholes were brimming with muddy water.