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Traveling and Writing
This website is about traveling and writing. Being on the move and being emotionally moved. Two different but interconnected things. Spotting places and losing your heart. Temples, pyramids, cities and ruins, forests and mountains, valleys and rivers, volcanoes and lakes, daily life in the streets, the world as habitat for writing.
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The Author
Derk Cools was born in 1939 in Den Haag / The Haque, the Netherlands. He got his degree in social geography and economics at the University of Utrecht(1958). As a civil servant with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, he developed expertise in regional (economic) planning at home and abroad. In 1994, he retired and moved to the Netherlands Antilles, the island of Curacao. Read on: Since 1995, he traveled

27 juni 2013

Seven Days in the Grand Valley (Zeven dagen in de Baliemvallei) Translation






Fragment from chapter 11   ‘Drawn in the sand’ (page 47)

Today, we make a short trip in the valley – facing the unknown mountains beneath the dark clouds. It’s already late in the afternoon.  Rain is coming. I don’t know how long it will take and where we will be at the end of the day. Basically, one never does.  It’s okay, I think. Our guides are two young men, teachers in training. They guide us on request – in order to improve their knowledge and practice of the English language. They are allowed to skip lessons for one day.  Passing a gigantic mud stream of small gullies and slippery cobblestones – people drowned, any message in a newspaper? – We reach a broad path, a true road of asphalt constructed by the government, but now blocked by the mud and the collapsed bridge. The Papua is a born walker. Now, the traditional way of life is back again. Walking is the old way of moving, it determines how they look at the world, slowly, step by step, more intense than at high speed. The bridge is a ruin, a monument, the first rundown work of art I see. In case of emergency, the government has cross country vehicles at her disposal for her own activities .She can close and control the area. For her, the mud stream is a winning lottery ticket, a blessing in disguise. Slowly, we move up the mountain and it starts to rain. It drizzles and the mountain wind is strong. The great circulation of water is starting. Warm air rises up, condensates into clouds, becomes rain, a river, a flood and finally the sea. “What’s the height of the mountains”, I ask when my breath calms down. Actually, I don’t know what I bring about. At what height above the sea level is the valley and   I point my finger into the far. They stare at me. Are the mountains high? What is it that I ask them? And the sea, what about the sea and the mountains?  The sea, they know the sea from stories of land behind the mountains, of the capital where the aircrafts take off to bring food to the valley.  And in the period without airplanes, there was not anything like foraging from the coast to the valley. They had heard about the coastal area as the cradle of money, the old shells. (And they thought the shells grew on the branches of the trees) All expeditions from the coast got stuck in the mountains due to a lack of food en route. The mountains were high and built up in parallel rows along the coast and the slopes too steep for natural vegetation, often far too steep for cultivation of food. The coast and the sea were beyond imagination. They produced bad luck and disaster, barbarians, money and illness. The mountains here along the valley are accessible for walking; they hide the view on the sea. They are good for nothing here in the grand Valley. I pick up a stick and draw in the sand.

To be continued.

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