Most visitors arrive in Buka town on Air Niugini's daily flight from Port Moresby. Some flights stop first in Rabaul on New Britain, extending a two-hour hop into something longer. PNG Air serves both Buka and the smaller airport at Arawa-Kieta. Neither is cheap - air travel in PNG generally isn't - but the alternative is finding a weekly cargo ship out of Rabaul where you do not book so much as turn up and hope. Adventurous travelers have been known to arrive by boat from Korovou in the northern Solomon Islands, but the immigration logistics are complicated and neither government encourages the practice. The water taxi across the Buka Passage from the airport to the main island costs a few kina and takes minutes. The locals crowded in with you will be happy to explain which village down the road is yours.

Bougainville is divided, practically, between the north and everywhere else. Buka town, on Buka Island just across the passage, is where government offices, NGO workers, and most of the formal accommodation now concentrate. It replaced Arawa as the functional capital during the civil war, and never entirely handed the role back. The waterfront has restaurants where small boats zip across the strait as you eat. Kokopau on the south side of the passage is where most visitors step onto the main island, and Tinputz to the east is your first glimpse of the picturesque coastal villages strung along the road to Arawa. Arawa itself, once the richest town in PNG outside Port Moresby, remains partly derelict - cyclone fencing over old shopfronts, a stadium overgrown, the copper-boom architecture slowly returning to the jungle. South of Arawa is Buin, from which you can see the Solomon Islands on a clear day.

The signs at Morgan Junction are clear and the barricades are real. The road that once carried copper concentrate from the Panguna mine down to the Loloho port has been a no-go zone since the peace agreement, and ex-combatants - officially disarmed, practically not - still control access. You can reach Panguna, but only in the company of a well-connected local who has made the arrangements in advance. It is worth the effort. The pit is one of the largest holes humans have ever dug, now slowly filling with rainwater the color of turquoise or tarnish depending on the light. Villagers have taken up small-scale alluvial gold mining in the tailings. Rusting draglines sit where they were parked a generation ago. The rawness of the place - the sense that history stopped and hasn't restarted - is what people remember.

The three-day trek up Mount Balbi from Wakunai village is the serious hike on Bougainville, taking you to 2,685 meters where sulphurous vents still breathe and the view opens across the Emperor Range to Bagana's plume in the distance. Extended to seven days, the trek crosses the range to the west coast. Guides in Wakunai are knowledgeable and worth hiring. Mount Billy Mitchell, the dormant volcano to the south, has a two-kilometer-wide caldera lake that local Rotokas ecotourism groups will take you to. Offshore, diving on the Solomon Sea reefs is rumored to be among the best in the world, but there is no land-based operator - only the occasional liveaboard willing to make the trip. Dugongs are reportedly as common here as anywhere on Earth. For history pilgrims, the most famous relic is Admiral Yamamoto's Mitsubishi G4M bomber, shot down by American P-38 Lightnings on 18 April 1943 and still in the jungle three kilometers off the road south of Arawa. A signpost marks the turnoff. The wreckage is well preserved by jungle standards - engines, wings, tail section all visible and in place.

Fish and chicken are the staples. Pigs are reserved for special feasts. Cassava, yams, tapioca, and choko (chayote) fill out the plate. The traditional dish worth asking for is tama tama, made by pounding cassava or banana into a starchy dough - Bougainvilleans will tell you, proudly, that it is the same thing as African fufu, and they know it. Homebrew is the local alcohol, unpredictable in strength and sometimes distilled to nearly 90 proof. Most accommodation offers full board because restaurants outside Buka are few. Bougainvillean basketware, woven from local fibers, is often called the finest in PNG, and Wakunai is the place to buy it. Two more pieces of advice: the overwhelming pro-independence sentiment means questions about the war, about Australia, about PNG, are genuinely sensitive - listen more than ask. And never get in an argument with a local. In a culture where guests are protected fiercely, an argument puts your host in an impossible position, and in a place where many houses still have a rifle somewhere, you want your host on steady ground. Approach with respect, and Bougainville will open up in ways few places in the Pacific still can.