This mysterious and intriguing island sits right on our doorstep, yet Australians rarely visit
The travel time makes it feel like it’s a long way. From Sydney you have to fly to Brisbane; from Brisbane you travel on to Port Moresby.
You then spend the night in the PNG capital, thanks to the connection times, hunkered down in an airport hotel away from the action. The next morning you trundle back to the terminal and jump on yet another flight and fly another hour and a half on a small plane to finally touch down in Bougainville.
Bougainville feels like a long way from home.Credit: Liebert Kirakar
That’s more than 24 hours of travel. You could get to pretty much anywhere in the world in that time. You could fly more than 16,000 kilometres to London. Instead, you’ve covered less than the distance to Perth.
And of course, the place itself makes it feel like it’s a long way from home, too.
They’re renovating the airport right now in Buka, the capital of the semi-autonomous region of Bougainville, so they’ve shifted the check-in area to an old aircraft hangar nearby. That hanger is open to the elements – it’s just a rusting, semi-circular sheet of metal suspended above the ground.
There’s no room under there for those waiting for their baggage, so instead we all gather in the carpark, under the baking hot sun, until our gear is unloaded from the plane.
Ben Groundwater at Buka Airport.
You’ve heard of Bougainville, of course, in the news. This was the site of a bloody civil war, a brutal conflict that lasted 10 years, well into the late 1990s. It was also the site of vast environmental damage inflicted by the Rio Tinto Group at the Panguna copper mine.
But what else do we know about this place?
Do we know its language? Or more specifically, the fact there are 13 distinct native languages spoken on an island that’s the same size as Cyprus? Do we know Bougainville’s customs, its stories, its legends, its people?
It always strikes me when I’m in the Pacific that we Australians are happy to travel so far to discover places that are unfamiliar, and yet that mystery and that intrigue sits right before us. Just touch down at Buka airport, and you understand that.
Of course, Bougainville probably isn’t your idea of a Pacific holiday. It couldn’t be further from the private island resorts of Fiji, the overwater bungalows of Tahiti, the pâtisseries of New Caledonia.
So don’t think of it as a Pacific holiday. Think of it as an adventure.
It’s basic here; rough around the edges. Drive out of the airport gates and you find yourself in a town that reminds me so much of East Africa, with its general stores pumping music from speaker stacks out the front, utes trundling by laden with passengers in the tray, men strolling dusty streets deep in conversation.
There’s no bridge across the narrow strait that separates Buka Island from Bougainville proper; you jump in a banana boat and speed across, navigating rapidly flowing waters that are funnelled through the gap.
You would travel a long way for experiences like these. You would seek out hidden corners of Latin America. You would strike out on an overland journey in Africa. But it’s all right here, in our region. In what is essentially our home.
Do you travel for history? Because Bougainville has history. Some a little more recent than you might hope.
You can visit the old Panguna mine site – with permission from the local landowners – and stare deep into the abyss, at what was once the world’s largest open-cut mine, and which played a large role in plunging Bougainville into civil war.
You can visit World War II relics of deep importance. A plane carrying Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned the Pearl Harbour attack in Hawaii, was shot down over South Bougainville. You can trek through the jungle to see its wreckage (with permission, once again, from the local landowners).
Do you travel for culture? There is so much culture in Bougainville, much of it entirely undocumented. On this journey I will go on to see things on this island that few have ever witnessed, from a festival in the Siwai area, a gathering of cultural groups singing and dancing in traditional finery, to a demonstration of “upe”, the tradition in which boys are given a towering headdress to signify their transition into manhood, deep in the jungle.
There is much culture to be experienced in Bougainville.Credit: Liebert Kirakar
Admittedly, Bougainville isn’t an easy travel experience. There’s very little tourist infrastructure here. But the Pacific region as a whole offers a full range of this sort of stuff, from festivals and WWII history in mainland PNG, to homestays in Samoa, to cultural experiences in Vanuatu, to kava ceremonies in Fiji.
This is adventure. It’s the sort of thing that will make you feel that you’re far, far from home. And yet it’s all on our doorstep.
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