Papua New Guinea

There is a huge potential for wreck photogrammetry in Kavieng and the neighbouring large island of New Hanover in Papua New Guinea, for it is here that one can find several notable wrecks of WWII aircraft. Don Silcock shares his experience working with technical expert Sean Twomey in an initiative to capture photogrammetry imagery of the wrecks before they succumb to the ravages of time and eventually disappear.

Kimbe Bay, located in the West New Britain province of Papua New Guinea, is open to visitors again after two years of pandemic restrictions. What awaits are beautiful dive sites, diverse marine life and coral reefs with great fish action. Pierre Constant shares his adventure there.

The southern coast of the large island of New Britain in Papua New Guinea is a truly remote location isolated from the northern coast by high, rugged mountain ranges with no real roads through them. There are no commercial airports here—only landing strips and old WWII airfields used for small-scale charter flights. Practically, the only way to get to the southern coast is by boat from Rabaul, on the eastern tip of New Britain.

World War II came to the Australian territory of Papua New Guinea in January 1942 when the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Rabaul in New Britain, followed shortly after by the taking of Kavieng in New Ireland. The invasion turned Papua New Guinea into a major theatre of war in the battle for the Pacific, and there were many brutal encounters between the invading Japanese and the defending Allied forces.

There is a line of thought in the scientific community that this is where it all began and the first corals originated… a large sheltered bay, roughly one third along the north coast of the island now called New Britain.

Is there another country anywhere with so much diversity? The six million inhabitants of this nation of mountains and islands are spread over 463,000km2 of mountainous tropical forests and speak over 800 different languages (12 percent of the world total). Papua New Guinea occupies half of the third largest island in the world as well as 160 other islands and 500 named cays.

I’ve been on the road for 36 hours now, and I’m pretty much on the other side of the world from where I started back in rain drenched England. At last, I’m approaching the final legs of the journey—just a short one-hour flight to go.

Things have gone smoothly so far, I’m thinking, as I wander up to the check-in desk for the last leg of my trip. “The flights full,” the attendant tells me, “You’ll have to wait until tomorrow.

Papua New Guinea. A name evocative of the exotic, this island nation is one of superlatives. Lying south of the equator some 450 miles north of Australia, it shares the world’s second largest island with the Indonesian province of West Papua.

Lying undisturbed in the deep water just off the fringing reef from the remote village of Boga Boga on the tip of Cape Vogel, is what many consider to be the best aircraft wreck in Papua New Guinea and possibly the world.