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Solomon Islands
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We went down to the Kitano Mendana hotel to be picked up by Guadalcanal Travel Services (GTS) who were taking us on waterfall tour. We were picked up by a double cab ute, which had another two visitors in it, one Brit and an Ozzie. They had both been working at the Australian High Commision, and had a few spare days before they had to leave. The driver took us east out of Honiara for about 12km and turned off the main road onto a track that took us past the Catholic boarding school of Tenaru and on up into the bush. After about 40 minutes we were deposited at a small village where we set off into the rainforest with a guide from a local village.

Our guide appeared to be mute and did not utter a single word to us throughout the whole of the walk. The Solomon Islands, like the other Melanesian Islands possesses a vast number of languages. This is probably due to the historically practices of headhunting and cannibalism; if you wandered out of your own area "wantok" then your chances of survival would be veryh slender. "Wantok" is actually a pidgin word and is a corruption of the english "one talk". Pidgin is the lingua france of the Solomons and is understood by all, in addition to the language of their wantok. With a little bit of effort we found that we were able to understand and reasonable amount of the Solomon Island radio broadcasts in pidgin. Because of this similarity to English it is possible to make yourself understood relatively easily and we did not encounter anyone who could not understand English, with perhaps the exception of our guide.

As we passed through several small villages the guide had to pay so that we could walk through their custom land. It turned out that we were the first group of people to take this route in over a year, because there are had been disputes between various families over the correct distribution of the payment for use of custom land. These disputes are, one of the major hurdles any companies wishing to invest in the Solomon Islands have to overcome. There may be several people disputing who has rights to a piece of land, and even when an agreement has been arrived at with all interested parties, it is no guarantee of trouble-free use of land, since people may well continue to appear out of the woodwork with claims, for many years into the future.

The concept of compensation is very well defined in the Solomon Islands, since it is essentially the idea behind the bride price. The life of women in the Solomn Islands is not an easy one. From a very early age they carry out most of the work within a family. This means that they are an incredibly valuable resource for the family, and since when they marry they move to live with the husbands family, marriage represents a significant loss to their family. To make up for this the husbands family has to effectively purchase the bride to be, with a combination of traditional shell money, breast plates, mats, money, agricultural produce and modern domestic appliances. The circumstances under which compensation can be claimed seem to be broadening constantly, we were told that employers are very reluctant to offer overtime to women, because not only do they have to pay the female employees, but also their families as well for keeping them away from home where they would be carrying out useful work for the family.

In the second village we passed through we were joined by two small boys. This proved to be rather fortuitous, for our guide took us down the wrong path at one point and it was only when we reached a river we could not cross that he listened to the boys who were trying to tell him he had taken the wrong route. We walked for an hour and forty minutes without any stops and had to cross the same river twelve times before we arrived at our destination, Tenaru Falls. We were not walking through virgin rainforest,but a mixture of plantations and old cultivated land which was being left fallow. The waterfall is about 140 feet high and plunges into a large pool in which it is is possible to swim. We had about 25 minutes rest at the falls before our speachless guide headed back so that we could be picked up by GTS and taken back to Honiara.

In the evening we went down to the Kitano Mendana Hotel where we had their buffet meal and watched first, performers from Kiribati dancing and singing and then Solomon Island panpipers, Are Are. The food was excellent, and the choice was extensive. It was hard to believe that we were eating in the Solmon Islands. Kitano is actually a chain of hotels owned by a Japanese company. The Kitano Mendana does not appear to be a particularly pleasent hotel, everything appears to be run down and uncared for, and the rooms at the eastern edge overlook the Honiara Yacht Club, which has music playing at past midnight.

We had arrived at the restaurant at 7:00pm, and it seems the earlier you can arrive the better, since all the choicest dishes disappear first.