Rabaul
"The town is still half-buried under 1994's ash. Nobody seems particularly bothered, which tells you everything."
I did not understand Rabaul’s geography until I was already inside it. You drive along the coastline of New Britain island and the road curves around what looks like an ordinary bay, and then someone explains that you are, in fact, inside the caldera of a supervolcano — that the ring of hills enclosing the harbour is the rim of a volcanic crater twelve kilometres across, and that the town of Rabaul occupies a peninsula on the inner edge of this enormous geological structure. This is, by any measure, an extraordinary place to build a colonial capital. The Germans built it here in 1910 because the harbour was the finest natural port in the Pacific. The volcano reminded them of the terms of the arrangement in 1994.
The eruption of Tavurvur and Vulcan in September 1994 was not the largest volcanic event of the century, but it was catastrophically precise: it buried the town of Rabaul in a metre of grey pumice ash over the course of a single night. No one died — an early warning system gave residents time to evacuate — but the buildings didn’t leave. You can still walk down what remains of Rabaul’s main street and see the rooftops of stores and houses protruding from the ash at ground level. A church sits with its windows at knee height, the building below completely entombed. The Catholic cathedral, once the architectural centrepiece of the colonial town, is a ruin, its walls eroded by thirty years of rain, bougainvillea climbing through the windows where the glass used to be.
The town that rebuilt itself on higher ground is called Kokopo and is now the provincial capital of East New Britain — functional, unglamorous, and largely indifferent to the drama visible from the harbour below. But Rabaul itself persists as a kind of inhabited ruin, with a market still operating in the ash flats, a scattering of trade stores, and locals who seemed neither traumatised by what happened nor particularly interested in discussing it with tourists. The volcano Tavurvur still smokes visibly across the harbour from the market — a thin column of white vapour rising from a cone the colour of old concrete — and people sell vegetables and mobile phone credit within sight of it without apparent concern.
The WWII history here is as heavy as anywhere in the Pacific. Rabaul was a major Japanese military base from 1942 to 1945, and the tunnels the Japanese dug into the caldera’s rim to protect their forces are largely intact — kilometres of hand-dug passages housing submarines, command centres, and ammunition stores, now lit by bare fluorescent tubes and open to visitors. I walked through one tunnel for perhaps twenty minutes, the walls close and damp, the ceiling low enough to make me stoop, trying to imagine the tens of thousands of people who lived underground here for three years.
The hot springs at Rabaul are another geological side effect of the caldera: natural thermal pools at the edge of the harbour where the ground temperature runs warm, the water slightly sulphurous, and the sensation of floating in them while looking across at Tavurvur is genuinely bizarre. Everything about Rabaul is slightly bizarre, which is, as it turns out, a recommendation.
When to go: May through October is the dry season for East New Britain, with less rain and calmer seas for the short boat crossings around the caldera. Tavurvur is monitored continuously and there is a warning system in place, but the area is considered geologically active — check current status through the Rabaul Volcanological Observatory before visiting.