I’ve dreamt of going to the Silk Road for longer than I can remember. Something about that phrase is more evocative than any other, for me at least, of far flung places, exotic spices, dusky maidens…..adventure.

So when we rocked up in Turkmenistan, we were ready to get our Silk Road ON.

First stop Tolkuchka Bazaar, on the outskirts of Ashgabat, and for decades perhaps the most famous of all the Silk Road bazaars for its sheer volume of STUFF. Want a live camel or two? A bushel of pomegranates? Stripy skullcap for the gentleman, silken headscarf for the lady? Prayer mats? Or more prosaically, some drain cleaner? A new kitchen sink? It’s all right here, you’ve just got to haggle (hard) for it. Strangely, however, we came away without buying anything other than several pounds of pomegranates (small translation issue), some nougat and a small mountain of dried fruit and nuts (so good here). Not for fear of haggling, mind (although we did both nearly fall over when the nice kindly old man quoted us $300 for the nice fluffy hats we’d been looking at. Real mink, apparently, rather than the more traditional sheepskin. Or fun fur). More a completely overwhelming surplus of choice. Tolkuchka has been moved in recent years to a smart, glossy new location that is shaped like a carpet (kid you not) and absolutely MASSIVE. Too big. We had an awesome time wandering round and looking at the transparent evidence of a genealogical melting pot in the faces of the people all around us but nearly gave up on our quest for the livestock market. We found it eventually though and were rewarded not only by the sight of camels being manhandled into pickup trucks (apparently quite easy – tie up their front leg, hoick it up onto the flatbed, camel will follow) but also the famous Silk Road fat bottomed sheep. And yes, they do indeed.

We did also see some magnificent carpets at the Bazaar, which, in retrospect, were probably some of the finest we have seen. However, Turkmenistan has some fairly byzantine carpet export legislation, so we didn’t look too closely, saving that treat instead for the shops which sell the goods complete with licence. Here, however, the selection was underwhelming, until, in the half hour before we were finally due to leave Ashgabat for good, I looked into the hotel shop – only to find a veritable Aladdin’s cave of beautiful, fairly priced carpets, but alas without the time to be able to indulge. We’ve been left, both of us, with a relentless thirst for a truly beautiful carpet which has followed us through the Silk Road, thus far unslaked.

What’s a girl to do in the face of such adversity? Well, ordinarily, drown the sorrow, but what with the multiple attractively dressed and strangely unaccompanied young ladies in the bar, I fell to the last resort.

Mutton kebab. First of many. Uuuuuummmm, greasy.

Welcome to the Silk Road.

On our first night in Pyongyang we were hustled on to a bus and driven to the May Day stadium for the Arirang Mass Games – the very-much-anticipated highlight of our trip to Korea was going to be pretty much the first thing we saw. As ever, we were worried that an event we organised our entire eight months off around might not live up to our extremely high expectations.

We needn’t have worried – it was extraordinary. I can’t say that you should go and see it yourself – unfortunately this year was the last year of the Arirang, to be replaced next year by something else, no doubt also involving 100,000 spookily-drilled performers. We just opened our eyes wide, sat back, forgot about all the overtones and undertones, and enjoyed the show.

Like many visitors to North Korea, we were keen to take home some examples of totalitarian kitsch. So far, however, we had been largely thwarted. Yes, we had picked up a book of Kim Jong-Il’s views On the Art of Opera (his much longer book On the Art of Cinema was sold out in English, and I didn’t have the heart to read it in French). Yes, we had picked up a biography or two of the great man himself, but so far there had been nothing suitably and inadvertently hilarious to bring home. Everything had been pretty normal.

Or so we thought. Enter a beautiful little green phrase book, titled “Let Us Learn Korean”.

It starts off pretty slowly:

• “Hallo Comrade” = “Tongmu” (or “Tongji” if the comrade is a lady – very equal opportunity these Koreans)
• “Good morning” = “Annyong-hasimnikka”
• “Thank you” = “Kamsa-hamnida”

So far, so useful. In Chapter 9, however, things take a decidedly left turn. At the risk of verbosity, I am going to repeat many of the English phrases in the chapter verbatim. There will be a prize for any of our dear readers who manage to insert any of these phrases into natural conversation:

Chapter 9: Sightseeing of City

• “What are you going to see today? ” = “Onul odirul chamgwan haryo-go-hamnikka”
• “I want to visit the bronze statue of Comrade Kim Il Sung first to express my condolences”
• “Comrade Kim Il Sung was the most distinguished leader of our times”
• “Comrade Kim Il Sung devoted his whole life to the freedom and welfare of the people”
• “Death of Comrade Kim Il Sung is a great loss to the Korean revolution and the world revolution”
• “With the death of Comrade Kim Il Sung mankind lost the legendary hero, great leader”
• “The services rendered by Comrade Kim Il Sung will remain forever in the memory of the Korean people, and the world’s people”
• “It is a miracle that Pyongyang has been built up beautifully and magnificently in such a short time”
• “Such a miracle is only possible in Korea led by the great leader Comrade Kim Jong Il”

And a cheery goodbye from Chapter 11: Departure

• “I saw and learned a great deal in Korea” = “Josoneso mani bogo baewot-sumnida”
• “I practically felt that the Korean people are singleheartedly united behind Comrade Kim Jong Il”
• “Korea is the people’s paradise where there are no beggars and all people study”
• “Pyongyang is clean and beautiful, and seems to have the best housing conditions in the world”
• “All the Korean people are good-mannered, diligent and modest”
• “The Korean people long for national reunification”
• “The United States must get out South Korea. It has no grounds for remaining in South Korea”
• “Goodbye”

I hope you have all been paying attention. There will be a test on this later.

Life on the Sepik, in some ways, seems completely unchanged and unchanging. Most women get up at about five, then paddle their dugout to a good fishing area, where they’ll fish until they have enough fish both to eat and to smoke (later to be sold at market). Later they’ll spend time looking after the kids, tending the garden and any livestock, and cooking the family meals – this last performed squatting over an open fire, typically inside the (highly flammable) wooden and palm thatched house. Men, on the other hand, have a more sporadic approach to hard work – a typical day will see them hanging out in the village spirit house, smoking and perhaps working on some carving to offload to suckers like me and James. Once in a while, however they put on a spurt of activity – only men can build houses (a necessity before one can marry) or dig out a canoe. Men also hunt, mainly for crocodiles which they kill for the skin, mainly with spears or bush knives, exactly as they have done for the past hundred years or more. There’s no running water, no electricity, no TV, no books.

And yet, everywhere one looks, there are the artefacts of modern life. Most people have a cell phone (we never quite figured out how and where they charge them up given there is little or no electricity down river). In a couple of villages, there’s a generator, used in the village guesthouse where the tourists stay but also clearly “borrowed” from time to time by the rest of the village. The village shop sells cigarettes and Coca-Cola (sorry Tek). And the timeless rhythm of the river has of course been most radically altered of all, through the introduction of outboard motors.

There’s definitely a feeling, though, that the Sepik people have taken from the modern world only what they really value. Even in villages with generators, it’s extremely unusual to see electric light in any village houses – what’s the point when there’s plenty of daylight time? The traditional forms of crop harvesting are still used (including the insanely time consuming extraction of sago flour from the sago palm – chop down tree, grate, mix with water, leave starch to settle to bottom, extract, dry) and there’s no machinery used (again, why bother – the plots are so small they don’t really lend themselves to modern farming equipment). Houses are still constructed entirely out of bush materials with no nails, and no locks (there’s no crime – what would you steal?) and are capable of being built by the owner with a little help from a friend or two on the hard parts (putting the upright supports / stilts in place). It’s an entirely organic mixture of old and new and it seems to work pretty well.

The Sepik culture, too, is a curious amalgam of the old traditional kastom ways and the newer ideas espoused by the many missionaries in the area, most clearly articulated in the local church with its mixture of Christian and kastom iconography. Somewhat understandably given that they provide the majority of healthcare and education to the region, the missionaries enjoyed great success at first, with most villagers nowadays proclaiming themselves as Christians. This is undergoing something of a backswing however, with more and more people returning to the traditional ways. Spirit houses, which were abandoned in some villages at the height of the Christianity boom, are being rebuilt and the old kastom ways (use of a clan system to clear up any village disputes; worship of river spirits; initiation ceremonies – including skin cutting) are being revived.

This – oddly – appears partially to have been driven by tourism. One of the fears about going on this sort of a trip to see the “authentic” lives of those less well off than you is that the excursion turns into something like a safari trip – oooh, look at those funny indigenous people doing their funny indigenous things – whilst behind the scenes, the funny indigenous people take off their costumes, relax from their forced poses, and continue with their really very normal day to day life, cursing the tourists for fools as they do so. In the Sepik, there’s more of a feeling that the tourists, with their remunerative interest in the kastom ways, provide an excuse for the villagers to retain some of these traditions and in many ways have revived village pride in customs which they had been taught by the missionaries to despise. No, I don’t for one second believe that the entire area has genuinely reverted to the type of kastom tradition prevalent in the area 50 years ago – and nor would I want to force that kind of stagnation on a region – but rather that the continual presence of (minor – maybe 2-3,000 people a year) cultural tourism has allowed a kind of hybridization to take place which should act to protect some of the older ways and provide an alternative to the blind acceptance of the missionary credo which was (from the sounds of things) becoming commonplace.

The economic impact of modern day life is harder to express. Most people are what we started to refer to as “subsistence affluent” – that is, the quality of life achieved through a subsistence way of life is very high given the area’s fertility and widespread availability both of required food types (protein, starch, vitamins) and building materials. But everyone needs cash for fuel, salt, cooking oil, cigarettes… and we were amazed to find a sort of middle class angst that had set in at least in some villagers – the never ending worry over school fees, despite the fact that this is a country with a 75% unemployment rate and an education guarantees you nothing (our guide, Josh, was a college graduate unable to find work outside the village). School fees can cost around US $2,000 a year if you have a few kids, and I still have no real idea quite how many smoked fish it would take to generate that sum. Provide food and lodging for a tourist for the night, though, and you’re $75 up. We’re one of the best cash crops these people have.

One of the main reasons we wanted to head down the Sepik is its reputation as the cultural treasure house of PNG. The villages are insulated from the outside world due to the difficulty (and, prosaically, expense) of getting up and down river. As a result, the Sepik is an area where tribal traditions are still kept very much alive, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the village Spirit Houses.

In the Sepik, gender roles are pretty well defined: women do the unimportant stuff (cooking, cleaning, farming, fishing, trading, looking after the children, managing the household finances) while men do the important stuff (chewing betel nut, smoking, carving the occasional crude statuette, discussing initiations and how best to placate the crocodile spirits this year). OK, so they also hunt from time to time, build the occasional house (once a decade or so) and hollow out the occasional canoe. Tough life, eh? So that they have an appropriate place to do all this important smoking, chewing and discussing, they build themselves a whacking great frat house in the middle of the village. Did I say frat house? Sorry, I meant Spirit House or – interchangeably – Men’s House.

There is probably some long, hack-journalistic riff I could carry on here about the amusing similarities between frat houses and Men’s Houses, but I won’t. To do so would be to belittle the Men’s houses, which are utterly spectacular. By far the largest structure in any village, they loom over ten meters high on heavily carved hardwood uprights, gables faced and crowned with sculpted eagles and wickerwork demons. Inside their dark and smoky interiors sit terribly, majestically scarred village men, their skin cut in literally hundreds of places during bloody teenage initiations which are virtually indistinguishable from torture. We don’t have any of our own photographs of these “crocodile skins” as we didn’t think it appropriate, but my God are they impressive in the flesh.

The rest of the Spirit House (all of which are utterly off-limits to local women and children) is full of ritual carvings, statues, masks, costumes, massive drums, spears and shields. The level of craftsmanship is variable, but can be extremely high. Everything on display is for sale, with the carver of each piece no doubt sitting within earshot chewing, smoking etc. and eager (but not undignifiedly so) for the cash. Needless to say we went a little crazy, coming out with two beautiful carvings, one statue and two ceremonial spears, all of which are currently on their way to my parents’ house in London (Hi Mum! Hi Dad!). Each village, although no more than a few miles apart, has its own distinct traditional style – the people at the post office were able to tell exactly where we had been by the carvings we were trying to send home.

It was while we were sitting on the river bank drinking homebrew (see elsewhere for the suitably flippant tasting notes) that we had an exciting invitation. There was going to be a crocodile skin cutting ceremony in the neighbouring village the very next day. Would we be interested in attending? Bear in mind that these ceremonies involve bloody, lacerated, eighteen year olds screaming for their mothers while being held down by their uncles and sliced repeatedly with knives. While this isn’t normally something we would go out of our way to attend, given we were on the Sepik at the (pretty rare) moment when an initiation was taking place we couldn’t say no. Unfortunately, after an excited night we awoke to find out that the ceremony had been postponed by 24 hours. Would we be able to delay our departure for a day to witness it? This was, unfortunately, a hard No as we were due in Mount Hagen for the – even more spectacular – annual Sing Sing. So we declined, even though the invitation was repeated by the elders when we passed through the relevant village itself.

We make no bones about this in the other posts: travel in PNG is difficult, uncomfortable and expensive. But being able to see such extraordinary places, with ancient, alien traditions being kept alive in deeply taboo circumstances? Absolutely worth it.

There are a number of our friends who have managed to fit long adventures into highly successful careers. Thanks for the encouragement, guys!

Dan & Melora – the original travel blog

Crabs on the honeymoon - unfortunate

Tom & Eden – global ambassadors for packing cubes. Don’t laugh until you have tried them!

Visiting us in New York. TRUMP!

Ben & Jo – luckiest, most size-mismatched couple in the world

Ben - he's tiny!

Nick & Phoebe – loved it so much they did it twice

You lucky b....

Tracey & Mike – Lucy’s sister and broinlaw. The original six month honeymooners.

Here deer here.

Cabe & Caroline – not because of their travel (although they do) but because they exemplify the ability to have fascinating cultural experiences without ever leaving home.