"Mining & Logging" a Bulolo Travel Page by Bwana_Brown

In October, 1980, after living in Papua New Guinea for just over one year, I led a small team from the PNG Electricity Commission into the old gold-mining area of Bulolo. This town is located just south of the city of Lae, and not far from the end of the line at Wau (see my 'General Tips' for a map of Bulolo's location). We were there to assist the local privately-owned hydro-electric dam with some technical problems that it was experiencing. It was the discovery of gold deposits in the 1920s at both Bulolo and Wau that led to the 1930s explorations further into the Highlands of PNG. However, at the same time, the rich deposits of gold in the remote Wau/Bulolo area led to a massive engineering undertaking to bring this material to world markets. In the end, a world airlift record was set in the early 1930s when 8 huge dredges, each weighing between 1500-2500 tonnes, were flown into the site in pieces by German-built Junkers G31 tri-motor aircraft. We just wandered around these abandoned ruins, taking the time to think what it must have been like in it's hey-day! This page details my impressions of that very interesting trip a quarter-century ago!