The Lost World of Papua

New species in the unexplored jungles

You often think that the last drops of adventure were squeezed from the world long ago by men with pith helmets and blank maps. A recent effort by a team of international scientists and a BBC film crew to discover the secrets of a mysterious jungle-filled volcano crater on the other side of the world proved there are still places worth getting off the sofa for. Not only did they find a lost landscape of caves, rivers, rainforests and jungle tribes, but they also discovered animals and insects previously unknown to science.

Their target was Mount Bosavi, the collapsed cone of an extinct volcano, buried in impenetrable jungle deep within Papua New Guinea.  It’s one of the most remote places on earth, with fortress-like cliffs over half a mile high. The rainforest-covered bowl of the crater had never been entered by Westerners, and even the local tribesmen shied away from entering an area considered virtually off-limits. Since the volcano’s last eruption a quarter of a million years ago, life in the crater has been able to develop untouched and undisturbed. The thought of what might be discovered within this unique habitat was enough to persuade some of the world’s top scientists to join the expedition.

As far from civilisation as possible

As with any major adventure, planning and logistics were a huge issue and the job of making it happen was down to BBC Series Producer Steve Greenwood, who spent months preparing the ground. His starting point was Fogasova, a four-day hike away from Mount Bosavi and about the furthest it was possible to get from civilization. It was a place where the villagers remembered a time when their grandfathers had been cannibals and they had never seen white people.

After flying in by helicopter, an event in itself for both the villagers and visitors, Steve and his translator sat down with the headmen to try and explain what they wanted to do, a tricky concept in a village with no TV. With the help of a laptop and old nature films they eventually got their message across and managed to secure the help of the villagers as builders, porters and trackers.
Steve had two main worries. The first was disease, in particular malaria: “Just because you take the tablets doesn’t mean that you don’t get sick,” he was warned. The second was physical trauma.

Having spent previous months in Borneo, Steve was prepared for what to expect. “In the jungle it’s all too easy to fall off a tree or down a slope, get hit by a machete or bitten by something nasty,” he tells WideWorld. Although they had arrangements with helicopters, they could not always rely on them for evacuation because of communications and weather problems.

Communication problems

It was the communications that proved one of the thorniest issues, meaning they had to set up a series of radio repeaters on different hilltops to get calls out on VHF radio: “By the end, I knew a ridiculous amount about radio equipment, how it works and how it doesn’t work – it became a central feature of my life,” Steve recalls, but it was all worth it. “I remember as a kid looking at the atlas and seeing these impossibly far-off lands like New Guinea and Borneo, thinking that when I grew up I’d love to go to some of these places. To find myself there 30 or 40 years later was amazing.”

Once the preparation had been done it was time to fly in the scientists, initially to a base camp at the foot of the mountains.  Dr. George McGavin was head of the scientific team and while he was used to working in the field, he hadn’t experienced conditions quite like this before:  “It’s very humid, hot, wet – if you stand in one place for more than half an hour you rot from the feet up. Absolutely everything gets wet, especially the high-tech kit. All the sensitive equipment had to be kept in a custom-made heated box and it was the only thing in the camp that was dry and warm. But it’s exciting because it’s tough.” At one point the river at the bottom of the camp flooded and were it not for a last-minute rescue mission that involved pushing 200-litre diesel cans up a hill at 3am in the driving rain, the team would have lost their boats, fuel and fresh water.

The crater reveals itself

After a few weeks at base camp the scientists ventured up the sheer sides of the crater, looking down at the magnificent view, before venturing into the dark, green depths below. For Dr. McGavin it was one of the best moments of the trip. “Standing on top of that rim, looking out over a crater 3½ km across and trying to see in my mind’s eye the thing blowing up; imagining how, from that total ash-filled destruction, we now had this incredibly rich habitat was amazing. To top it off we then walked twenty metres from the helicopter and identified a new species of frog in the first thirty seconds.

“As a scientist it was enormously exciting. In six weeks we found sixteen new species of frog, three new species of fish, a new species of bat, loads of insects and a never-before-seen giant woolly rat, the size of a cat. To find animals with a backbone, a new species, is relatively rare because we have found and named most of them now, but this gave us evidence that there are lots more out there in these rare habitats.”

Raining ash

The expedition didn’t just limit itself to Mount Bosavi. A second objective was the exploration of New Britain Island, to the east of New Guinea. Here Dr. McGavin intended to set up camp in a swirling grey, alien landscape sculpted in ash. The aim was to study the still active volcano nearby. “As soon as we got there it went nuts, starting to bang and pop,” he says. “There were pieces of rock the size of cars flying out of this thing, the ground was moving all the time, there were lava bombs and we had to leave fast the first evening as there were things actually flying over the camp. Thick ash everywhere, the smell of sulphur and nothing much alive apart from a few strange oddities.”

Meanwhile, another team set out to map the unexplored Megeni river-cave system. By far the most dangerous part of the adventure, the team had to abseil down 200ft of cliff just to get to the waterfall-filled entrance to the cave. From there they had to battle against roaring, freezing water in almost total darkness, climbing a series of underground waterfalls to eventually reach chambers that had never been seen by humans before. Jonny Keeling, the producer who accompanied the team, says that the worst moments for him were sleeping in the caves at night where “you could see the fault lines in the stalagmites from previous earthquakes. Not nice if everything suddenly started shaking with a million tonnes of rock on top of you”. The word isolated does not even begin to describe their situation. Not only were they in a cave with a fast flowing river, there were miles of narrow black tunnels to the entrance, 200ft of technical climbing below the edge of the cliff, which was a two-hour hike from the helicopter landing spot and then a whole plane flight away from New Guinea, the nearest help. If something went wrong they would be in serious trouble and that night, although mercifully earthquake free, one of the team came down with a fever and had to be evacuated out to recover.

“When we finally got back,” says Jonny, “we were standing at Heathrow, everyone there safely, happy that we were all alive. I remember looking across at Tim, the safety guy, and he gave me this weary smile as if to say it’s been good fun - but I’m really glad that we’re all back in one piece.”