Here are some more photos of our time at Sohano Island (above). Since I am blogging by email, I can't write in between the photos and all the text has to be at the bottom, but let me tell you about the photos above.
The first photo is a view from Sohano Island, looking toward Buka Island and town.
Sohano Island sits in the middle of the Buka Passage, towards one end. In the second photo, on the left is Buka Island, and on the right is Bougainville Island.
We decided to have a picnic lunch at Sohano, so before we left Buka, we each bought a cassava cake with banana in the middle. It is a nice food, although it doesn't look all that glamorous in the (third) picture. It is very filling! I was only able to eat half of mine that day and had the rest the following day for lunch.
Lastly, the beautiful water. Although the photo is small, I hope you can get a sense for how lovely it is. There is a strong current and when we went snorkelling we really noticed it. You have to swim with a little bit of effort to make progress when going in the opposite direction from the current, but when you're going in the same direction, you can just float and let the current carry you.
Today Rebekah and I went to Sohano Island, which sits in the Buka Passage, that is the small bit of ocean between Bougainville and Buka Island. There are some war memorials at Sohano and I visited them on your behalf. The Australian memorial was a bit off the beaten track! It wasn't very far, but the path to it was almost non-existent and we ended up with lots of prickly burrs in our clothes for our effort! The first 3 photos above are of this memorial. I think the words are pretty clear on the first picture, but the second one is a bit harder to see – it says: In memory of the service given by the coast watchers and the loyal natives who assisted them 1939-1945. The Japanese war memorial was more prominent and we just walked on nice short grass to get to it. It is in the 4th picture above. You can see it from the sea when you are travelling on a motor boat as it is at the top of a hill at a point on the island. The final photo is of a shell of a plane that crashed at Sohano. What I wonder is, did the plane crash at that exact spot, or was it moved to this more prominent position? We also went snorkelling and it was great when you were in the midst of a whole school of fish, loads of them surrounding you. Those were rather unspectacular fish, but we also saw the nice brightly coloured ones too. No photos of the snorkelling as we don't have waterproof cameras! I took a lot of photos of the views from the island, so I will put them up in a blog post in a few days.
