Why outhouses should be deep . . .

Now, where were we? Ah, yes, I was venturing out to find the outhouse. Nearly wandered into a pig house at first, but was warned in time by vague snorting noises from within. Found the appropriate building, stepped inside, and before I knew what was happening I had broken through the floor and found myself in the curious position of having one entire leg beneath the floor. But before you start gagging or close your browser in disgust, let me assure you that (to the exceedingly great relief of my body, mind and heart) this was a new, deep outhouse. So new and deep, in fact, that although I was in up to my hip, not even the tip of my toe came into contact with any objectionable matter. I managed to pull myself up with a dry leg, and only a small knee scrape to show for it.

We worked hard collecting data that night, because we knew we had a lot of hiking to do the next day. People told us that it would take us a day and a half to walk to the next village, and there were no villages in between! There was, however, a "bush shelter" about a third of the way there, where people sometimes spend the night if they are out working in a garden far from the village. So we hiked as far as the bush shelter the next day, and spent the night there. You can see pictures in the slide show, along with pictures of the vine bridge we got to cross on the way! Very fun.

We got up early in our bush shelter, before 5 am, and started hiking while it was still dark. Again, we had to use our headlamps, but there is something much friendlier about morning darkness. It is a hopeful darkness.

That was another long, tough day of hiking, but we had an exotic snack on the way. The guys who were hiking with us saw a kapul, which is kind of like an opossum, in the trees high above us. After a very exciting hunt involving much running, climbing of trees, and shouting in the Setaman language, they shot it with their slingshots and a couple of them ran ahead of us to cook it. A few hours later, when we caught up with them, they dug it out of the ground where it had been cooking on hot stones and we all sampled this Papua New Guinean delicacy . . . I even got to try the liver. Here is one of the hunters, telling the story in his own words: