The story goes a bit like this. Two tribes are enemies and one tribe outnumbers the other. So to have a conventional confrontation would result in an obvious outcome. The lesser tribe had a brilliant idea which was if you can’t beat them, scare the sh*t out of them. If successful, the enemy would run without shedding any blood. The result of this strategy became the mud men. With bodies covered in mud and scary masks, they would descend out of the jungle at night into their enemy’s village and achieve their objective in a very effective way.
For us it was more fun than scary but you could see the idea and it looked really good!
After the obligatory photos with the group and the mud men, things got a bit out of hand. Jeri, our friend, decided she wanted to try a mask on then proceeded to do her own version of the creepy, scary dance.
She did a very credible perfomance. The locals, while impressed, thought this was the funniest thing they had ever seen and broke up in crazy laughter. Jeri was so taken with the experience she offered to buy the mask from the performer. The price was right so he reluctantly accepted.
These things weigh 30lbs so I’ll leave it up to the reader to imagine getting the thing through airport security. Jeri was successful and it is now sitting comfortably in the overhead compartment of the jet. I’m guessing she’ll bring it out some time during the flight (from Port Moresby to Fiji) and do a performance for us.
Bottom line. PNG is a fascinating country and well worth a visit. We speculated how much of what we saw was “staged” versus real. I’d put it at 75% / 25%. While that might seem a bit “touristy”, the last 25% is important because we are seeing how people actually live and, while they don’t do it every day, their customs and rituals are genuine and practiced on a regular basis. In fact the Mount Hagen annual Sing Sing is a giant celebration of their cultural commitment. Their way of life, in villages and tribes, exists today and contitutes the majority of the population outside of the main cities. No doubt it will be gone in 10-20 years