 ARAWA
Arawa is the capital of Bougainville
and is located on the eastern side of the island. It was home
to many of the miners from the near by Panguna copper mine. In
it's prime it was home to a Woolworths, Shell service station,
squash courts, government buildings, police station, hospital,
telephone exchange, schools, air strip and a number of other
modern amenities.
During the crisis Arawa was abandoned
and all the locals moved up into the hills to escape from the PNG
Defence Force. I was told a story by our security guard that they
stayed in the hills for two years. I asked him how they knew when
to come back down. He said they sent the oldest man down to Arawa
to have a look and when he didn't return they just stayed up their
longer.
 During
my time in Bougainville I lived in Arawa at Club Gecko II ("Gecko
House"). A number of the HQ PMG staff lived in Arawa. The RASIGS
(Army communications specialists) personnel lived in Gecko, Chook
Pen and Tropicana and the officers and civilians lived in Pacific
house and Raffles house. Some houses were typical tropical stilt
houses and some were slightly elevated wooden houses. All were
walking distance to HQ PMG. We used large diesel generators for
power and had normal 240V adapters for our electronic devices.
 In
2000, Arawa was still pretty overgrown and run down. The remnants
of the crisis were everywhere. The Woolworths was just a wrecked
shell of a building with everything stripped out. Ambulances were
burnt and wrecked on the side of the road. The jungle had swallowed
a number of buildings and wasn't stopping soon. A number of shops
were operating in Arawa in the building that had been damaged during
the crisis.
 The
people in Arawa were always nice to us and we made friends with
our neighbor - Deano and his family, who were originally from Australia.
Arawa beach was very nice and we would run down there on a weekend
for a look. I loved my time in Arawa and would love to go back
one day to see how much it has changed.
Below are some cool things I
have about Arawa. I have a number of 360 degree photos of locations
around Arawa. Google Earth hasn't got a very high quality image
of Arawa yet but cross fingers they will update down the track.
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