Houston – Los Angeles, 7 hr layover, LA – Nadi Fiji , 8 hr layover, 2 massages (neck/back, leg/foot), Nadi – Honiara Guadalcanal Solomons, then to the “best” hotel on the islands (Kitano Mendana), which was crap, with hardly-working AC, mold, construction underway, but at least hot water. We crossed the International Date Line, but just barely, so we traveled “2 days.” The time difference is 20 hrs, counting the IDL.
8-9 Aug Wednesday & Thursday, Honiara Guadalcanal Solomons
We crashed Tuesday night then Wednesday went for 2 dives here on Guadalcanal – 2 Japanese transports (marus). My first buddy was Cheryl, but she tarried a lot for photos so I changed to Ed. He is a good dive buddy because we go about the same speed. The bay area outside Honiara is called Iron Bottom Sound since there are so many ships, airplanes, etc down there. 67 warships & transports. The dives were interesting but you couldn’t see the shape of the ships so much – it’s more like an artificial reef covered in coral & fishies.
We are being taken around by a local dive company – our leader is Luke, a very interesting guy. He’s from the Solomons, but lives mostly in Australia now. He was a professional rugby player in France for 3 years, and has also played in Australia. He works as a dive master here, and travels back to Australia several times a month to be with his wife & kids. His accent is very aussie, for ATM he says “ITM”.
In addition to diving, they’re taking us to see a few things. We’ve seen the American WW2 memorial on the island, then Red Beach, where a huge assault of Americans onto a Guadalcanal beach into entrenched Japanese gunmen ended up in a big bloody mess, they said. That may not be it, because there’s also White Beach & Blue Beach.
My favorite was a “museum” of Am & Jap planes & guns out in the jungle in the middle of nowhere, called the Vilu War Museum. A guy who lived there threw on a shirt & showed us around in a pretty-unintelligible English. We had to keep translating for each other. I loved this place. Rusted torn up machines of war, with the bits remaining placed so you could tell what the whole thing had been, with wildflowers growing all around and the damp dark green jungle encroaching. Memorial plaques by Americans, Aussies, and Japanese, falling into disrepair. I imagine these war sites would be better maintained if more Aussies had been involved in the fighting here. I think just one of their ships (Canberra) was involved.
More on WW2 later.
Luke talked a lot about “the Tension.” This was a recent skirmish that went on a long time between local Guadalcanal folks & people from Malaita, the next island over. These people have come to Honiara for better jobs, which the locals resent, so each side started gathering up arms & taking potshots at each other – Solomons version of Jets vs Sharks, Guadalcanal Freedom Fighters vs Honiara Eagle Force, or something like that. It kept things so disrupted, with people’s housing being destroyed etc that the Australians sent soldiers in to break it up. They pretty much came in & said, “OK lay down your weapons, kiss & make up, or we will take you all out.” Discretion WAS the better part of valor & most everyone complied. The Aussies are still there, soldiers in full camo with machine guns wandering about.
It seems that the relationships between the smaller countries (Solomons, Fiji, etc) and Australia & New Zealand is a bit rocky. They know the bigger boys are needed to keep the peace & help with infrastructure (roads etc) but at the same time they are resented. A little like “Thanks for the help but who do you think you are? You’re not the boss of me!”
Thursday night we got onto the dive boat, the Bilikiki. We were met by the leaders, Liz & Josh. She’s English & he’s an Aussie. They showed us around the boat & explained about dive times, meals, which water you could drink, conserving fresh water during showers, etc. We were assigned cabins & my usual roomie Cheryl & I were surprised to each have a room instead of bunking together. Good thing cuz the cabins are pretty small. Mine is up at the end of the hall (#9), right by where the anchor goes up & down – pretty loud! But the cabin has 2 shelves for clothes & 3 hooks, so I’m happy. Each cabin has its own shower/toilet – fabulous! There are 10 cabins & we are the only group on board.
10-21 August Friday – Tuesday, on board the dive boat Bilikiki
We have time between dives to read (as well as eat!). The boat has a lending library of novels and there is an extensive library of fish books (for recording in your dive book what you spotted) and books on the Solomons & WW2 battles in the Pacific. These are very interesting & I want to record a few of the quotes from the soldiers who wrote about it.
Guadalcanal was the site of a huge air, land, & sea battle that turned the tide of the war against the Japanese for the first time. The island was nothing special until an airfield was built there by the Japanese & the Americans had to take it from the Japanese to protect Vanuatu, Fiji, Australia & NZ. The battles lasted about 6 months, starting in August 1942. The guys who were about to land there saw what looked like an island paradise of greenery, beaches, and palm trees. Then after they got to land, it turned out to be “a pestilential hellhole.” Hot, humid, torrents of rain, skin infections, fungus, slimy mud, rotting vegetation, Kunai grass that cut like a knife, snakes, scorpions, spiders, malaria, and dysentery. “If God ever created a hell-on-earth contest, the island would have made it to the finals.”
Right as the Allies were landing, the Japanese snuck up on them by night & sank 4 heavy warships, with about 1300 sailors lost – some eaten by sharks as they hit the water. This Battle of Savo is the worst-ever US naval defeat. The Japanese owned the night around here, sneaking in cargoes of men & supplies so successfully it was called the Tokyo Express, doing guerilla warfare, etc.
“Beginning at Guadalcanal the war in the Pacific would be a war without quarter. Prisoners were rarely taken & atrocities were answered in kind… Marines were told that mutilation was a court-martial offense, but … Halsey was putting billboards all over the Solomons that said Kill Japs Kill Japs Kill More Japs.”
The local people gave excellent support to the Allies because the Japanese were here first & treated them very badly, stealing from churches, taking all their food, using them as forced labor, etc. So they did scouting & had some guerrilla operations of their own, as well as rescuing pilots who were shot down, etc.
Enough about the war! Let’s go diving. Daily schedule on the boat:
7am get up
6am – 8am breakfast (breaky) (toast, fruit, cereal, eggs, etc)
8am first dive
9:30ish snack after first dive (two of: fresh cookies, fruit, and popcorn)
11am second dive
12:30pm lunch (soup & what we would call a full meal)
2pm third dive
3:30ish snack after second dive (again two of: fresh cookies, fruit, and popcorn)
5pm fourth dive
6pm appetizers on the upper deck to watch the sunset (cheese, crackers, raw veggies & coconut)
7pm dinner (meat, 3 usually-local veggies, salad, bread, dessert)
8:30pm night dive (I NEVER do night dives)
The difference in lunch & dinner is soup at lunch & dessert at dinner. They often do an interesting fruit salad in addition to a lettuce salad – watermelon or pineapple or papaya with green onion and dressing and a local nut called ngali. No one is going hungry here. We are all going to have gained about 10 pounds on the boat.
One morning one of the dive guys went fishing & invited anyone who wanted to come along, and several folks took him up on it. This was at Mary’s Island, which is apparently in the middle of nowhere (it ALL looks in the middle of nowhere to me) and is unoccupied, so there’s no problem fishing there. No poles, just a hook on a line. They caught 2 tunas & a rainbow runner (whatever that is), so that night for appetizers we had tuna sashimi with wasabi, ginger, and soy sauce. I don’t usually go for raw fish, but it was yummmmmy.
They used the rainbow runner for the crew’s dinner because it has too many bones to be considered “appropriate” for “guests.” There are 16 of us & 14 crew people, Liz & Josh & cooks & room cleaners & boat guys & general dive boys who wrestle gear on & off the tenders (which they all call “tinnies” cuz they‘re made of something like tin. So every day 30 people have to be fed out of a tiny kitchen about 12 ft square.
The most interesting thing to me is that we buy food from the villagers as we move through the islands. If there is a village locally, folks come out in dugout canoes to sell coconuts, watermelons, greens, eggplants, & nuts. Liz & a crewman talk with them & take what’s needed, usually all they have. The prices are pretty well set beforehand, so there’s no haggling. 1 coconut, $1 S ($1 Solomon is about 13 cents). I’ve gotten some pretty good pictures of the canoe folks. They don’t mind the photo-taking at all & are very friendly & smiling.
The Lonely Planet volume (very thin!) on the Solomons, dated 1997, says that the 992 islands receive about 4000 tourists a year – maybe that’s why they’re so friendly. We’re almost as unusual to them as they are to us.
Australian words they use on the boat –
Breaky – breakfast
Mozzies – mosquitoes (important word because of malaria)
Sepos – Americans (from septic tanks, rhymes with yanks, don’t ask me)
Guts-ache – someone who’s a pain in the butt, but it’s affectionate? (that’s what Josh (Josho) called me)
Pijin = Pidgin English. Every day with our first dive briefing we have a Solomons pijin lesson. Examples:
Iumi go dive – let’s go diving
Tanggio tumas – thanks a lot
Staka fis – a lot of fish
Hao mas nao fo diswan? – how much does this cost?
Nem blong mi Donna – my name is Donna
Mi no laekem rain – I don’t like the rain (we thought this one sounded like Tonto)
Wetsuit blong mi hemi smel pi – my wetsuit smells of pee (!)
Fud hemi gud tumas – the food’s really good
Blong seems to be an all-purpose possessive and preposition for with, for, of, belong to, etc. Liz has added a couple of funny ones as a sidebar:
Basket blong titi – bra
Plastik blong pushpush – condom
On a related theme, Solomons folks have an idea that everyone who speaks the same language has an inherent interest in each other – probably because they speak a couple of hundred in addition to Pijin. One of the boat guys, Tim, is from the island called Choiseul, and he says they have 8 native languages there that are all unintelligible to each other. Anyone who speaks your language or dialect is a member of your “wontak” (one-talk) & you must help them & maintain interest in their welfare. An Australian girl was hit by a car in Honiara & the locals called another Australian woman to the TV every time something was on about the accident. “Your wontak, your wontak!” They just couldn’t get that in a country of 20 million you might not know or care about someone just because they talk like you do.
In the Solomons people are responsible for supporting their families (& members of their wontak) to the Nth degree. If you have something & a family member asks for it – aunt, uncle, cousin of whatever distance - you have to give it to him or her. Hospitality is very important too. Anyone coming by your place needing somewhere to stay, or food, gets it. Apparently to the point that a family can be bankrupted by it.
A lot of the people, especially the kids (pikaninnis in pijin) have blond hair – very strong black facial characteristics with broad flat noses etc, but topped by beautiful curly blond hair. I asked Liz about it & she was going on about gene pools, but Josh broke in to clarify by saying “it’s from the missionaries – teaching them the missionary position.”
Josh explained about paying for the right to dive in the Solomons. Each dive site belongs to a person or family because that’s where they’ve fished or made sacrifices or whatever historically. They have to keep track of how many divers go in at each site, and the info is tabulated & about once a month they pay SD 11 per diver per site to the “owners,” who may not even live on the island anymore, but in Honiara.
The Solomons folks are over 95% Christian, with the biggest groups being the Church of Melanesia (offshoot of the Church of England) and Catholic - although some traditional patterns appear to remain in place, like custom money (kastom mani). This is special money that is used not to buy food or clothes or to pay rent, but for ceremonial purposes. It is primarily used for bride price, an amount paid to a woman’s family by a man who wants to marry her, and for resolution of disputes. Tim said that a bride costs one – five pieces of money on his island, and that if a man “does something bad to your wife” he has to pay you up to 20 of them, or you can kill him! Custom money differs from one place to another – on some islands it’s a large flat clam shell shaped like a flat donut, about 6-7 inches in diameter. That piece is worth SD 1000, and a wife would cost one or two. On Tim’s island it’s a cylinder (“like a cup, but open at both ends”). On Guadalcanal it’s disks made from shells that are strung like necklaces, with the red ones worth more than the white or black ones. Another type is a forehead decoration made of shells & animal teeth.
We are having programs occasionally at night – I was the first show, a talk on how to take better pictures. In my talk I included a “what’s wrong with this picture?” section so people could critique some of my pix. We will also have “How tech is tech diving?” by Eric, one on how air compression & purification works by Jess, and another one I don’t remember. Ann arranged with us beforehand to do these talks.
Village visit
One day we visited an island village called Karumalun. The boat had arranged for us to visit, so when we got there we were greeted by the chief, Raymond, who took us over to a group of children who were carrying leis made of plumerias, white & pink. They put one on each of us, and then took us to our seats for a special show.
The women danced first, singing in beautiful harmonies. There were 4 lines of 4 women each, with the front left-hand woman calling out which song & setting the tune. They were wearing “grass skirts” around their bosoms and belted at their waists. Some had chains of shells or beads, another a shiny multicolor string of plastic stuff in her hair. They carried double staffs wrapped around with colorful fluffy something, I couldn’t tell what. Sometimes in the midst of the song they would stop and stomp their feet rhythmically, then start again.
Then the men came on, painted all over with a white chalky paint - their chests with ships, their faces looking like shells, and symbols up & down their legs and arms. They were wearing loin cloths, some with briefs on underneath, others … not! A few of them had painted their butt cheeks black! They carried wooden shields & hatchets (ceremonial, not real)that they whacked each other with occasionally. There were about a dozen of them who danced in 2 lines. They also sang, but most of their numbers were either war chants or humorous.
At the end of the show almost the whole village got together to sing a couple of numbers, even the kids – very cute! They had some of the moves & others not at all, but kept after it. Then Raymond took us on a short tour – I guess there were about 100 people in 20-something houses, as well as a church. They had swept the sand around the village so it would look tidy for the visitors. Rachel gave some of the kids individual hard candies, which they put their mouths without taking off the paper, so she had to pull them out of their mouths to unwrap them.
Speaking of mouths - Just about everyone chews beetlenuts, so their teeth are red & half rotted-away. They seem a bit self-conscious of their teeth, because folks with the mega-red rotted ones are not likely to smile for a photo, even if you joke with them.
Back on the boat
I have never taken medicine for a trip before but when I went on the CDC site listing disease problems in the S Pacific/Australia area, it mentions malaria & says “don’t mess with it, it will kill you.” Then it lists the places malaria isn’t a problem, a list as long as your arm – Fiji etc – and afterwards a very short list of where it’s a real problem – Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, & … Solomons. So I called the dr & got the medicine. You have to take it 2-3 days before getting to the area, every day when you’re there, & 5 days afterwards. Lots of folks get back & aren’t sick so they stop taking it, but the mosquito (mozzie) larvae live in you a few days before you come down with it. Anyway, the interesting thing about the medicine is that supposedly it can give you nightmares, but I’ve just had very vivid exciting dreams with complex storylines & bright images. I look forward to the show every night.
Some of the most interesting dives have been on the WW2 wrecks, at White Beach & some other sites. White Beach was a staging area I think where men & supplies were moved through. There are 4 pontoons still there, some peeking up out of the water, and all sorts of materiel – jeeps, a tank, munitions, old (very old) Coke bottles - under the water. is so strange to see these ”implements of war” with corals & other animals & plants growing on them. Fish schooling in & out, starfish, seasnakes skittering about, anemones dancing in the currents. Something like the planes & machine guns at the jungle war museum, surrounded by wildflowers. There was a very well preserved Japanese seaplane, only one wing broken off, where you could see the propellers & camera area (used for spying) and even the pilot’s and co-pilot’s seats and yokes. It seems that the wrecks are always at a depth & in a type of terrain that is murky & silty, so they really look like ghosts looming up from the bottom are you approach them from the surface. Fascinating.
One of the memorial stones at the jungle museum on Guadalcanal begins with the statement “Governments declare wars but young men must fight them,” which was very perceptive & personal when you compare it to the overblown & high-faluting memorials you usually see. Much of the area around here feels much like that – an acute awareness that men really did die here in the struggle to bring to a halt the Japanese advance across the Pacific. About 7-8,000 Allies & even more disastrously, over 24,000 Japanese. Many of these casualties were from disease & starvation, thousands of men coming to an obscure corner of the world to die, all in the name of patriotism & love of country.
It has been interesting to talk to Josh about Australia. First of all, he sounds like he’s from Boston almost, dropping all Rs but the ones at the front of a word. “Rs are overrated” in his opinion, so sometimes we have “tukah” (tucker = food) or go out to see “shahks.” But he spent some time diving in Cozumel, so he ran into enough Texans that when he says something and gets a blank look, he repeats it in a Texas accent and everybody says Oh! That’s what you said! We’ve also picked up a couple of sayings from him –“rare as rocking horse shit” and “harder to pick than a broken nose” (for predicting a winning horse or what a current will be like once you get underwater).
We have discussed a bit the Australian policies about the Aborigines. One thing was the White Australia policy from the 30s to the 50s, according to which aborigine kids were taken from their families to be raised by whites, with the idea that they wouldn’t “breed” because of being isolated from each other and even if they got together with a white, the result after a few generations would still be that Australia would be an all-white country. (as in the movie Rabbit-Proof Fence) This was all done away with in the 50s and in the 70s or so there were official apologies that people could sign, called the “sorry books.”
Also Australia’s had lots of back & forth over how aborigines can prove they own the land, since they were nomadic & never built any buildings or fences or cultivated any land. Eventually it’s been worked out that “crown land” that’s not owned by any individuals can be claimed by them. So some groups are living on land almost like a reservation. Not too good, but it seems they are very unhappy in the cities & have a lot of problems with alcohol & “petrol” (sniffing gasoline).
Aug 21 Tuesday back to Honiara … and to Houston. A very L O N G day
Our last day in Honiara, after we left the boat, some of us ate lunch in the Lime Lounge, on the corner of the street where the Am Consulate is (also the Melanesian handicraft center, which we enjoyed so much that a number of people needed also the services of the DHL next door). The lounge is a hang out for expats (most were Austr & NZs) & also cops! Anyway, I started talking to 2 guys who were obviously Australian police, although their arm patches said Participating Forces on the top & Helpem fren on the bottom, pijin for helping friend or some such. Wayne & Shane, from the Queensland & Tasmanian State Police respectively, were on loan to the Solomons because of what they called “the troubles,” the Tension. They are advisors to local police forces & help maintain order – although not in quite the same way as the soldiers you see around town. The Frens are made up of state federal & local cops from Australia, New Zealand, & even Fiji & Tonga, serving on mixed teams. They live in Honiara 2-3 months, then are home a month, then back to the Solomons.
The thing they said that really made us laugh was that Australians call Tasmanians “Mexicans” because it is the most “under” state in the Down Under. What would possess them to bring Mexicans into it, in this far corner of the world? Strange.
Well, we got back home after ~30 hours of traveling, back across the Date Line. The only excitement (besides the Fiji – LA flight being an hr late & almost missing the LA – Houston connection) was that we had a bit of a layover, & had to get off the plane in Vanuatu briefly, so now I can add another country to my list.
Thanks for listening!
