> > by Barry Stone
It was meant to be an uneventful day, cruising northfrom Cairns for a series of ‘wet landings’ in inflatable rubber zodiacs onto some of Papua New Guinea’s most remote islands and atolls.
It was dusk and we were alone on the forward deck of the Orion, fresh from its season cruising Antarctic waters watching its ice-hardened bow plough through the Coral Sea while 73 other passengers were either playing trivia in the lounge relaxing in the bar or in their cabins.We had the bow and the roaring wind and the setting sun all to ourselves when suddenly, out of nowhere, the exhilaration that we thought was still a day’s cruising away, arrived early.
Three Red-footed Boobys appeared above us, elegant seabirds and accomplished divers who specialise in feeding off squid and small fish that venture too close to the surface. They’d somehow found us, a rogue ship in the middle of an empty ocean, and began diving from a height of 20 metres into massed schools of airborne flying fish we’d likely never have seen without the aid of our red-footed guides, who were plucking them from the air with a skill and precision worthy of a BBC documentary.
It was thrilling to watch, though it was just a taste of things to come. Deboyne Lagoon is a fringing reef in the Louisiade Archipelago, a 26,000km2 expanse of volcanic and coral islands 200 kilometres southeast of Papua New Guinea bounded by the Solomon Sea to the north and the Coral Sea to the south.
The first European to sight them was Luis Vaez de Torres in 1606 who named them after the king of France, Louis XV, and it was here between the islands of Nivani and Panapompom that we saw the first of several reminders that these islands were once a battlefield.
A Japanese A6M Zero ditched here 100 metres off the beach in just three to four metres of water 68 years ago after its aircraft carrier, the Shoho, was sunk on the first day of the Battle of the Coral Sea and leaving its pilot without a runway. We snorkelled over it, dived down and saw the joystick and pilot’s seat, and if you’ve never seen a sunken World War 2 fighter plane before it’s an experience that stays with you.
“Did the pilot survive?” was the question on everyone’s lips. Its wings and fuselage were still intact and it looked to me to have been a decent, survivable landing. I asked a villager and he told me yes, the pilot did survive, though another pilot who ditched his Zero just a few kilometres away wasn’t so lucky.
The following day we anchored at Egum Atoll. Egum Atoll is the best kind of tropical paradise, the kind that no one knows about. In fact it’s so unknown even being told exactly how to get there leaves you none the wiser. What’s the point of knowing that it is 50 kilometres south-west of the Woodlark Islands and 82 kilometres northeast of Normanby Island if you don’t know where they are?
In fact Egum Atoll is so far removed from civilisation that the islanders who live in the village of Panapompom on neighbouring Yanaba Island couldn’t even be contacted to say we were coming. Orion’s Justin Friend, whose specialty is finding unambiguously remote places by hook or by crook (he once rowed to an island in a 12-metre dinghy with two 44 gallon drums strapped to its side for heaven’s sake) had heard stories of a small community of 200 islanders who lived on Yanaba from a privately chartered American clipper that stumbled on it during a cruise to nowhere in particular.
Justin hired a small boat out of the nearby Trobriand Islands and moored it out of sight of Panapompom before sailing ashore right out of an empty ocean and cheekily asking: “Is this Australia?” The locals were gobsmacked, and Orion pencilled in a new destination.
If you’re a geologist you’ll know of course that Egum isn’t really an atoll at all but a flat, narrow submarine plateau known as a reeftopped carbonate bank, which for us non-geologists means it has a spectacular coral reef with a 45-metre drop-off that seems to contain half the world’s fish and will keep you mesmerised for as long as you’re able to stay afloat.
Kitava Island, one of the minor islands in the Trobriand Islands’ group was next. First visited by Europeans in 1793 the Trobriands were referred to as ‘The Islands of Love’ in 1914 by the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who mistook their tradition of encouraging romantic behaviour amongst their young as promiscuity when it was merely a traditional means of finding a suitable partner.
The so-called ‘down time’ between islands was filled with lectures on reef formation, the region’s flora and its fauna, its geology and the origins of Melanesian Pidgin, one of the world’s many ‘trade languages’ developed to help European colonial powers communicate with indigenous peoples.
If you want you can learn about the ‘Ecological Niche’ theory which says different species evolve to feed on their own individualised foods so they no longer need to compete with other species for survival, or that leeches in PNG are land-based, not water-based and if they get on your eye you can’t pull them off because their teeth are embedded in your cornea.
We handled rhinoceros beetles and sea cucumbers and learnt to recognise the Stinging Bush and its tiny silica shards embedded with toxins that will sting like blazes if you brush up against them and sweat bees that feed on salt and will lick the perspiration right off your face.
On that rare occasion you happen to meet a westerner out here, prepare yourself for an interesting story. On Lambom at the tip of New Ireland we met a female missionary from the United States who’d been living alone at the end of a village in a raised timber house since 1994. Supported by Wycliffe Bible Translators she was translating the New Testament into the local Tolai language and had completed Matthew and Mark and is currently working her way through Luke. That’s two and a bit Gospels in 16 years.
The jungle around Lambom remains some of the most inhospitable and remote jungle anywhere in the world though ironically there are inland roads through here built by the Germans in the 19th century, composed mostly of crushed coral, that are supposed to be some of the best roads in the entire country.
About eight years ago a local man gathered together a collection of American World War 2 vehicles from their encroaching environment – trucks and jeeps mostly – abandoned when US forces left here at the war’s end and promised they’d return to claim one day, then rang the US government to ask when they were coming to take them back. Their reply was, well, inconclusive.
We also dived into yet more coral off Little Pigeon Island in the Bismarck Archipelago, scaled the devastated lunar landscape that is the eastern flank of Rabaul’s volcanic and still-smouldering Mt Tavurvur, saw the remains of a failed 19th-century French colonial outpost, crawled into Admiral Yamamoto’s concrete command bunker, dived on two submerged Japanese tanks in the Duke of York Islands, and found the most famous plane wreck in all of Papua New Guinea.
But that’s another story.