Fiji
Solomon Islands
Vanuatu

Samoa
New Zealand

We awoke to a calm sea, no rain, no wind and the sun just breaking though the clouds; it augered well for our return to Honiara. After breakfast we were taken by boat to Ruavatu school. This is not the place at which visitors are normally picked up and dropped off, which is only a 10 minute boat journey. Due to the state the roads were in the previous day it was thought best to take us further along the coast, a journey of some 40 minutes or so.

At Ruavatu, Brendon tracked down the headmaster who confirmed that their telephone link was down and that there were no vehicles that were returning to, or going in the direction of Honiara. With no other option, we decided to head off on foot in the direction of Honiara, accompanied by Brendon, who insisted on coming with us. We knew that we had a long walk ahead of us, because it was Sunday, and in The Solomon Islands, like most of the other Pacific Islands, observance of the Lord’s Day is taken very seriously. The only possible relief would have been from members of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, who celebrate their Sabbath on Saturday, and make up a sizeable proportion of the population of the Solomons. The clouds had, by now, dissapeared and we spent the next two hours walking along an unmetaled road with no shade. There was very little noise as we walked between coconut and cocoa plantations and so we were able to here the sound of the approaching vehicle for some time before it finally appeared from round a bend behind us. It was a rather battered white twin cab ute, with a European and a Solomon Islander sitting in the front and four Solomon Islanders sitting in the rear. Brendon flagged it down and explained the problem that we were experiencing and we got into the back with the Solomon Islanders.

Two of our fellow passengers were an elderly couple returning from a church service, which had taken them several hours to walk to earlier that morning. They were dropped off after we had been travelling for about 10 minutes. We arrived at one of the bridges that had given the Australian visitors to the island so much trouble, to find that it had been reasonably well patched up. The ute was able to negotiate the end of the bridge, that had been washed away, with little difficulty because of the number of logs that had been placed into the gap. At this point we were beckoned to sit in the back of cab, and found out the our driver was a Catholic missionary who had spent a large number of years in the Pacific. He had been in the Solomons for 20 years, and had then spent twenty years in Papua New Guinea before returning to the Solomon’s.

We were taken as far a Tenaru, which we were informed was just 12knm from Honiara. This gave us heart, since we knew that the airport was 8km from Honiara, and so we only had 4km to walk before we would find a telephone. Of course by this time the weather had changed and we spent most of our time walking in the rain, so we were very grateful when we came across the Airport Motel, a short distance before the airport itself, and were able to call Venice to come and pick us up.

The Lelei restaurant has the best reputation in Honiara and Fred and Venise had made a reservation for us that evening. When we arrived we found that there was a reception taking place for a delegation from the European Union, and it was this that probably explains the experience we had.

The Lelei has a fairly limited menu, and it appears that the EU had already ordered most of what was available. How when we had finally managed to come to an aceptable compromise with the waiter, we encountered problems with the kitchen staff. It seems that they are incapable of catering for both large parties and paying diners at the same time. Not only did we have to wait for more than an hour for our food to arrive but when it did arrive it was a huge diappointment. Lucy's pasta dish came without any pasta, but with rice, and my swamp crabs were positively anorexic. Furthermore when we complained the staff just weren't interested and just shrugged their shoulders.