Imagine going on an expedition deep into the jungle to find one of the last hidden tribes left on the planet and make "first contact" with them. A holiday to quicken the pulse — and not just among extreme sports desperados? What's on offer is a chance to go back a hundred years to the time when the world's powers were racing to fill in the blanks on the maps. For just a month and £3,000 (NT$191,887) you could don the khakis and discover a tribe that has never before set eyes on an outsider. You might even be shot at by bushmen with bows and arrows.
This is the experience offered by Kelly Woolford, a 43-year-old former tennis coach from Wisconsin who runs an adventure travel outfit based in Bali. He specializes in trekking trips to West Papua, the most eastern province of Indonesia, a rugged land of swamp, jungle and mountain. Access to the interior must be made either by boat, up one of the many rivers snaking north and south from the mountainous spine of the island, or via chartered light aircraft and a short landing strip hacked from the jungle.
There has been tourism in West Papua for many years but few have ventured beyond a few well-trodden destinations. Much of the province has only been surveyed from the air and with good reason — away from the navigable rivers, travel can be slow and arduous, the way forward barred by torrents and treacherously steep, overgrown terrain.
Woolford runs all the usual tours but his "first contact" expeditions are the real draw. He promises encounters with "truly 'stone-age' tribes ... people who have never experienced anything from our modern world". It seems incredible. On a planet populated by six billion, where traditional tribes are being pushed to the brink of extinction, can there really still be undiscovered peoples? Yet it's not such a fantastic claim. Survival International, a UK-based charity working to protect the rights of indigenous peoples, reckons New Guinea "has the largest number of un-contacted peoples' outside Brazil." Most anthropologists are skeptical, citing the improbability of an entire tribe somehow escaping the scrutiny of the thousands of explorers, soldiers, missionaries and prospectors who have crisscrossed the island for the past 150 years. Queasy at Woolford's human safaris, they point to the arrogance inherent in the very concept of "first contact". And what constitutes a genuine "first contact" anyway? Does it have to be their first view of white skin, or would a man from the neighboring Moluccas Islands count? Or a Papuan from another part of the island?
Woolford, however, is adamant there are still "lost" tribes in West Papua and dismisses as professional protectionism claims to the contrary. Anthropologists are simply too afraid, he says, to go into the areas he visits.
It did not take long for his expeditions to attract a clientele — or controversy. When Outside Magazine, a respected US adventure journal, sent one of its reporters on a first contact expedition in 2004, the ensuing article effectively claimed the whole trip had been a hoax and that Woolford had somehow staged a show of tribal aggression deep in the forest. Anthropologists shown photographs of the "ambush" agreed, pointing to the fact that the tribesmen were wearing ceremonial dress: what amounted to their Sunday best. In response, Woolford invited the BBC on the first expedition scheduled of this year.
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