Page updated:
Monday, 13 August 2007

The sea seen through pawpaw...

Travel in the Solomons

Motor canoe is the main means of travel between coastal settlements

All roads converge on Auki. With its sea and air connections the town is the gateway to Honiara, only six hours travel by ferry. The proximity of Honiara and its large produce market makes it profitable for Malaitan farmers to take their produce there to sell. Hundreds of farmers and thousands of pineapples are to be seen at the Auki ferry wharf waiting to board the ship.

Roads take travellers south and east of Auki, up into the hills of Central Malaita, over to the Takwa area of the north-east coast and north along the shoreline to Malu'u.

Trucks are Malaita's public transport system and the unsurfaced roads they travel are winding and bumpy. Wet weather makes them slippery and passengers sometimes have to get out and slip about in the mud, pushing the sliding vehicle up hills they can gain no traction on. When it rains, passengers hastily cover themselves with the plastic tarpaulins most trucks carry. There is no shelter from the sun.

Those are the worst of conditions. Better is to take one of the night trucks and travel through the hours of darkness. Though on the crowded trucks your legs cry in discomfort at the cramped conditions, when the weather is fine night travel is pleasant. You do not sleep, but who would want to? There is the rush of cooling air and around you the hills are dark shapes, the trees and coconut palms silhouettes beside the road. Now and again there is a darkened village.

Travel under a full moon is memorable. Where the road comes close to the shore the sea shines, the palms, headlands and islands form dark shapes against silver water. Above, clouds are rimmed with a silver fluorescence. Around you, the huddled shapes of fellow travellers. This is travel at its best.

Travelling in the Solomons requires patience. This I had learned as we waited in Gizo for a motor canoe to make the open sea crossing to Choiseul and while waiting for a canoe to make the return voyage. It was learned again as we waited through cancellation and delayed departures at Henderson Field and it was learned by a friend, an aid worker, when he had to spend the night beside a small rural airstrip after the plane failed to show.

Travel is expensive. In their budgetting, aid organisations make generous allowance for the cost of travel by motor canoe and air. Motor canoe is the main mode of coastal movement. Small cargo vessels carry passengers between the islands but the traveller needs time to spare as they stop to offload cargo and take on people at isolated villages.

With the weight limitations on Solomon Airline's Twin Otters, travelers have to watch their baggage. Both you and the baggage will be weighed before embarkation but, even then, it is possible to arrive at your destination and find your baggage missing. Before the flight to Gizo the airline clerk had to ask for a volunteer to catch the next flight to bring the aircraft back within its load capacity. On the return from Auki to Honiara, Steve looked out the window to see his Pelican case being carried from the aircraft to reduce weight. He collected it from Honiara airport next day.

Waiting for Bruno

Before we left for Choiseul, Tony Jansen, the adviser to the aid organisation I was to produce the handbooks for, told Steve and I to expect two men from Bougainville, Bruno and Alfonse, trainers with Paruparu Development Education Centre. They were to meet us in Sasamuqa and had, Tony believed, already started their journey from their isolated mountain valley.

The border between Bougainville, which is part of PNG, and Choiseul in the northern Solomons is, shall we say, porous. It is only a four hour motor canoe crossing and people come and go freely.

This is how Bruno and Alfonse were to get to Sasamuqa. First, the open sea crossing from Bougainville, then the canoe journey down the Choiseul coast to Sasamuqa. As always - communications in this part of the world are poor - there was a substantial element of uncertainty to these travel arrangements. The plan, loose though it was, was for Bruno and Alfonse to return with Steve and I to Gizo then fly back to Honiara for a meeting of the Melanesian Farmers First Network. That is to assume there would be seats on the Solomon Airlines flight.

Due to the vagaries of transport, the two Bougainvillians ended up following us through the Solomons. Steve and I expected their arrival in Sasamuqa but by the time we were ready to leave they had still not arrived. We considered waiting but learned that the canoe we were to take would be the last to make the crossing for at least three days, perhaps longer. We doubted this, thinking that people would have to go to Gizo to buy rice for Christmas or for other business, but we did not want to be delayed any longer and arrive late on Malaita. So we left.

The Bougainvillians arrived the day after we left. And it was true - there were no canoes for three days. Fortunately, Steve had left $1200 Solomon currency at Sasamuqa with Lucy, just in case the two did turn up and needed funds to get a canoe to Gizo and buy air tickets to Honiara. They arrived in Honiara the day after we left for Malaita and they arrived in Auki the day we travelled to Silolo. From there they made their was by truck to an agricultural training centre in Central Malaita that we would all have visited had we met up.

Motor canoe - the only way to travel

Apart from Solomon Airline's Twin Otters, the ferry linking Honiara and Auki, a number of small ferries servicing the Guadacanal coast and the small, inter-island freighters, motor canoe is the only way to travel through most of the islands. Only Malaita has a reasonable road system; the main road on Guadalcanal, the one which links the capital with its near hinterland, is all of 200km in length.

Motor canoes are characteristically powered by single outboard motors of 35 to 40hp capacity. None I have seen carry life jackets or spare water supplies and only a single canoe paddle is usually carried in case the motor breaks down. Yet these vessels make open sea voyages of considerable length during which there may be a mid-ocean stop to refuel.

There is no protection from the sun in the canoe and sunburn protection must be applied. In choppy or stormy conditions the ride can be wet. In flat, calm conditions when the canoe slices through the water the ride is enjoyable. Although it is possible to hire canoes, at a cost, travelers seeking motor canoe transport in the more isolated areas of the provinces are subject to the movements of local people.

All part of the fun

Travel by whatever means in the Solomons must be accepted as part of the adventure of traveling or working there. To expect it to comply with developed world standards is to ignore the reality of Solomons time: that all schedules are approximations.