The Volcanic Post

A few days ago at the cultural show we met a local woman, Rebecca, who gave us some info on the upcoming festival, and about the surrounding area. She ended up helping us arrange transportation to Rabaul and to Mt. Tarvurvur, an active volcano we wanted to climb. On Saturday morning she picked us up in a PMV (Public Motor Vehicle) with another tourist from Israel, Leo. We headed off to Rabaul and ended up taking another PMV to Matupit Island, a small village just outside of Rabaul that wasn’t totally destroyed by the volcanic eruption in 1994. From there we were introduced to a few of Rebecca’s relatives who we to take us to the volcano. The idea was to paddle across the bay to the base of the mountain, but once in the canoe and after an hour of paddling and getting nowhere we realized the increasing wind was going to make the voyage impossible. Instead we opted to take a walk around Rabaul with the guys and see the ruins of the once-thriving town that was almost completely buried by volcanic ash nearly twenty years ago.

We stopped at the local market to buy some food and fuel first, the other half of the plan being to stay at Rebecca’s brother’s home in Matupit Island for the night and make another try at the volcano early in the morning. We strolled around the town drinking beers with the guys, except for Leo, who everyone was slowly disliking more and more, due to his critical, ignorant, cynical, and typical Israeli attitude. We even nicknamed him Mr. Negative. Rabaul itself has a real ghost-town feel to it. The history here is amazing; the Germans were the first people to establish colonialism there, being pushed out by the Australians in WWI. Just over twenty years later the Japanese arrived, establishing a huge naval base at Rabaul that was never conquered by force. Now, after a volcanic eruption, nearly all of the historical gem is buried in ash. The main street that was built by the Germans now sits under a foot of volcanic ash. Some monuments such as Admiral Yamamoto’s Bunker and the Royal Yacht Club still stand, presenting an eerie spectacle, relics of their former selves. The airport side of the city ended up the worst, being closest to the volcano. The terminal building is barely visible, buried under meters of ash, the land completely barren and unusable.

Staying with Rebecca’s family was a great way to experience local life and a get a feel for their local culture, which can be pretty complex. One of the coolest things presented to us was the island’s use of their own currency, which is tied in the the Kina, the local currency of Papua New Guinea. Basically they can measure a value of goods with these cords of shells braided into them, a primitive type of money unlike any I’ve ever seen. The amazing thing is that you can make money off of it as a local, simply by paying for them to be made, buying goods like a sack of rice with it, then selling the rice for more money then you paid to make the shell money in the first place. This is an economic professors nightmare. We did manage to buy a string of them off of Rebecca’s mother.

Now for the coolest part of the story. We woke up early to low winds and we were able to jump in the canoe and paddle over to the base of the volcano. Upon landing on the beach, I was amazed at the terrain, something I’d never seen anything like. The beach was black volcanic sand, forming out of a wide lava field that looked like something from an alien planet. The volcanic eruption had laid waste to the entire area, a large stand of dead palms sticking out of the volcanic ash like matchsticks. Strange colourings of yellow and green painted large sections of rock where poisonous sulphurous gases leak out of fissures in the ground. The entire scenery of the mountain is set in a kind of chaotic pattern, with small gullies snaking their way through the ash, down the mountain and through the lava fields. Small plums of volcanic gas can also be seen leaking from various points on the mountain, giving it a hellish look. Walking on the volcanic ash you can hear the hollowness below you, likely old (or possibly active) lava tubes snaking underground. The ascent is a tough one, the last leg of the mountain is steep and the ash is loose, making the footing very difficult. The last leg is also where there’s the most gas vents.

Arriving at the top we realized we it was a false crater, not the active one, a mere two minutes stroll up the old crater’s rim. Our guides (if you can call them that, it was their first time up, too) took us up the side of the mountain that turned out to be the right side to take, being completely upwind of poisonous gas clouds that were spewing out of the active crater with ferocity. The density of the cloud and the amount of gas spewing out of the crater was amazing. Thanks to the high winds, we were able to get close, only catching occasional whiffs of rotten eggs, only feet away from gas erupting from the bowels of the Earth, gas that would certainly kill us had the winds shifted for a few seconds (sorry mom and dad). We had our few moments of glory, spitting into the crater and throwing a rock into the cloud, watching it disappear into the cloud right away, then got our asses back down the mountain and stopped pushing our luck with death. Arriving at the bottom we chatted with a bunch of guys who had canoed over from Rabaul to dig up the eggs of native pheasants that nest in the ash at the foot of the volcano. From there Matt directed my to an old Japanese naval gun on the beach. I couldn’t reach it though, due to the fact that the water on that end of the beach was literally near boiling point. Honestly, the beach was fucking steaming; my feet could only bear to be on the sand for a second of two. We jumped in the canoe parched and needing water, but fully satisfied with seeing one of the most powerful forces of nature at work right before our eyes and below our feet.

By the time we arrived back at the village, Matt and I were exhausted and were ready to call it a day. We started back in a PMV towards Rabaul, making a detour to drop the selfish Leo off at a hot springs that the other seven of us didn’t want to go to. The whole car was happy to be rid of him and we had a good laugh at his expense. We then headed to an old Submarine base used by the Japanese during WWII. An old man there named George, who was familiar to us from the PNG episode of an awesome Canadian travel show called Departures (that partly inspired me to do this trip), toured us around the huge caves, telling us stories of the days during the Japanese occupation. His son then showed us around some bunkers and fortifications above the tunnels. Seeing the beauty of this place, it’s hard to believe it was part of a full scale world war, being a major focal point of fighting for many years. Just meters off the shore, the ocean floor dives off a shelf to amazing depths of three hundred meters, making an amazing contrast of blue when viewed from the sheer cliffs above. I hope I get a chance to further explore that area at some point and hang out with George some more, he was a pretty cool old man.