Just recently, about a year ago, I had the most remarkable trip. I thought that that world was gone, that disconnected world. But I got to go to Papua New Guinea. And up the Sepik River and to the Trobriand Islands and I had a friend, Courtney Ross, who was sailing around the world. And she was... She was going to go up the Sepik and like ask to join that part of it. And I got to see there's still parts of the world where it's like Africa had been. That we would go to villages that no white person had visited the village in living memory. And I would meet children who would want to touch my hair, my... You know, have the same interaction that I remembered from Africa. And of course we'd go into the village and always first it would be interacting with the children, the adults would stay back.
And I would have a trick which is I would... I had my iPhone and of course there was no cell coverage but I'd turn on my iPhone in selfie mode and all the children would gather around and I would take a selfie. And they would be amazed and horrified and excited at seeing themselves on the phone. And then I'd make friends with the children and then the adults would come and look at what was happening.
And so, and then we would usually bring a soccer ball with us, we'd give a soccer ball to the children as a sort of gift of arriving at the village. And that was always a successful gift, the children would start playing with the soccer ball and we'd get off to a good start. Which was a good thing because as it turns out there was a group that had gone in a couple of weeks before us, up the Sepik, and done kind of what we did of exploring villages and they went into the wrong village with the wrong guides and got killed with bows and arrows. So it was actually kind of dangerous, but, if you didn't sort of hit it off well with people. Each of the villages spoke a different language because the cultures were very isolated, had been cannibals until recently. And so, you know, the common language that they speak is this sort of pidgin Dutch English language. It's the only thing they can speak to each other.