The Junkers aircraft made the trip over and over and over. Each pass brought another component of a 2,000-tonne gold dredge across the Owen Stanley Range and set it down on the Bulolo airstrip, where men waited to haul it into position and bolt it to the rest. Eight dredges were built that way, piece by airborne piece, in the valley of a Papua New Guinea river that had previously been known mostly for leeches and heavy rain. By the time the last dredge stopped running in June 1965, the fleet had turned over 7.4 million cubic meters of gravel. A few of those machines are still there, slumped in the jungle where they were abandoned, green with moss and claimed by vines.
The Bulolo gold fields sat in country so rough that shipping a dredge overland would have cost more than the gold was worth. The solution, in the 1930s, was audacious even by the standards of an audacious industry: dismantle each 2,000-tonne dredge into pieces small enough to fit inside a German-made Junkers, fly them in over some of the worst flying country on earth, and reassemble them in the valley. Every bolt, every plate, every hydraulic line arrived by air. Eight dredges were built this way, working the Bulolo River for decades. One was eventually cut up to make bridges. Two were shipped to South America to keep working. The others were simply left where they were when the last one shut down in 1965, slowly reclaimed by the jungle they had displaced.
When the gold played out, another industry grew up to replace it. Bulolo is now a forestry center, and the hills around it carry extensive plantings of Klinki pine, a local relative of the Norfolk Island pine. The trees grow tall and fast in this wet highland climate, feeding mills that have become the region's economic backbone. It is not the gold rush energy of a century ago, but it has given Bulolo a steadier rhythm. And the surrounding country, now and then, asserts itself in other ways: the area is one of the most insect-rich places in the world, with butterflies in numbers that startle first-time visitors and a density of beetles and other creatures that draws entomologists from across the globe.
Papua New Guinea's oldest golf course is not in Port Moresby or Lae. It is in Bulolo. The nine-hole course first opened in 1947, two years after the war that had rolled through the valley ended, and it has been in play ever since. The miners and mill workers who built it and kept it running were making a statement about permanence, about the kind of town this was going to be. Play in the tropics has its quirks; afternoon downpours interrupt everything, and the rough is genuinely rough. But the course survives, older than most of the dredges ever were.
Bulolo connects to Lae, Papua New Guinea's second-largest city, by road. Public Motor Vehicles ply the route, running up from the coast into the Wau-Bulolo Valley. Three flights a week from Port Moresby reach Bulolo on PNG Air, a different pattern from nearby Wau, which has only a single weekly flight from Lae. Accommodation is limited; Pine Lodge offers what's available locally, with most travelers continuing to Lae for more options. The airstrip that once handled those Junkers gold-dredge deliveries still operates, smaller in purpose now but still the quickest way in when the road is cut by rain.
About 100 kilometers southwest of Bulolo lie the villages of Aseki and Watama, known for a burial tradition that unsettles outside visitors but holds real meaning for the Anga people who practice it. Bodies of the dead are smoked and placed in wood or bamboo cages on mountain ridges or in burial caves, where ancestors remain visible to their descendants. The practice, once widespread, still occurs occasionally. Closer to Lae, along the banks of the Snake River, limestone caves were used as open-air burial grounds; skeletal remains can still be seen inside. These are not curiosities staged for travelers. They are living and historical places of grief and reverence, and visitors who come should come with appropriate respect for the communities whose ancestors rest there.
Located at 7.20 degrees South, 146.65 degrees East, in the Wau-Bulolo Valley of Morobe Province at roughly 750 meters elevation. The airstrip has historic significance as the delivery point for the 1930s gold-dredge airlifts using Junkers aircraft, flying components over the Owen Stanley Range piece by piece. Bulolo sits about 15 nautical miles north of Wau along the valley floor. Lae Nadzab (AYNZ) is the nearest major airfield, about 45 nautical miles northeast. Valley weather demands morning arrivals; afternoon convective buildups over the Owen Stanleys produce heavy rain and turbulence. From altitude, the cleared river valley and the extensive Klinki pine plantations stand out against surrounding jungle-covered ridges.