Mmmm...Bats

Saturday I experienced something very new. It was exciting, entertaining, and weird all at the same time. Myself and a volunteer, who is here for a month, took a long hike up one of the near by mountains with a national friend of mine. The hike was up a decent sized mountain so it was fairly tiring but any exhaustion was well worth the view of the the large valley below and the feeling of just being deep in the jungle. As we hiked we picked up a few more nationals who wanted to tag along, like women and children. Now, before leaving on this hike I was under the impression that it would be fairly long and hard, not a trip for women and children to come on. But they came, and made me feel like less of a man. The kids were running up and down the path playing games while some of the women were carrying trees they had cut down for poles in their home. All the while, here I am going at a decent pace but with no extra energy to play games or carry anything more than my 15 pound pack. I guess it is their home and has been their entire life. And I've lived in Illinois my whole life so I'm sure I could have smoked those kids on flat ground, so I gain some man points back, right? Anyway, aside from my shame, the hike was a great experience.
We were not just hiking for the sake of seeing the bush, we had a goal to see and explore a cave near the peak of the mountain. Along the way up we picked up Pastor David, who's family owns the land that the cave is on, without him we would have had to pay the owner of the land to go in the cave. As we got closer to the cave my anticipation was growing, not only to explore inside, but to stop walking uphill, which we had been doing for 3 and 1/2 hours. Also as we grew closer to the cave the nationals started cutting down branches with lots of twigs on them, I wasn't sure why they were doing this but I didn't ask questions.
After crossing over a fallen tree and stumbling down a small hill we we finally made it to the cave next to a small mountain stream. After a short rest we got our headlights on and went in. The only real climbing we had to do was at the beginning, repelling down a waterfall to get into the cave. Once inside, my national friend handed me a tree branch and told me to spread out from everyone else. I complied not thinking to ask why because I was busy checking out the first room inside the cave. What I hadn't noticed while checking out the cave was that Pastor David went on in the cave deeper on his own to scare up the bats, and he did a good job, because soon after he went in there were bats flying everywhere. It seemed that they liked to fly right at my face and turn at the last second because of their sonar. After recovering from the shock of bats flying at my face I noticed that everyone was swinging their branches attempting to hit and kill the bats. They wanted the bats for food since their protein intake is limited so they will eat what ever animal they can get their hands on, even bat. I started in on the swinging, not because I was hungry but because I didn't like them flying at my face. Soon swinging at the bats was less protection and more sport, we were counting to see how many each of us could kill (I only got 4). We must have killed around fifty bats between the five of us, at least thirty of the kills were Pastor David, he has been killing bats for food since he was a kid so experience must help. (You may ask yourself..."So did they put the bats in a bag and carry them home?" Oh no my friends, they stuffed their cargo pockets full of dead bats. As many as they could fit!) The bat killing was merely a side activity to climbing down the cave. We went through holes that were no more than 2 feet square to enter rooms the size of our house. Through underground streams, up and down guano (bat poop) covered rocks, and to the back end of the 600 ft deep cave. The air was cool and my pants were wet as we sat down at the bottom to take a break. As we sat their we decided to turn all of our lights out. The pure darkness and silence at the bottom of that cave was so peaceful, for that minute that our lights were out I was completely alone.
We climbed back out of the cave with minimal wrong turns and got out safe and sound with nothing more than a few scratches. Once out we dusted ourselves off, refilled our water in the mountain stream and began the long walk home. We had planned to stop and make a fire to roast our bats on the way down the mountain but a thunderstorm rolled in quickly so we had to skip the bats to make it home before we had a Mount Humbolt experience (inside joke for the Sauder family)
The whole day was an exhausting one, but like anything else in PNG the pain is well worth the reward. Seeing the deep parts of the bush and having so many new experiences made it well worth while and I will go back again soon for sure.
Oh, by the way, for all those serious animal lovers out their who might have a problem with us killing fifty bats... we were merely controlling the population in the cave.