You're a 21st-century adventure tourist bored with whitewater

Sunday Herald, The, Jan 21, 2007 by Barry Didcock

TREKKING deep into uncharted jungle for a "first-contact" encounter with a tribe that has never seen a white man sounds like something from a Boy's Own story. In fact, it's the ultimate in 21st- century adventure tourism. For the extreme sports fan bored with whitewater rafting, base jumping and the Pamplona bull run, it is the final buzz: the prospect of a face-to-face meeting with a people whose way of life hasn't changed for millennia . . . and who have the spears to prove it.

Kelly Woolford, an ex-pat American who lives in the Balinese tourist town of Ubud, runs just such a tour. For dollars-8000, he promises to take well-heeled adventurers into the jungle terrain of the West Papua highlands and introduce them to a lost world. He led his first trip in 2003, and has been running them annually ever since.

Anthropologists and environmental groups are horrified. "Were the first contact genuine it would be incredibly irresponsible and we would condemn it very strongly, " says Miriam Ross of campaigning group Survival International. "Uncontacted peoples are uncontacted because they choose to be and we need to respect that." Author and anti-globalisation campaigner George Monbiot is another to voice his protest. "If a group of people had ensured they had no contact with the outside world, that would be their choice, a result of their deliberately withdrawing and keeping away from people, " he says. "Any effort by a travel company to get in touch with people who have taken that choice would be grossly irresponsible and clearly in defiance of their wishes." But how verifiable are Woolford's claims?

Is he being nave in believing he is delivering a first-contact experience, when in fact the tribespeople themselves may be deceiving him? And are there any uncontacted tribes left in the world anyway?

In 2004 an Australian photographer joined the tour, bringing with him a small video camera. A few days into the jungle he filmed what appeared to be a "first-contact" meeting with a group of tribesmen.

So far, so predictable. The footage, however, is intriguing. Virtually naked and armed with spears, the tribesmen surround the group, refusing the proffered gifts of tobacco, and swatting them aggressively out of the hands of local porters who look genuinely alarmed. Then they melt back into the jungle.

The nervous party beds down for the night.

Nobody sleeps much. When the tribespeople return in the dark, the footage shows them as ghostly green forms. Then, once again, they melt away. The Westerners are left scratching their heads. Was it or wasn't it?

For Kirriemuir-born explorer and documentary-maker Mark Anstice, these stories and this footage were too tempting to ignore. So, late in 2005, he signed up for a first-contact tour with Woolford's company, Papua Adventures, and in February 2006 found himself hacking through the jungle of West Papua in the company of Woolford, half a dozen porters, a cameraman and two local men who claimed to have been held captive for a week by a group of tribespeople. First Contact, his film of the expedition, screens on BBC Four next month.

"My first thought was that it was all a hoax, " says Anstice. "When I heard the descriptions of the tribespeople they seemed to be all dressed up, like going out to work in your Sunday best. Secondly, the trips seemed too formulaic: a couple of days up river in a boat, a couple of days on foot and then wham! Out they come, all painted and feathered up. They're very angry and then they calm down and let you take a few pictures.

Then they get angry again and leg it."

ITis clear from the documentary that Woolford sincerely believes he is offering a genuine first contact. But To Anstice's eye, it seemed a little too neat. "To get a first contact these days, you have to go a lot further than a couple of days into the forest, " he says. "In fact, a lot of anthropologists will tell you that there is no such thing as a first contact any more. Even in the Amazon where there are uncontacted peoples, it often turns out they're resisting contact because of atrocities carried out by white invaders perhaps two generations earlier." That is certainly true of the Sentinelese, as Indian fishermen Sunder Raj and Pandit Tiwari found out to their cost last year. While fishing illegally for crabs in the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago they fell asleep and drifted onto the island occupied by the tribespeople. Believed to be the last preneolithic society in the world, they are renowned for their violent attacks on anyone approaching their island home. Raj and Tiwari were hacked to death, and when an Indian coastguard helicopter tried to recover the bodies it was met with a hail of arrows.

A similar thing happened in 2005, when Indian officials tried to approach the island after the Boxing Day tsunami in an effort to establish how many Sentinelese had perished. For their part, the islanders have suffered at the hands of Arab slavers, the British, the Japanese and the Indians, though Sentinel Island is now protected under law and non-authorised approaches are illegal. For the Sentinelese, first contact was a disaster.