Once upon a time, we lived in a far, far away land in a teeny, tiny town in the middle of a ginormous rainforest.

You’d never believe this place.

In this land, waterfall streaked mountains stand as high as the sky. It’s a place where clouds, filled with buckets of rain, move like smoke, and the ground shakes and slides. Trucks as big as buildings rumble inside the earth scooping up rocks and boulders full of copper and gold.

Bulletproof choppers whirl in the sunshiny skies while fleets of white Toyotas and monster buses bounce around the rocky roads below. It’s a place where Papuans hoot and holler from mysterious places, and where loudspeakers broadcast calls to prayer.

It’s hard to believe that such a crazy land exists, but it does.

We saw it with our own eyes.

Tembagapua nestled in the Irian Jaya Mountain Range. Photo courtesy of sinarpapua.com