Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means by Charley Boorman

people wind up in towns like Lae with no work and nowhere really to go.
    We weren’t staying in town for very long. The plan was to drive into the highlands as far as a place called Goroka, where we would meet up with a Dutch guy called Marcel Pool who would give us a bed for the night. He had been in Papua for a couple of years, helping disabled people try to fit more easily into the community. Tomorrow we would spend some time with a team from Voluntary Service Overseas. I had not had much to do with VSO in the past, but when it comes to fighting poverty they are the world’s leading independent development organisation. People volunteer their skills to help others less fortunate than themselves: doctors, nurses, carpenters, bricklayers - you name it. *
    But before all that we had a seven-hour road trip ahead of us. Josh had organised a lift in a truck run by the Wagi Valley Transport Company. We would ride with an old fellow called Koi, a big guy with curly hair, a grey beard and a wide smile punctuated by a missing front tooth. He told me he was fifty but he looked a lot older than that. He loved his truck. No . . . he adored it. An eighteen-wheeler with full bonnet and bull bars, it had been shipped originally to Papua from Brisbane. It was pretty ancient now and God knows how many miles it had done, but each time it left the depot it was checked over by a mechanic in a massive open-sided inspection shed.
    On this particular sticky, hot day, Koi was carrying two containers. These had been loaded by a forklift truck and placed with the doors facing each other, a tyre squashed between them. In his Pidgin English, Koi explained that when the first road was cut into the mountains there were plenty of bandits up there. There still are, in fact, but I’ll come to that later. Back in the 1970s the bandits would wait until the trucks were labouring uphill at walking pace then they would hop on the back like something from Mad Max . Using bolt cutters they would open the container doors and steal whatever was inside, but with the doors facing each other and a massive tyre jammed in between, there was no way anyone could open them.
    As soon as the inspection was over, I clambered into the cab. Koi sat behind the wheel while Josh piled in the back, ready to translate. When you first hear their Pidgin English you think you’re going to be fine. It’s only later that you realise you only understand about half of what anyone is saying.
    Koi was a cool, laid-back guy and probably the most careful driver I’ve ever been with. He told me that he’d been driving trucks for as long as he can remember, but until he got behind the wheel of this baby, they had all been gnarly old things. This one had power steering and was fully upholstered, with a sleeping compartment tucked neatly behind the seats. He treated it like he would a favourite child.
    We headed west, deeper into the country. Rumbling along, I realised that the cab’s windows and windscreen were covered with a mesh grille. I asked Koi about it and he said it was because people liked to throw stones.
    ‘It’s like that in Ethiopia too,’ I told him. ‘The kids throw stones. I don’t know why. It’s just something they’ve always done, or at least that’s what Ewan and I were told.’
    ‘Not kids here. Drunk people mostly.’
    Leaving town, we headed into open country where the road was bordered by trees and banks of rich grass. The cab was bloody hot. It was hot outside but in the passenger seat the heat came rippling off the engine and I couldn’t put my feet on the floor without them burning. In places the mountains were burning too. We stopped at a roadside market to buy some bananas and I could see smoke billowing from folds in the land halfway up the hillside. Josh told us the villagers were burning the scrub to scare out pigs and snakes so they could hunt them. I’d seen a massive green snake on a small ridge we’d just passed and I imagined the thing