THE FARTHER WE GOT from Agats, the stranger things became, as the villages grew gradually more primitive and less accustomed to visitors. It didn't take long in any village for news to spread that the aliens were coming. In one, when I asked if they often had visitors like us, the elders pondered a bit. "Yes, they say they have many visitors," Rufus translated. "Two this year."

Jeff held a particular fascination for the locals—owing to the ministrations of missionaries, his long hair and bushy beard made him a ringer for the one white man that most of them knew by name. They enjoyed practicing a few words of English on him: "Hello, Jesus Christ! Nice to meet you."

As we grew more comfortable, I grew more competent, and things began to click. By day three I'd begun to enjoy myself as I dug into the reporting and, more surprisingly, discovered an inner TV persona I didn't know I possessed. We found people whose parents had sold skulls to Rockefeller and men who remembered the bespectacled foreigner. We interviewed one of the two "boat boys" who had been with the heir on his catamaran just before he disappeared. The process wasn't flawless: During that interview, as I was sitting on his hut floor on the riverbank in the village of Sjuru, I looked away from his ancient face, shrouded in the smoke of his cigarette, to see Nat wiping the camera's lens with his T-shirt. The humidity, exacerbated by a dozen people jammed into a 12-foot-by-12-foot hut, had gotten to the camera, and there was condensation inside the lens. We paused the interview and switched to our backup camera.

"This one's all fogged up, too," Nat said, 20 minutes later. "Nothing I can do. But I got plenty of good stuff before it went."

Having a routine helped maintain some normalcy. At each new village, Rufus would disembark first and explain what we were doing. We'd usually shoot one piece outside and then go into the village's yeu (pronounced like "joe"), the traditional, male-dominated longhouse that sits at the physical and cultural center of every Asmat village and serves as kitchen, community center, house of worship, hostel, and overall nexus of life.

While filming in a yeu was difficult, sleeping in one was nearly impossible. The Asmat sleep little, believing that their spirits leave their slumbering bodies and commingle with the spirits of the dead. Every night was a chorus of mosquitoes, dogs yelping, pigs rooting around under the floor, babies crying, old men coughing and laughing, and fires being stoked. Yeus have no chimneys; keeping the smoke in helps keep bugs out and preserves food but contributed to mornings of coughing—"yeu lung," we called it.

But the welcome and the warmth of the people (most of the time) more than made up for any discomfort. All the locals asked for in return was answers about our own culture.

"He wants to know where you are from, and how you got here," said Rufus, translating a question from one village elder. I didn't know where to begin, so I let Rufus take over.

"I telled them that where you come from, it is so far away that when the sun is going down here, it is coming up there," he said, explaining the distance between us. "I said that you are from the other half of the world."