Boat in harbour and Australia Day

It was a surprise one afternoon to come back to the village after a trip to the bush, and find a nice, white shiny boat in the harbour! It’s not often that there’s a boat anchored there.

It was a charter for surfer tourists. They stayed for a few days, travelled south and anchored again for a couple of nights on their way back north. I met the guys and the boat captain invited me over for dinner with them all on Australia Day. It was so amazing – who would have imagined that I would have an Australia Day BBQ with a bunch of Aussie blokes (and one woman, the captain’s wife) while out in the village! It was a great meal too – not your sausage and hamburger BBQ, rather steaks, fish and lobster tails!! Wasn’t the timing great!

It also looked really pretty at night with the boat lights reflecting on the sea. It’s hard to get a good photo at night, but I thought this one wasn’t too bad (taken from the beach).

Heading to the village Part 1 – Buka to Bougainville

When we are heading back out to the village after being in Buka for a while, everyone who is at the Centre gathers together to pray for us as we go. We always do this whenever someone is travelling.

Prayer for us going to the village:

We have a short car trip from the Centre to the boat ramp in Buka town, where there are always many little boats vying for us to choose to travel with them. I never know which one to choose, they’re all much the same to me, so we just pick any one. We load our supplies on, then make the very short trip across the water from Buka Island to Bougainville Island. It only takes 1 minute to cross.

Next blog post will talk about getting the rest of the way to the village.

Stuck boat

There is a boat that is stuck on the reef off the west coast of Buka where we were travelling. It is quite a funny story. It’s a Malaysian boat, registered in Panama and its name is ‘Le Feng’. Anyway, they had engine problems so they were drifting and not able to control their movements, and the wind or a storm brought them to settle on the reef. I can’t quite figure out how it happened, the propeller is fully out of the water, as you can see in the photos. A lot of the boat that is usually under the water, is out of the water, so it is an unusual sight. In the photos, the whole area of the boat that is red is normally under the water, and it’s only the black part that you would normally see.

Anyway, it has been sitting there for 3 months or so now, and there are still some Malaysian staff on it, plus some police, to make sure that they don’t get off the boat as they don’t have visas. One of the men apparently wants to marry a woman (any woman) from Matsungan Island, presumably so that he could stay in Bougainville.

This is the boat as seen from Matsungan Island: