The less pretty sights of Arawa

What can we say? Bougainville is still recovering from a civil war, and Arawa took a bit of a beating.

Here are some of the buildings that are looking a bit worse for wear.

Looks like Arawa even had a squash court! I don’t know if there’s anywhere in PNG at present that has a squash court! (Maybe Port Moresby does, but I wouldn’t know).

Lastly, here’s a road that’s not in quite as good a shape as the ones I posted earlier.

Ok, now after reading this post, go back and look at the previous post of the nice sights and rejoice that this town is slowly building itself back up again. Arawa is a nice town with a lot of potential, and it’s going places.

The nice sights of Arawa

As well as some pretty roads, there are some other nice sights in Arawa. Here is their beautiful river, which is right in the centre of town. You pass it, going over a bridge, just after the market (or just before the market if you’re going the other direction!).

How cool is this sculpture of the world? which, ironically is missing PNG. Apparently it used to be even cooler, as it used to be a bit of a fountain with water flowing over the world. Sounds great.

This is a lovely mural on the side of a building in the middle of ‘Beautiful Arawa.’

This technically isn’t a ‘sight’ because it is inside a building, but I was so excited by it that I had to share it anyway. It is the inside of the relatively new supermarket. Look at it! It’s so bright and shiny and clean and spacious!! And it has a lot of stock – things you can’t get in Buka. I even took photos of the food on the shelves, but I’ll spare you them, as I’m sure you know what good supermarkets look like.

Nice Arawa roads

I went to Arawa for the first time a couple of months ago. It used to be a big modern town in the early 80’s. The streets in some areas looked like roads that you would see in Australia. I thought they were very nice with the median strip in the middle. Looking at these photos, you could be mistaken for thinking that they are of a small country town in Australia.

And here’s an intersection. It may not look very exciting to you. In fact it may just look like a normal intersection. That is what I found so exciting about it. I haven’t seen an intersection quite like this one in PNG before. It even has a slip lane for turning left! It felt really strange – ‘surreal’ is maybe what you would call it.