Smoked corpse of Aseki.  

Throughout the many hundreds of different tribes in Papua New Guinea there is just one tribe of natives that had a most unusual ritual over 150 years ago of disposing of their dead. They smoked the corpses over a fire then suspended the smoked bodies in a bamboo frame and carried the frame and body up a steep mountain track to a natural ridge in the side of a mountain and placed the whole frame (and body) on wooden poles against the wall of this natural ridge so that their dead could look over their village a thousand feet below. This mountain is very sacred to them indeed.
These are the people of Aseki, a very remote village, high up in the mountains about 200 km inland from the port city of Lae in the Morobe Province of PNG.

Charles beside a Kuku Kuku. Note how he is standing on his toes to try and make himself look taller!

Aseki is also home to the most feared warriors in all of PNG, the Kuku Kuku’s pygmy’s (pronounced cookcoo’s-cookcoo’s). These people are small in stature but they are a very hardy tribe and they feared no one.
There are only two means of transport to get there, the first is by road (which is very treacherous most of the time), or by small single-engined aircraft which is even more risky than by road because of the dangerous mountains that surround Aseki. Once a pilot has committed his plane into the approaches to land at the short dirt airstrip he cannot abort the landing and fly off and around because there are steep mountains to the sides and near the end of the runway. We saw the wrecks of three light aircraft that tried to abort but didn’t make it.
On the Queen’s birthday holiday weekend in June 1985 when we were living in Lae, we and some friends of ours decided to drive up to Menyamya (the furthest point inland by road from Lae), overnight there, then call into Aseki on the way back from Menyamya. We each had our own (company) Landcruiser Station Wagons for the trip and as there is only one fuel stop located at Wau we made sure we had at least three spare 25 litre jerry cans of fuel in each vehicle plus our food supplies and some warm clothing and plenty of water.
We set off at midday on Saturday 8th June (1985) for the gold mining town of Wau 138 km from Lae. Just the first 8 km out from Lae to the Markham River bridge was bitumen and after that it is all dirt and stones and very narrow in many places with lots of jungle growth on each side of the road and a lot of hairpin bends as you wound up and down through the valleys and gorges. You had to be on alert for fallen trees across the road as this often meant that the village near where the tree had fallen had cut down the tree purposely to form a road block so that you had to pay to pass through their village. Luckily we had no road blocks all that weekend.
We stayed overnight at the Wau Ecological Institute Hostel and this started off with a bit of “drama” the very next morning (Sunday 9th) when my wife burnt her hand on the gas stove as she was preparing our breakfasts and then our friend George hit his right eye on an open cupboard door in the kitchen. Luckily it didn’t require stiches but it did bleed a fair bit for a while. The “drama’s” didn’t stop there either for when I was loading our Landcruiser up after breakfast I decided to look at a beautiful Frangipani tree close by and as I walked around one of its branches I just barely missed running into the biggest spider I have ever seen in my life sitting in the middle of its large web in between two branches. I’m not frightened of spiders at all but this one certainly made me pull up very suddenly. It was black all over and it had a series of beautiful golden stripes going all over its body and legs. When I put my hand up near it to judge its size it was much larger than my entire hand with fingers fully extended. Its body alone was nearly as wide and as long as the palm of my hand itself. I actually stroked its back with my index finger and although it moved a bit it did not go into the “attack” position when they rise up on their legs. I asked one of the attendants if this was one of the bird-eating spiders and he said it definitely was. These are not poisonous but pity any birds that fly into its web.
We filled our vehicles up with petrol then we started heading towards Menyamya 152km away. As I mentioned before, this is definitely not a normal Sunday drive in the countryside although the views as we climbed higher and higher into the mountains became more stunning. The views were absolutely breathtaking as we saw the deep blueness of the mountain ranges mingling in with the deep green of the forests.
Just before Aseki the road reaches an altitude of 9,020 feet and you thought you were in a lunar landscape it was so bare. Even the petrol in our spare jerry cans was bubbling because of the thin atmosphere. Luckily our Landcruisers were equipped with high altitude compensating jets in the carburettors otherwise the engines would have been running on too lean a mixture and the engines would have been struggling to pull us up over the ranges.
Driving up to these heights wasn’t too bad but like the old saying of,” whatever goes up must come down”, was quite true. We slipped our Landcruisers into low four-wheel drive to help with the braking of our vehicles as we descended down those very steep twisting mountain slopes into Aseki then down further still to our stop for the night at a “new” hotel in the village of Menyamya some 50 km past Aseki. This was our very first and only trip out this way.
The “hotel” was more like a small lodge with a couple of cabins and a small kitchen and dining room. You supply your own food etc and the linen (bed sheets) supplied by the hotel. We were all in bed by 9pm that night and I remember around midnight something biting me on the big toe of my left foot. I didn’t worry about it until a few minutes later when it happened again. I switched my torch on to see what it was and here were two of the biggest cockroaches I’ve ever seen nibbling on my toe. They were about the size of a small mouse! I told them to “bugger-off”, which they did when they knew I was alive and able to kick them off me, and this time I slept under the sheet and not on top of it.
The next day (Monday 10th June, 1985) was to be our most “exciting” day and one of our longest. We all had a restless night before by being got at by cockroaches and mosquitoes buzzing around. We left Menyamya at 8.15am and headed up to Aseki to finally visit the famous smoked corpses.
On arrival there we were greeted by several dozen villagers ranging in age from a few months to around 50 years of age. We also met a few of the famous Kuku-Kuku tribesmen and lucky for all of us they were all very friendly and sociable and none were carrying their deadly spears and bows and arrows for which they were famous. We arranged for a guide to take us up to their sacred mountain to where the corpses were and the moment we left the village area we were on the beginning of a very steep mountain track. After just a couple of hundred yards our wives decided to stay behind as by now it was hot and very humid. My friend George and I continued climbing up the zigzag track through thick jungle growth and after about 45 minutes of climbing we finally arrived at the spot where the corpses were. Besides having my usual 35mm camera I was also carrying my Super-8 movie camera and some spare film.

Our first contact with the array of corpses was a hideous sight. There were 15 of them in line, each crouched naked in a coarsely-woven grid of wood. Each container was about ten feet tall, the upper half a funnel, mounted on a thick lower centre pole. The funnels cradling their corpses stood nearly vertical, gently leaning against the rock face, Just a couple of paces away was a precipitous drop. The covered ridge they were sitting in was about 30 feet long and only a few feet wide.
Bleached bone was visible through dark crusty skin wrinkled like the shell of an over-ripe passionfruit. Those well mummified, with remaining flesh and features, were daubed and smeared with red ochre clay. Others were near skeleton. On some, the crouching stance was fixed by tribal arrows made of black palm tips and bamboo shafts. They pierced the bodies, impaling them, the weight transferred to the woven funnel frame.
Because of the altitude and the place they were in, the corpses and their “coffins” were still in quite good condition considering they’ve been sitting on this ledge for over 150 years. George and I stayed there for nearly twenty minutes admiring this “gruesome” scene. My movie camera worked overtime as I filmed the corpses and their original village over a thousand feet below.
I wore out my old pair of leather boots by the time we descended and I gave them to the village kids to play with and they certainly had a lot of fun with them. I met up with a Kuku Kuku village man soon after and he barely came to chest height on me, but he was very solidly built.
This had certainly been a most memorable trip for all of us, seeing countryside and people we have never seen before but most importantly, seeing the culture of “burial” from over 150 years before. Of all the different places I travelled to during my thirty years in PNG, this trip to Aseki stands out most amongst them all.