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Today's visitors to the Baliem Valley will have their first glimpse of it from the plane, as the undulating jungle-covered mountains abruptly plunge into an unexpected and remarkable landscape. All of a sudden, harsh cliff-faces fall away to a cultivated plain: a chess board of terraced fields, divided by rattan fences to keep the pigs out and the crops segregated. Sprinkled over the valley floor are jumbled assemblies of thatched honai huts. Most travellers to Jayawijaya regency, as it is known, come here to encounter the inhabitants of the valley, the Dani . These proud people have managed, in the face of continued government and missionary pressure, to maintain a culture of incredible depth and beauty. Whilst the warlike nature of the Dani lives on only symbolically in dance and festival, for the most part they still live by the same methods as have existed in the valley for thousands of years. They mostly shun Western clothes, the men dressing solely in a penis gourd ( horim), with pig teeth pushed through their noses and their bodies decorated in clay-and-grease warpaint. The first Western encounter with the peoples of the Baliem Valley didn't happen until 1938 , when the millionaire Richard Archbold saw the cultivations from his seaplane while on a reconnaissance mission for the American Museum of Natural History. He returned and made a successful expedition, but it was not until the 1960s that the missionaries and Indonesian officials started to trickle in. The Indonesians have since made huge logging commissions in Dani areas, which have now almost entirely cleared the Baliem Valley of forests. The summer of 1997 saw the beginning of one of the harshest periods in memory for the peoples of the central highlands. The El Nino weather system was blamed for the terrible destruction all over the island. Fires started by slash-and-burn farmers raged out of control, and such a vast amount of smoke poured into the air that for months the haze blocked out the sun, and visibility in Wamena was down to a few hundred metres. By the end of 1997, after four rainless months in the usually lush valley, over five hundred people had starved to death in the Wamena area. Summer smoke haze and its knock-on effects have become quite regular since. Whilst the thickest smoke has been in Kalimantan and northern Sumatra, it's much more of a problem for travellers here, as almost all travel is by air. It may soon be the case that July to September become months when travellers should steer well clear of travel in Irian.
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