Buin

I’ve had some wonderfully unorthodox border crossing experiences before. I walked into silver-back gorilla territory of Congo and rode a horse from Honduras to Guatemala, and I’ve taken my share of private and public boats between islands, but the little banana boat that took me from Bougainville to the Shortland Islands was a pretty simple journey. If I hadn’t known before that a border existed between these islands, I wouldn’t have believed it, nor would there have been so much stress around getting a boat in time. Its hard to explain in words but a google map search will show you that big Bouganville, as underdeveloped and inaccessible as the southern part is from the rest of Papua, is only 10 km from the Solomon owned Shortland islands, and they are just a tiny, undeveloped, far off islands in comparison to the rest of the Solomons… so the Solomon islanders go to Buin, and Bouganvillians trade with them. They exchange fish and jewelry at the market, and the only petrol station for all their little banana boats is in Buin.

Rainy Ghizo

There’s a small market on Thursday (mostly catering to the Sabbath observing Seventh-day Adventists), and the big Market on Saturday, when other Bouganvillians from Arawak and even Buka come all the way down to Buin. I got there on a Wednesday night, and stayed at one of the unnamed guesthouses (there are around 3 or 4 but none of them are named or signed but all cost 180/120 Kina per night with/without dinner and breakfast). The PMV driver from Arawak (PMV’s leave from the Arawak market in the afternoon, around 3pm, but also early mornings on Thursday and Saturday) took me to the main guesthouse, or I guess the best known one, which is owned by a guy who owns ‘Lease Investments’ but run by a plump little buck-toothed lady. I had missed her dinner serving so had to wander around the sleepy town to find the one open shop selling some canned tuna and cold coca cola, since the betel nut and beers didn’t seem an adequate meal.

my captain getting fuel in Buin

The next morning I was up with the sun, which is an hour too soon for anyones liking (Bougainville follows the time zone of mainland Papua New Guinea, even though they’re hundreds of kilometers east in the Solomon Island time zone), and the market started shortly after. The Solomon islanders were easy to spot, with their lighter coloured skin and greasy shell jewelry for sale, but some of them blended right in with their jet black skin and smokey stinky fish that other Bougainvillians also sold. The market lasts until they’ve sold all their goods, then they drive down to the beach 15 mins away and roll their banana boats over the sand back into the sea for their journey back to the Shortlands. I waited to see who would finish first, since I had an afternoon flight leaving at 15:30, and by 12 noon I had negotiated a ride for less than $10. It was a young couple and their child and nanny, and we filled up on petrol, ice cream and Fanta before jumping on the little put-put motor boat. The airport is on its own separate island, a little further down the coast of Shortland, and it took a whole hour to get there.

boarding the plane at Balalae

Don’t think of an airport airport, just think of a sleepy green island, and the only thing differentiating it from the rest of the islands scattered about was the bunch of banana boats anchored to its shore, and the barely visible clearing down the middle of the island. It’s a grass run way, and a small concrete structure had a man at a desk with some paper and pens, and a scale from the 1920’s to weigh you and your luggage. The check in was just a verbal spelling of my first name and the ticket number from my email confirmation. There are 2 flights on Thursday afternoons, but only one stops in nearby Gizo, the other one heading straight to Honiara, Solomons capital. My flight to Gizo came first, even though it wasn’t supposed to be due for another hour, and they ushered me on. No security check, no document check, no gangway, just me, a plane, and a bunch of people that didn’t talk or treat me any differently than Bougainvillians on our way to civilization.

A few notes on the border I did or didn’t cross:

I couldn’t get an exit stamp from PNG because the guy in Buka told me there was a guy in Buin to do it, but when I arrived at his ‘office’ (it was just the basement of a house with a colour-print, laminated sign saying ‘Papua New Guinea Customs’), nothing was set up except his computer and printer, and he didn’t have a stamp or stamp pad, or an exit card or anything official feeling. But, he wrote me a very lovely letter, which took him forever and a day to type out and print (even though it was from a copy and pasted letterhead from the last tourist that did this crossing in July), and not one person read or checked that letter between Buin and Gizo.

You can only go from PNG to the Solomons with most western passports, since entering PNG requires a visa you can only get upon arrival at the International airport in Port Moresby. If you live in PNG or have a multiple-entry visa for PNG, then you could go the other way, which would certainly be easier since you don’t have to worry about catching a once-weekly plane, but then you’d have to wing it for your own boat transport from the Balalae airport to Shortland island, and/or the boat to Buin… unless it’s a market day and you happen to find one of the 5 or 10 sellers going across. There’s very few people around, no banks or petrol stations, but the friendly people and handful of guesthouses make it a totally hospitable place to be lost or stuck. Once in Buin, you can make the 3 hour PMV ride to Arawak or 5 hours to Buka (where there is a bank and airport) each morning. They’re almost finished building an airport in Arawak, but that will probably only fly within PNG, not to the Solomons or internationally… but who knows, anything can happen in a place so rich in mining and tourism prospect.

Once in Gizo, a woman named Rose will have to stamp you into the Solomons, giving you a tourist visa for however many days you might need. She loves chocolate cake, and sweet talking her with a slice of that and some supporting documents (ie. A copy of your departure flight from the Solomons and this seemingly useless letter I got from PNG customs) plus a photocopy of your passport (she doesn’t have a photocopy machine) will get you in without any hassle… even if it’s a day or two late, no one seems to care you’ve informally entered the Solomons.

I had heard of this island state, but always heard “Bogan Ville,” which made sense since it was Australian occupied for so long, but didn’t add up why there would only be bogans. But, its actually named after some French guy Captain Louis-Antoine de Baugainville who mapped it for the first time a long long time ago but never set foot on land when he sailed up the east coast of the island in 1768. It was the burial ground of many Japanese during WWII, while Australians and Americans also left some dismal footprints, and It just came out of a bloody “crisis,” a war waged between Bouganvillieans and the Australian over a ludicrous mining industry that took copper and lime-stone from the land without proper land-rights compensation. After being discovered in 1964 and thousands of people and millions of dollars were invested in the mine, Panguna mine was shutdown in 1989, and a civil war broke out as Papua New Guinea’s richest town became a black hole, deserted by the government and declared an independent republic in 1990. Some 12 years later, Papua New guinea recognized Bougainville’s claims to autonomy, and now that peace has been restored, only the burned-down remnants of Arawa, the mining town now squatted by locals, and a few road blocks to the mine still remind one of what actually happened.

Bougainvillians are usually black all over, but these kids have some red or brown blood, with light hair, and oh so cute

I flew from Rabaul to the auntonomous state of Bougainville, where a smaller island north of the main island called Buka with a city of the same name has remained largely unscathed and now full of expats (they say its one of the fastest growing cities in Papua, along with Kokopo). I stayed with some Kiwi girls, who volunteer for the Volunteer Service Abroad, and also the head guy for Australian Aid there. He comically explained to me its not fair to be white in Bougainville, since everyone can always seem him at night but he always jumps out of his socks everytime someone passes him and says “Evening!” and he can barely make out the whites of their eyes right beside him. They really are as black as night, and one of the independence slogans I saw for Bougainville was “Black is beautiful.” They call other people, who aren’t jet-black, brown or red, which I nearly could have resembled as far as skin tone, but since I didn’t have the fluffy hair, I was white as white. Some of the super-black skin had brown or red hair, which looked almost blonde in the contrast, but I haven’t really figured out why. It cant just be sun-bleaching, since I’ve never seen that in West Africa, but it could be genetic, or even a sign of malnutrition.

I took a PMV from the north of the island accross the Buka passage to Arawa, a 4 hour journey, and made the mistake of not peeing on our pee break. So when I finally got the courage to ask the driver to stop for me, he nearly broke a sweat trying to find a place, since everywhere he slowed down to check out, he’d speed off again saying “no no, plenty people.” I couldn’t see a soul around, and quite frankly I thought we were in the middle of nowhere, but finally he liked one patch of jungle more and let me out to pee. The woman beside me came to guard watch, and after 3 mosquito bites on my rear end, I returned to the car relieved.

I couchsurfed with a german guy who works for Geneva’s International Committee of the Red Cross, and his project there is fascinationg. They’re helping families find missing persons (which are mostly bodies in unlocated mass-graves) to facilitate the process of closure to many people’s grieving. The energy in Arawa made me strangely aware of this unfinished business, with the spooky energy of a destroyed town and its forgotten history never properly dealt with. People were peaceful, but also incredibly timid, shy and quiet, their inaudible voices rising only out of a whisper if you were more than 5 m away and heard a friendly greeting of “abynoon” (pidgin for “good afternoon”).

Toby took me snorkeling at one of the most beautiful coral reefs I’ve ever seen, and if you could ignore the sunken car batteries and floating plastic, you’d almost believe you were creeping up onto the Great Barrier reef. More than that, it was on a totally deserted beach, backed only by a few private fwellings, so keeping with their very sensitive land-use rights, we paid for our snorkel with a few beetel nuts to the land owner.

A Solomon Islander/Bougainvillian couple gave me Fanta and icecream before our boat journey together from the market in Buin to the airport in Balalae

Eventually I ended my tour of Bougainville on the southern end, where the town of Buin is closer to nearby Solomon Islands than Arawa. It took another 3 hour PMV to get to the end of the island, and while I lucked out with the passenger seat up front, the rest of the men sat in the open-air cab of the jeep, hooting and hollering the whole way. I’m not sure if they were screams of joy or just normal greetings, but all the passerby’s hollered back and the fireflies seemed to twinkle more in response.