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Baliem Valley Travel Guide
Stone-Age tribes have survived into the 21st century at Baliem Valley, a town in the tribal Papua region. The pig figures strongly in the culture of the Dani, the dominant tribe identifiable through the males' koteka (penis gourds). The pigs here can buy love and sex. They are highly celebrated in pig feasts, traditional street dances and mock wars, which attract tourists and ethnographers all over the world.
Wamena, the valley's sprawling, dusty commercial center, is a springboard to explore the tribal villages. The air here is cool, the surrounding hills redolent with fields of purple yams and flowers, and the rivers stunning in its clarity. Nonetheless, since everything in Wamena is brought in by airplanes from Jayapura, accommodations and supplies here are expensive.
When not busy with pig feasts, the locals of the valley mingle with Javanese transmigrasi (migrants) and Christian missionaries who, since their discovery of the valley in 1938, have somehow influenced the Dani to embrace modernity and lose a part of their "Stone-Age" way of living.
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