The flight from the capital Jakarta to Irian Jaya on the Eastern tip of Indonesia goes overnight and ploughs through storm infested monsoon skies for more than 10 hours. This terrifying experience is made worse by three stop overs in God forsaken places.

At one in the morning I woke up on the island of Sulawesi to a man hoovering between my feet whose features were much sharper and darker than those of the Javanese stewardess.

Three hours later: another stop over, another man with a hoover. I stir in my half sleep to find someone looking like an Australian aboriginal. He smiled broadly to reveal a mouth stained with blood red beetle nut juice. Strictly speaking this man was also Indonesian.

Penis gourds

But it is only at Wamena airport in the highlands of Papua that the geographical vastness and ethnic variety of Indonesia hits you. Many of the plane-spotters peering through the barbed wire fence on the edge of the runway were completely naked but for their penis gourds.

The local variety starts with a manly boast just above the scrotum. Juts out at a suggestive 45 degree angle and then tapers into a decorative if disconcerting twirl at the top.

The woman selling roasted sweet potatoes, the staple diet here, wore a Man United T-shirt and a grass skirt and next to the prehistoric scales used for weighing luggage a yellowed poster reassures the sceptical traveller that Wamena which has no computers and no radar was Y2K OK.

We wanted to find out how the people of Papua felt about their masters in far flung Jakarta and the village of Aikima seemed as a good a place as any to take a sample.

A mummy

Aikima is famous because of one Werapak Elosa, once a fearsome warrior and headhunter. Today a mummy. If you ask them nicely the village elders will bring out the blackened remains of their ancestor, preserved with secret and patched up here and there with black gaffa tape.

During the day Werapak sits on his throne, a wooden kitchen chair. At night he sleeps with the 20 men of the village in their exclusively male thatched hut.

"How old is the mummy?" I asked the stark naked village elder who looks after Werapak. Popping this simple question involved three interpreters and after it had been translated from English to Indonesian Bahasa, from Bahasa to Dani, the language of the local tribe, and from Western Dani to the Eastern Dani dialect of Aikima village, the answer was this: "We don't really know. May be 367 years!"

There are 250 languages and tribes in Papua. Two of them are called "insiders", they have never seen white men. They have never been filmed. One of them is still believed to practise cannibalism.

In this vast and remote province twice the size of France conventional time and distance mean nothing. Time to ask a question that by now seemed rather silly.

"Did he feel he was part of Indonesia?" I asked the elder whose name was Sopaluma Elosak. He was fondling his weather beaten testicles and extracted a cigarette from inside his gourd as if it was some party trick. Not a recognisable brand. Definitely a roll up.

After the question was filtered through three stages of translation the man's leathery face twitched. His watery eyes, whose black pupils seemed to have run like the yoke of an egg looked at me in disbelief.

Freedom to Papua

The answer when it finally reached me in English was a simple but profound NO. Papua Merdeka. Freedom to Papua, the elder added for good measure in Bahasa and puffed out a large cloud of acrid smoke.

Issues of national sovereignty and independence exercise the Dani of Aikima as much as the chattering classes of London. "The Indonesians have built a road, which is good", Sopaluma continued.

"They also built a brick hut for our mummy. This is bad. The hut was too hot. The mummy started melting. So now we use the hut for pigs and the mummy sleeps with us again."

It's a small harmless example, but it shows that the Indonesian authorities have had as little success in understanding or taming the Dani as their Dutch predecessors did during colonial rule.

This didn't matter in the past because military rule kept the lid on discontent. The Indonesian army was able to kill with impunity while exploiting Papua's gold and copper mines, its forests, its oil.

Dream of independence

All that has now changed. Political reform in the capital, the independence of East Timor, the secessionist stirrings on other islands have encouraged the tribes of Papua to dream of independence too.

Their expectations have probably been raised in vain. Papua is far richer and bigger than East Timor. Too stuffed with gold and copper to let go.

But the masters in Jakarta quickly need to dream up some good reasons why a man in the highlands of Papua should feel part of a nation as artificial as Indonesia. If this riddle remains unanswered Indonesia might as well not exist.