Honiara

My trip from Darwin to Honiara in the Solomon Islands was marred by niggling little difficulties. I had lost my camera on Saturday of the Easter long weekend. That meant that it was going to be difficult to correct that, as Australia proved to be strong on being closed during public holidays. (I did find a Duty-Free shop open where I bought a new camera.) I still had to get a ticket out of the Solomon Islands as they won't allow anyone in for a visit until proof can be shown that they have an onward ticket to depart the nation. I corrected that, but I did it in a park in Brisbane that happened to have free wifi access, and I didn't have access to a printer, so I couldn't get physical proof of my intention to leave the Solomon Islands. This became an issue when I got to the airport. The woman at the check-in desk seemed rather put off that I didn't have a piece of paper to show, as I was told that the first thing that would happen when I reached the Solomon Islands was that I would be asked to show my onward ticket and they didn't have computers to find it from a record number. So I had to convince them to print it off for me. And all of this was under the influence of lack of sleep. I had been up at about 8 in Darwin, my flight from Darwin was at 2 in the morning, and my flight to the Solomon Islands was at 9 the night of my arrival in Brisbane. With that short time in Brisbane, I decided there was no point in trying to stay anywhere, which meant not having anywhere to catch a bit of sleep. But I got a camera, I caught a little bit of rest in a far corner of the Brisbane airport where there were some rather deserted, but quite comfortable cushioned benches, and the check-in staff printed off a copy of my onward ticket. The only thing left was that I had once again not done a thing about staying somewhere in a country where I was going to arrive in the middle of the night. In that past that has spelled trouble. I hoped it was going to go well this night.

I immediately noticed something interesting as boarding for the flight commenced. The staff knew most of the boarding passengers, and seemed to know them quite well. There was banter and questions about how families were and when they were moving from place to place. There seems to be a fairly regular community to this little circuit from Brisbane to the Solomon Islands to Nauru and then to Kiribati. I remember that kind of feeling when I would visit my father in Penticton when I was young and we would fly. There were only 39 passengers on the plane, so there was plenty of room and for the first time in a while I had a meal on the plane. I have been flying budget airlines for a while now and they don't just offer meals to passengers as part of the ticket price. This airline did, though. So that probably means it wasn't really a budget airline and my ticket was higher than normal. Which it was.

My arrival in Honiara was just as easy. There were only two of us who got off at Honiara. The rest were going on to one of the other two stops, Nauru or Kiribati. That made immigration very quick. And not once was I asked for my onward ticket. I think it's just put on the responsibility of the airlines to make sure so that they don't have to upgrade the airport systems out here. But they told me in Brisbane that if a passenger couldn't produce an onward ticket, the airline would get a big fine. Fair enough, but it annoyed me a tad that they didn't even seem to care enough to ask when I got here after I had everyone up in arms in Brisbane about my not having a physical copy of my ticket. It did bode well for how easy it might be to get to a place to stay. And it was easy. I had to take a taxi, but there was no haggling. The Solomon Islands is rather more expensive than a lot of places I have been (barring Australia, of course), but the taxi driver didn't seem to be gouging me. He didn't even seem to try. He told me a little about the city (town, is how he put it, since it isn't in a league with big cities I would be familiar with), and took me around to three or four different places to stay. The first was closed; the second was more expensive than I wanted to pay. The third one was a backpacker's place and, despite a bit of confusion of answers I got from the manager, translated through my cab driver (which, to be honest, felt like the hostel manager was trying to see if he could gouge me a bit), it ended up being a reasonable price with a reasonable room, so I opted to stay in Honiara's Chinatown area.

And then, at long last, after about 40 hours or so, I got some much needed sleep.

The next morning, I got up and met a couple of my hostel mates, Clifton and Nelson. They are pretty much living here as it's the cheapest spot to live among the various choices of accommodation. They are really nice and gave me lots of information about Honiara and what I might find here and where I could go. Clifton told me he would take me to the visitor bureau on the Tuesday. It was closed on Monday because of Easter Monday. I can't seem to avoid the whole disruption to being able to do much of anything because of this holiday. Oh well.

I went for a walk and had a look at everything in the light of day. It's a nice little town. It looks like a lot of little towns everywhere. There are narrow paved streets. There are dirt roads along side streets.

 

There is a main street where most of the action is. There is a one-way bridge over the river separating Chinatown from downtown.  (And I noticed that even though there were still cars that hadn't gone over the bridge yet, there were times when the flow of traffic just stopped from one direction in order to allow traffic in the other direction to go.  What courtesy!!!)

There is even a couple of casinos, although the one in town seems to be a bit run down. (It reminded me of Stampede Casino in the early days.) And it was fairly quiet in town due to its being a public holiday. I walked around for while and ended up finding the location of the visitor's bureau on my own, but as Clifton had told me I was going to have to wait until Tuesday for it to be of use to me.

 I found some nice parks along the water. There were a couple of plaques explaining how Honiara and Guadalcanal figured in the World War II campaigns in the area. The area of water in front of Honiara is called Iron Bottom Sound. The reason for that is that a large number of ships went down in these waters.

Later on, I found Honiara's Botanical Gardens, which were a nice cool place to walk during the high heat of the day.

And everywhere, I met friendly people. Again, I had been warned over and over about it being dangerous here. Not so much physically dangerous, but danger from pickpockets and other forms of theft. Wikitravel warned me. Clifton warned me. My taxi driver warned me. Everyone was warning me, and what did I find? Clifton and Nelson giving me all sorts of information about Honiara and the Solomon Islands, and just shooting the shit with me for a while. There was Franco the security guard who came out to talk to me for a while as I was checking out the boat office where I could get a ticket to another island nearby. There was the father of the kids in the playground by the water, who smiled over and said hi. There was the woman I overtook as I was walking out of the botanical gardens who told me about the children's park by the water and wanted to take me there. There was the guy in the river at the botanical gardens, in the midst of some kind of washing, who looked up and waved and welcomed me to the islands. There were all the myriads of people who smiled and said hi on the street, or who asked me where I was from, or who just generally acted in a welcoming way. Are there pickpockets here? Probably. Are there ways I can be separated from my valuables? Sure. I can only do my best and keep my valuables as safe as I can, but it's no more than I would do anywhere else, and I don't think it's anymore dangerous here than anywhere else. It's certainly among the friendliest places I have been.