Our parting gift from Papua New Guinea, perhaps aptly, was an unexplained delayed flight and a resulting missed onward connection in the Solomon Islands.

Forced to stay in Honiara for a night we were determined to make the most of it: we had an excellent Japanese meal, a swim in the hotel pool, a good gym session and two very hot showers. We booked some air tickets, bought some snorkels and a local SIM card and updated the blog. We also rode up and down in the hotel funicular cable car and made two valiant attempts: one to find a famed local bakery / cappuccino bar (no bread, or coffee) and one to snorkel on a local wrecked freighter by booking a taxi and heading off in its general direction with our eyes peeled (no luck).

We were feeling a little twitchy. PNG had been amazing, but we (or perhaps more succinctly, I) had been ground down by the difficulties of getting around and we had, as a result, gone to less places than perhaps we should. Given that we are extremely unlikely to go back, this left us feeling perhaps a little guilty at the wasted opportunity. There is a long essay brewing somewhere about how to pace yourself on long trips, so we won’t go into that here. Let’s just say that we were keen to get on and do
things.

So we headed off to Zipolo Habu Resort on a small island in the Western Provinces keen for some action, only to find one of the more chilled out places in the world. Joe, the owner, constructed the place himself out of bush materials, slowly building it up over 30 years. There was beer in the fridge and fish in the sea – what more could anybody ask for? We had a great time, and we filled the time. I went scuba diving for a day: huge coral walls, sharks, two wrecked WW2 fighter planes. We went on a pretty amazing WW2 relic tour – snorkeling on a sunken Japanese freighter, lobster sandwiches on the pier for lunch, climbing on an American tank and half visiting an underground field hospital (let’s just say that you would have to be really, really sick to want to go inside). We went to a real life Skull Island! (yarrrr, me hearties!). We drank beer with a group of travelling yachties…

And yet, slightly spoiling the experience were the ants in our pants. You see, newly-made palm frond roofs sometimes still contain fire ants. And fire ants are tiny enough to fall through mosquito nets. And fire ant bites HURT LIKE HELL! And three nights in a row being bitten in the arse start to take the shine off anyone’s sense of humour. And the other guests – mostly Australian retirees – were very nice company and all that, but we were left with a mild yearning for adventure.

Little did we know how soon that would appear … next stop, Vanuatu!