{"id":3251,"date":"2017-05-22T12:43:22","date_gmt":"2017-05-22T11:43:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/?p=3251"},"modified":"2017-05-22T12:43:22","modified_gmt":"2017-05-22T11:43:22","slug":"rabaul-and-grove-island-shaped-by-volcanos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/rabaul-and-grove-island-shaped-by-volcanos\/","title":{"rendered":"Rabaul and Grove Island: shaped by volcanos"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been quite a while since my last blog post.\u00a0 During the past five months I have been travelling a lot, mostly with limited internet and often with limited time to write.\u00a0 So a catch up is long overdue.\u00a0 Since December 2016 I have been working in New Zealand, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, New Georgia, The Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, The Philippines, Ecuador, Colombia. I started writing this in Panama, as we passed through the Panama Canal in to the Atlantic.\u00a0 Almost three weeks later I am now in the south of France, driving through the Medoc vineyards, and this blog is still not complete!\u00a0 I use the excuse that time to write is generally limited to late nights in airport departure lounges or the odd hour snatched in cafes or bumpy coach journeys. However, I have run out of excuses so now must buckle down and finish the damn thing.\u00a0 So here goes.<\/p>\n

\"A

A local boy in a dugout canoe paddles by us. Garove Island, Vitu Islands, Bismark Sea, Papua New Guinea.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

A significant chunk of February was spent in Papua New Guinea.\u00a0 This was not a country I had visited before, nor one I knew a great deal about.\u00a0 The little I did know was limited to snippets such as lurid tales of cannibals, penis-sheathed hill tribesmen, the rascals of Port Morsbey and the effects of mining on the country.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We arrived in Papua New Guinea at the port city of Rabaul. A recent Lonely Planet guidebook described Rabaul thus: \u2018Walking the lonely streets of eastern Rabaul is like stepping into an apocalyptic film<\/i>\u2019.\u00a0 Spending a day there I can understand what they meant.\u00a0 Rabaul is something of a ghost town. In September, 1994, Mount Tavurvur erupted, burying much of Rabaul and Simpson Harbour under thousands of tons of ash. \u00a0The ash that rained down destroyed most of the buildings in Rabaul.\u00a0 This was the second major eruption in living memory.\u00a0 In 1937 Mount Tavurvur erupted and almost totally destroyed Rabaul.\u00a0 These two eruptions, along with the continuing low level activity, have inhibited rebuilding and development, so although the fantastic natural harbour is still in use as a commercial port, the streets immediately beyond have an aura of post-apocalyptic desolation.\u00a0 That being said, it is only a few blocks walk to the open air market.\u00a0 When we arrived this was a pretty busy place, with bananas, peppers, sweet potato, and tobacco for sale.\u00a0 Rabaul did not feel unsafe, nor unfriendly, simply down on its luck.\u00a0 A couple of general stores were all that was open.\u00a0 It did not seem like the sort of place that would have a caf\u00e9, let alone a restaurant.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Garove Island.<\/p>\n

Our next port of call was Garove Island.\u00a0 Garove island is essentially the exposed tip of Garove Volcano, a largely submarine volcano in the Bismarck Sea, some 40 miles north of New Britain Island.\u00a0 The island itself is a shaped like a giant donut, some 7 nautical miles in diameter.\u00a0 This ring of land is in fact the emerged rim of the volcano caldera.\u00a0 A mile-wide breach in south side of this rim allows ship entry to the large body of sheltered water within, known as Johann Albrecht harbour (presumably named after Johan Albrecht de Mandelslo, the 17th<\/sup> Century German traveller \u2013 by accounts a rather colourful character \u2013 rather than Johnan Albrecht the Russian diplomat, Johan Albrecht the German theologian or even Johan Albrecht the 17th<\/sup> Century German prophet , but who knows; I have not been able to find any information detailing why the harbour is so named<\/i>).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Two

Two young boys playing in an old inner tube, Garove Island, Vitu Islands, Bismark Sea, Papua New Guinea.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Unlike lagoons within coral atolls, this harbour is not shallow, most of it is over 100 metres deep.\u00a0 Thus snorkelling (or SCUBA diving for that matter) is limited to the steep walls of the caldera or a small, shallow area on the east side on the harbour.\u00a0 This shallow area lies between a little un-named island and the inner wall of Garove Island. A glance at a chart reveals that this island is, in fact, the tip of a rocky promontory projecting in to the caldera.\u00a0 Apart from the island-forming tip, the rest of the promontory lies just a few metres below the surface.\u00a0 This was where we chose to run our snorkelling operation. \u00a0As one might expect on such a small patch of shallow seabed surrounded by deep water, the coral present was quite limited.<\/p>\n

\"Soft

Soft corals, Johann Albrecht harbour, Garove Island, Vitu Islands, Bismark Sea, Papua New Guinea.<\/p><\/div>\n

There were quite a few soft corals and a few sponges though, so the area was interesting if not terribly diverse.\u00a0 The presence of significant numbers of white people and two Zodiac inflatables piqued the curiosity of a couple of young local boys playing in the water nearby.\u00a0 They were having fun splashing around in an old vehicle tire inner tube when they spotted us.\u00a0 Wearing big grins, they paddled across to us, the older boy sculling with what looked like a small piece of driftwood. The younger towed a towed a little, hand-made wooden boat attached to a pole and string.\u00a0 Quite what they made of us is hard to know.<\/p>\n

\"Sponge,

Sponge, Garove Island, Papua New Guinea<\/p><\/div>\n

They spoke no English and we did not know what language they spoke (there are 840 extant languages listed for PNG; English is an official language but spoken only by a tiny percentage of the country\u2019s population).\u00a0 Thus our communication was limited to smiles, waves and thumbs ups, but that was okay.\u00a0 Garove Island, with its lush vegetation, warm clear waters and (at least from our snapshot perspective) idyllic lifestyle seemed as far removed as could be from the dusty dreariness of Rabaul. \u00a0But of course snapshot impressions of tropical paradises all too often fail to capture underlying problems of poverty, lack of opportunity, and health problems, so I make the comparison cautiously.\u00a0 Both Rabaul and Garove island have been shaped by volcanos.\u00a0 Rabaul more recently and more catastrophically.\u00a0 Garove is the visible remains of a stratovolcano (reports of most recent eruptions vary from tens of thousands of years to possibly only a few hundred years ago).<\/p>\n

I finally finish this blog in a small cafe in Oban, in the West Highlands of Scotland. \u00a0I promise the next one will not take so long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Garove island is essentially the exposed tip of Garove Volcano, a largely submarine volcano in the Bismarck Sea, some 40 miles north of New Britain Island. The island itself is a shaped like a giant donut, some 7 nautical miles in diameter. This ring of land is in fact the emerged rim of the volcano caldera.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3255,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1021,1018,1024,1025,1020,1019,1022,1023],"class_list":["post-3251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bismark-sea","tag-garove-island","tag-johann-albrecht-harbour","tag-new-guinea","tag-papua-new-guinea","tag-rabaul","tag-vitu-islands","tag-volcanos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3251"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3261,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions\/3261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinmunrophotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}