Manam Island

One of the remote places we have to go to change the bearings is a place called Manam Island it’s a volcano off the coast half way between Madang and Wewak.

We have been told by Dave in Port Moresby that the trip to Manam Island would be organised for us by the New Guinea Administration. We go to their office and find the chap who is supposed to get people like us to this remote island. The chap consults time tables, makes some phone calls and advises us we can leave in a couple of days but he can only get us a boat back not to get there. Don’t worry, he says, I’ll just hire you a plane to get you there, then you can take the boat back to Madang. It is like being on yet another holiday.

Manam Island is a volcano

 

A couple of days later we get to Madang airport where a Piper Cherokee airplane is awaiting us to take us to this place called Bogia. 


It’s a tiny native fishing village and from there we take a boat out to the volcano. it’s a couple of hours by boat and we are the only passengers. The skipper is a native and has a large hole in his earlobe a typical New Guinea feature. It looks funny standing behind him and watching the volcano in the distance through his hole in his earlobe. I take a picture of that. The boat brings the supplies out to the Catholic Mission Station on Manam Island. 

The people are coming to greet us at Manam Island

When we get close to the island, we see just about the entire population at the beach, madly waving at us. Of course our boat is too big to get close and Phil and I and our toolboxes and bearings get transferred to lakatois which are small canoe type boats with outriggers to stop them from toppling over.

The children help with the transfer and carry the cases up the beach. They are very excited and chatter and cackle and surround us full of excitement. 

The Catholic father, a native himself tells us to pick some of the lads to carry our cases up to the volcanological observatory half way up the island. We pick a half dozen lads and make off up the mountain. We don’t have much time. The boat waits for us off the coast. This boat only comes to the island once a week and we don’t fancy spending a week on this island.

It takes us about an hour to climb up the steep volcano to the observatory. It’s very hot and humid. Just as well we have the boys carrying the toolboxes and bearings.

The observatory is just a small building consisting of a control room which houses a lot of instruments, seismographs I assume and electronic telecommunications equipment I assume must transmit the seismograph’s activities to the mainland. There is no staff there, the whole observatory is run and observed via this telecommunications equipment. There is a door and a set of stairs leading downstairs into a cellar where a huge concrete block stands in the middle of the floor. On it are more instruments spread all over this concrete block. sensors, I assume.

The air conditioning is purely there to keep the equipment conditioned, and the humidity low.

We turn the air conditioning off and start stripping down the motors. Now here is a place where that should never be attempted. There is only grass and dirt all around the building and nowhere really for us to strip a motor in a clean area. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the old bearings and I consider leaving them in the motors and write in the report we had changed them but I decide what the hell, we are contracted to change them so change them we will whether they get dirt in them or not. Not my problem. Let the silly desk pusher in Canberra come up here later on to fix the air conditioning if it breaks down because a bearing has grass or dirt in it.

We work hard and fast to strip the three motors of the air conditioning, all the time surrounded by lots of children from the island who cackle and chatter non stop and observe what we are doing.

We start up the system again and descend from the mountain and climb onto the lakatois who take us back to the boat. The skipper is happy to see us and tells us we’ll just make it back to Bogia in time for us to meet the larger boat that would take us back to Madang.