Around The Valley
The areas to the east of the valley , home to the Yali people , are becoming increasingly popular for adventure tours. The Yali are renowned for fierce adherence to custom, bizarre traditional dress and ritual war festivals. Some of the tribes here were cannibals right up until the 1970s, and are the only people who still build wooden towers to keep watch over advancing enemy tribes. The Yali region is only accessible by plane and by foot, the usual arrival point being the largest village of Angguruk . The village has a mission station, and is quite used to Western faces: the kepala sekola (schoolmaster) has a room put aside for tourist guests. From Angguruk, you'll have to walk out to the surrounding villages, and, if a flight can't be arranged, you'll have to walk all the way from Wamena: a minimum of five days. The western Baliem Valley is home to the Lani people , and is notable as the place where Sungai Baliem drops underground into a cavern system, to reappear by the town of Tiom. This area boasts some of the most spectacular scenery in Jayawijaya: forested cliffs plunging down to the valley floor, and gullies thick with jungle carving up the hillsides to form razor-edged ridges. The road is passable by taksi through Pyramid , where there is a large Protestant missionary set-up, a church and a weekly market held on Saturdays, to Pit River and on to Tiom where the road ends. From Tiom there are two "major" walking paths that skirt the valley edges and head right up to Bokondini and Kelila in the north. South of the Baliem Valley lies the magnificent Baliem Gorge . Here, tumultuous Sungai Baliem leaves the broad flat plain and tears violently into the steep gorge, with waterfalls and scree-covered rock-faces, and villages precariously perched on cliffside promontories. The area is relatively regularly visited, but still retains a raw, natural appeal, especially when you venture beyond the canyon walls. The people who live here are Dani , and spending nights in a thatched honai to a lullaby of gently grunting pigs is an experience you will not easily forget. Most of the internal Baliem Valley in the south has been deforested with slash-and-burn techniques, and is not as enjoyable to trek through. However, the route into the gorge and surrounding mountains is stunning. The paved road from Wamena now runs all the way to the administrative centre of KURIMA : taksis run to the village from 7am until the early evening (Rp2000; 1hr). At Kurima, where the gorge begins, an airstrip and mission have been cut into a precipitous rockface, 300m above the valley floor. Just northwest of Kurima at Sugokmo, you can take a trek uphill and west to Wulik village. It's a tough three-hour trek for which you'll be rewarded with a magnificent panorama of the valley and a nearby waterfall. From here you can trek round to Tangma , a six-hour walk, mostly through dense forest, for which a guide is a must: the scramble down is extremely steep and difficult. Tangma is arranged around a rarely used airfield where the houses are more modern than the honai of nearby settlements. It's wise to stay here with the kepala sekola, whose house is at the bottom of the runway. Alternatively, you could push on through Wamarek village to areas where several waterfalls tumble down the steep gorge sides. Raging Sungai Baliem is crossed here on a heartstopping suspension bridge, ninety minutes' walk from Tangma.
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