Birds of paradise sang our praises as my bride and I scrambled down an overgrown cliff at the southern end of Baliem Valley in Irian Jaya, using branches as handrails in a moment of our honeymoon that felt less romantic than heart-stoppingly uncertain. Suddenly there was nothing to hold on to except a sheer rock face. The path had narrowed into a ledge that accommodated only one foot at a time and took a sharp turn around the far side of the rock, apparently straight over the edge. About 240 m below us was the tiny missionary village of Tangma, nestled between a pristine river gorge and a grassy airstrip where a Cessna waited to return us to our hotel 30 km away.

That's when a woman of the indigenous Dani tribe emerged from behind the rock, wearing only a grass skirt and a bark-fiber net that held an infant on her back. With a bundle of wildflowers in each hand, she strolled past us as if on Fifth Avenue, laughing at the shock on our faces. A bearded Dani man followed, his penis tucked proudly into a hollow orange gourd that looked like a two-foot-long carrot. The local livery service had arrived: he carried us around the rock in his burly arms, showed us how to crawl downhill backward and led us to the airstrip.

So much for the blood-curdling myths that we had heard of Irian Jaya, the western half of New Guinea, which has been under Indonesian military rule since 1963. A soldier had warned us that unless he escorted us with his M-16 rifle (for $50 a day), the Dani would eat us like "long pigs." Travel agents say the area is too rough to visit without taking an expensive package tour. Newspapers paint a dismal picture of a paradise lost to a civil war waged by recalcitrant tribes, forests razed and rivers poisoned by mining companies.

The one plain truth is that Baliem Valley is the last bastion of the Stone Age---in all its glory. Isolated by 3,000-m peaks, most of the 1,600-m-high valley remains as untouched as it was on the day that American explorer Richard Archbold stumbled upon it in 1938.

Today Archbold could have flown from Los Angeles via Singapore--or from Jakarta, as we did--finally changing aircraft at the provincial capital of Jayapura. The final half-hour leg of the journey crosses the snow-streaked peaks that border the 60-km-long valley, and follows the zigzags of the Baliem River to the airstrip at Wamena, a cluster of tin-roofed buildings that serve as the valley's "capital."