Above us, on a rainforest clad cliff face, a giant neon 'Jayapura City' sign floats in the darkness, adding yet another unreal element to the film-like quality of the evening. Huge advertisements for mobile phone networks and, as much as I could make out, cappuccino flavoured cigarettes, hang along the road. Black acrid smoke fills the air and we wrinkle our noses at the burning plastic fumes. Soon we find the source – a burning dumpster with flames flickering in the darkness, ignored by the silhouetted people, cars and motorbikes passing by.

I really am a long way from home.

So what do we sailors do when we go ashore … Hang from the rafters in the 'Bar Paradiso' across from the docks? Cause a ruckus in town? No, we head straight for the internet cafe and the fruit market!

The following evening, as a farewell from Jayapura, we had a BBQ with local foods like cassava and Papaya flower. The latter is yummy but bitter, and it wards off mosquitos. A well-known Papuan band, Black Paradise, entertained us that evening.

The students who have been conducting the open boat tours started a line dance. They pulled a few people up, and soon enough everyone joined in – the students, crew, the band and even the police who have been ever-present on the dockside since our arrival.

All the local dances hold a special significant; this one especially so. John, a teacher at the university in Jayapura, gave me a 'Brief History of Yospan Dance' lesson (see below). Here, dance is "more than just a story, it’s the history of the island".

Koreri and the history of Yospan dance

On Biak Island, lived a young man named Manarmaker – a strong and diligent young man in the village. He had a big garden and regularly went to look after it.

One day, he found that his garden was destroyed, and he really wanted to know by what, so he took his javelin and stayed up all night. When the evening came, he saw something come in to his garden. It was a pig, but it had a man's feet. He threw his javelin at the creature. It wounded him, but it didn't die. It ran away.

Manarmaker followed his foot prints to a big cave. He heard the sound of music and people singing happily. He came closer to the place and saw there was a party going on. It made him very frightened, because all of the guests were dead, like his grandfather, grandmother and other people who had died a long time ago.

One of the old man came toward him and said, “Go home, it is not your time to be here, this is not your place. Go home and tell people to do the good thing, and they will live in a happy place.”

Back home he kept thinking about what he saw, and what the old man told to him. But people said that he was crazy after he told them what he witnessed in the cave. Because of thinking too much, he neither took a bath nor tended to his garden anymore, and as the time passed by, he got itchy. One by one people stayed away from him – till he was completely alone.

He started to make saguer (a traditional alcoholic drink, made of the stem of the coconut tree). One day he found that someone had stolen it. He was very angry. He climbed the coconut tree and waited. In the early morning of the next day, he saw something come down from the sky towards the tree and he knew that it was the Morning Star. Manarmaker fought against the Morning Star, and he beat it.

The Morning Star said, "Please let me go, because I will die if I am not home before the sunrise. I will give the landlord's daughter to be your wife".

The Morning Star told Manarmaker that the landlord's daughter will go swimming with the other maid of this village. “Go there and climb the Bintanggur tree (a kind of mangrove), take the fruit and throw it to the water. It will touch the lady's breast and she will fall pregnant, and she will marry you.”

Manarmaker let the Morning Star go, he got to the beach and there he found the landlord's daughter swimming with her friends. He did what the Morning Star told him. After several months, the lady was pregnant, and nobody knew who was her husband. The landlord decided to let the baby be born and wait until he could walk and speak. He organised a great party and invited all men from many other areas - Sorong, Manokwari, Serui, Biak and the islands around these places.

The Landlord made a big fire and everybody danced around it for three days and three nights. He announced that if his grandson came towards a man and held him, he was the father of the boy and the husband of his daughter.

Manarmaker wasn’t invited to the party, as nobody liked him. The celebration was finished when Manarmaker arrived. The landlord asked some young men to take him away from the party, but the little boy shouted, "No! Don't take him away, he is my father!" and ran to hug him.

Everybody was surprised, but the landlord couldn’t break his promise, so Manarmaker become his daughter's husband.

That is the time when people collaborate the 'Yosim' (the traditional dance from Sorong) and 'Pancar' (from the island in Cenderawasih Gulf of Teluk Cenderawasih, including Biak, Serui, Manokwari), and the surrounding islands.

This story is the reason some of the people in Biak Island do not eat pork, as they believe that a pig had shown the way to heaven for Manarmaker.