It is every international traveller’s nightmare – being caught innocently coming into the country with someone else’s illicit white powder. Well and it happened to me – in a sort of a way — last year.
I was coming back from Papua New Guinea after staying at Ambua Lodge, near Tari, in the Highlands. A pin in the centre of the PNG map finds Tari. One day one of the guides asked me if I would mind taking a letter to a friend of his in Australia because the PNG postal system was so bad. No problem. On the day I left, a lodge mini-bus took us along the hellish Highlands “”Highway” the 23kms back to the airport. It takes an hour and half. At the airport “”waiting lounge” – a patch of fenced-in grass 10 metres by 10 metres, the driver gave me the letter, which in fact was a small package. I am acutely aware of the dangers of carrying other people’s packages across international borders, but it was too late to send it back. It would seem so ungrateful to the guide who had shown me much. I decided to take the package and declare it at Sydney.
Quarantine opened the package in my presence. To my absolute horror it contained a sachet of white powder.
But who would be manufacturing drugs in the PNG Highlands? Marijuana, yes, but purified drugs surely not.
It transpired the powder was the subject of a very powerful addiction – orchids. The powder was orchid seeds. The quarantine officers were acutely interested. They sniffed and looked and felt through the plastic sachet. And then saw a hand-written list of species names. They went away and came back saying if the seeds came from PNG they were allowed in and they re-sealed the packed with bright yellow tape embossed with the words “”Passed Quarantine”.
I was happy to have been of service to the guide. His name is Joseph Tano and he has been working with orchids for more than 10 years. He has helped identify and collect about 150 species and thinks there are hundreds more in the forest.
Orchid collectors are always after that elusive undiscovered species.
Joseph led me through the rainforest. To me it was just green and black – all leaves and trunks and ferns. Then Joseph pointed up and said, “”There’s one.”
It was a delicate red and yellow orchid growing high on a tree.
We are walking on a track cut by local employees of Ambua Lodge. The track passes waterfalls and over creeks on bamboo bridges constructed without nails or bolts. You can see an occasional bird of paradise – usually the Stephanie or Duke of Saxony. The Germans were here before Australians.
Now not many Australian tourists come to the Highlands. Tales of violence and corruption get a run in the Australian press and so are a turn off. But with care, the risk should be no worse than visiting a American city. PNG doesn’t rate much in the international media, so Americans and Europeans do not get scared off. It is an exotic, exciting place. And many come to see the orchids. These are not the big bright South-East Asian orchids which are breed and hybridised to provide table decorations. Rather they are subtle plants.
Joseph bends down and pulls back some leaves. “”Look at this one.”
“”Where?” I ask.
He points and still I can’t see it. There is no colour, just brown and black forest floor and some small leaves. One has an insect on it.
“”Where?”” I ask again.
He points at the insect. It is indeed an orchid. A browny, grey large mosquito of an orchid. A collector’s gem.
It is a passion. It is a passion shared by people who come from around the globe to this remote place. They come to photograph them and sometimes to obtain seeds.
Ambua Lodge (www.pngtours.com) has an Orchid Haus (Haus is the German word brought into Pidgin English meaning house), built by the lodge owners Bob and Pam Bates to help preserve and protect the orchids from the ravages of logging and other development.
The lodge organises plant and bird walks in the rainforest and visits to Huli people’s villages. Many people in the Highlands still dress in traditional ways using plants and feathers.
The Orchid Haus houses the 150 specimens, many of which grow off tree trunks in the rainforest, never touching the ground.
The extraordinary thing about the orchid family is its diversity. There are 60,000 or so species, ranging from the microscopic to ones with flowers the size of footballs. The New Guinea Highlands is bound to be a source of the discovery of new species because the Highlands have only recently been open to European botanical exploration. The diversity and beauty of the species attracts the collecting fanatics. But they are fascinating enough to uninitiated.
Orchids are among the most highly evolved plants on earth. The key to their diversity is their sexiness. Many plants self-pollinate. Sure, reproduction is guaranteed, but they are recycling the same genetic material and do not evolve with new characteristics. They are therefore less adaptable to changing environments. Complex plants, like flowering plants (including orchids) rely on cross-fertilisation. It gives them the advantage of getting new genetic combinations every generation, but it requires pollen to be spread from one plant to another. This can be an uncertain process. Orchids have developed very cunning ways of ensuring their pollen gets spread about. They develop complex forms so pollen can be spread by the wind – masses of it. Most importantly they have devised ways of attracting insects which pick up the pollen and take it to the stigma of other orchids.
Hence my mosquito orchid in the Highlands. It would trick other insects into thinking it was a mate. It is called pseudocopulation. Other orchids look like something an insect wants to kill and eat — pseudoantagonism. In the pseudo mating and killing frenzies, the insect gets pollen on it and takes it to another orchid. Orchids mimic smells of thinks insects like. They have a huge range of colours and sizes. Charles Darwin was fascinated by them and wrote a book about the way orchids attract insects for pollination.
And up in the PNG Highlands – remote and isolated for so long – Joseph Tano – looks for more species with an astonishing eye, turning a leaf here, spotting a dash of subtle colour amid tree bark there, propagating each new species he finds and sending the powder-like seeds to foreign countries.