‘Travelling – it gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.’
Ibn Battuta, The Travels
Sitting in the boat for hours, perched like fools on the coral reef, left plenty of time to think. For me, it was like being stuck in a metaphor, an old one. We were at the bottom of the wheel of fortune, waiting for it to rotate and lift us up again.
The sun moved lower and cast the sky in purples and pinks. The sea responded in kind, creating a rippling canvas of deepening shades that had no top or bottom, and no edge but that offered by the nearby shore.
At last, five o’clock rolled around, and as the skipper promised, the tide turned and freed us. Our luck didn’t get any better, though – not yet. When Ronald and I arrived at the terminal, there was only one person left, a man in a yellow vest with reflective straps. He was in the process of closing the door to the tent, which housed – or rather was – the terminal.
‘I am here for the Solomon Airlines Flight IE 353 scheduled for 3 pm.’ I thrust out my hand and gave him my dubious ticket confirmation.
‘You are late. This plane already left.’
‘Are you sure? Aren’t there any more flights to Honiara?’
‘I’m sure.’ He looked annoyed. This man appeared to be the air-traffic controller, baggage handler, janitor, ticketing staff and airport manager rolled into one. ‘That was the departure for Honiara and there aren’t any more scheduled for today. I am shutting down.’
Although I was getting used to things going wrong, missing a flight was a new one. Returning to Bougainville was not an option in my contingency plan. The news caused me to freeze as my synapses misfired, looking for a pattern in the storm. I turned to Ronald but he had walked away, and was texting on his phone, probably sending messages to the merchants he had planned to meet hours ago.
The airport manager took in my stricken expression with curiosity, and then compassion. He had seen enough to feel some pity for a stranded passenger on a remote island.
The multi-purpose airport worker opened a small wooden cabinet attached to the wall and removed a dangling keychain of colourful tags. One of the keys opened the padlock to the tent. Inside was a simple desk equipped with an old computer and fat off-white CRT monitor, marked with fingerprints. After a few loud keystrokes, he said there was nothing available the following day. The earliest trip was two days later, on Monday at 7 am.
My heart sank as I considered my two options: return to Arawa on a canoe that night and try again the following Saturday, or stay in Choiseul Bay – assuming there was a place here for me to stay – in the hope of catching the next plane out.
The hitch was I didn’t know if my ticket would be valid for the plane that was due to leave on Monday. Ronald, for once, was at a loss for answers, and the man at the desk, despite his assortment of airport responsibilities, refused to confirm either way.
Places like Choiseul were far from the usual travel routes favoured by backpackers and suitcase tourists, and had little to offer foreigners who turned up out of the blue with a bag and no clue. A person like me would stand out like a mirror pointed at the sun on this under-populated island.
Erring on the side of caution, I decided to risk losing the money I’d spent on the ticket and return to Bougainville to try again in a week’s time, when the next floating market took place, sending skiffs back to Taro Island. I made a mental note: on my next attempt, pay better attention to the movement of the tides. Perhaps another chart in my notebook was in order.
There was a new wrinkle. As Ronald explained, the canoe we’d travelled in wasn’t from Bougainville. It was a Solomon Islands boat and it wasn’t going anywhere.
‘Okay then, what about a canoe from the Bougainville side?’ I asked him. ‘Can you find me a spot on one of those going back tonight?’
‘You’ve seen our boats. They’re narrow, they’re packed with stuff. It’s impossible to secure a spot unless you reserve in advance. Even if I can ask around, they’ll be loaded to capacity this late in the day. By the time we get to the dock, they’ll be long gone.’
Ronald didn’t understand what a problem it was for me to have missed the plane. In his eyes, I was a plucky, self-sufficient traveller who would take the setback in my stride and find a solution. He saw me as a kindred spirit, relaxed and unbothered; not because I lacked common sense, but rather because I had faith in my own ability to handle any challenge. This was the downside of turning people into dots.
He bid me farewell and stepped out of the tent. While he had been glad to make the ocean crossing at my side, this was a working trip for him, and he needed to finish his business before the sun set. Through the open flap, I watched him walk away – to make his way into this tiny fishing outpost.
With no option to return to Bougainville, I needed a Plan C…or D (I had lost track). The airport manager, still watching my face with curiosity, waited for my next query.
‘Do you have a way to check if my ticket is still valid for the flight on Monday?’ I asked.
He typed the confirmation number from my ticket into the vintage computer, and said he could switch my booking to the Monday flight at no extra cost – but I would have to make up my mind quickly, since it was time for him to close down the system.
Two nights on Taro Island until Monday. The synapses whirred. By then, the kind airport manager had run out of empathy and was ready to leave. Seeing my options dwindle, I agreed to switch the ticket to Monday’s flight.
He handed me a slip of paper with a series of dashes printed on it. I was to return with it on Monday when, he assured me, he would get me on board the flight to Honiara.
‘I guess I’ll just wait here then!’ I said, doing my best impression of a seasoned tourist who was accustomed to waiting in transit.
‘Uh, no.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re not staying here. Not allowed.’
‘Okay, is there any transit lodge or airport hotel nearby?’
‘Have you been to Taro Island before? It’s not that kind of place.’
‘So…I can’t go to Bougainville. I can’t stay in town, because there is no town. And I can’t stay at the airport. That puts me in a tough spot, wouldn’t you say?’
‘There’s maybe one thing you can try…’ As he closed the padlock on the tent door, he described a fisherman’s lodge where I could possibly rent a room. His directions were more like cryptic clues. ‘Go left, then right, past the big tree, left again, then past a little tree, up a hill and turn right…’
Taro Island was lacking in street signs or house numbers. Doing my best to keep his words clear in my mind, I cut a zigzagging route across the island, which was actually more of a coral atoll, topped by greenery and fishermen’s huts, the low terrain marked by a tangle of laneways and dirt tracks.
I was alone, and nearly broke, with just a few dollars of the local currency in my pocket, thanks to a gift from Ronald and Mariam. I was also lost, since my phone had no connectivity. The sun was now starting to sink below the western horizon of the island. The prospect of wandering aimlessly around a remote outpost – in the dark – was making me quietly panic.
Following a dirt road toward what looked like a radio tower about a kilometre away, I came upon a chain of small businesses, really just shacks lit by tube lights and dangling bulbs. There was a shop that sold a range of snacks and consumer goods, most of them hanging from strings. No-one spoke English and when I tried to buy a sim with PNG money, I was waved away. I found a kiosk that exchanged currency, returned to the first shop, and bought the sim card with Solomon dollars.
‘Winiaka! It’s me.’
‘I can tell. Where are you?’
‘Solomon Islands. And I’m stuck.’
‘Oh dear, Javey. Nothing gets easier for you.’
As she took in my story, her sympathy was palpable through the tinny handset. But this time, her consolation and compassion were all she had to offer. Her magical ability to find valuable local connections and fix my problems had reached its limit the moment I crossed the maritime border. From this point forward, I would have to figure things out on my own. I asked her to tell her mom to say a prayer for me.
The late-afternoon shadows lengthened, bringing out the night creatures. The feral cats of Choiseul Bay were unlike any I’d seen before. They were unusually large, with puffy faces and menacing eyes. And they were everywhere: lounging on verandas, draped imperiously on the branches of trees, and creeping out of the roadside wilderness. Apex predators, they walked with the swagger of street gangsters. They scared the shit out of me.
As I searched for the fishing lodge it was clear the feral cats weren’t my only worry. Some of the locals were getting drunk. Their angry voices came out of dilapidated fishing huts, loud with an escalating edge of aggression. It was a matter of time before someone took an unhelpful interest in me.
I held my head straight and kept walking. Finally, by a small miracle, I found the fisherman’s lodge. It was just that: a hut that provided a communal area for fishermen to sleep, rather than a hotel where a stranger might rent a room. The owners took pity on me, sizing me up as either a tourist who had wandered far from home, or a fugitive. There was a space upstairs where I could sleep in exchange for a couple of Solomon dollars.
To my grateful ears, their grudging offer sounded like a kind welcome.
When I woke up the next morning, the cats had fled from the daylight, receding into the shadows of the jungle. In the glare of the sunshine, the island put on an astonishing pageant of natural beauty. The flora was rich and prolific with tropical birds, filling the air with their song, and the clear waters bubbled over with the mysteries of their depths.
There was so much life here, it turned the presence of a solitary human being into an incidental detail. As someone who had experienced enough of the human jungle lately, this primeval Jurassic Park was a glorious place. For two days, I took pictures of the ocean from every angle, and sampled the local dishes from the seaside food huts, quite aware I stood out as the island’s only tourist.
By Monday at sunrise, I was back at the airport. It was a 7 am flight, but I arrived hours early. By now I knew to give myself time to deal with the unexpected, since anything might happen.
This time, it didn’t. The plane stood at the ready, and my ticket was accepted by the airport staff, just as my jack-of-all-trades friend said it would be. (He was here too, helping people to load their bags of vegetables into the cargo holds.) To be safe, before boarding I put on my disguise of baseball cap, sunglasses and headphones, set to silent, creating a magnetic field that warded off any unwanted conversation.
The plane, waiting for us on a grassy field, was a fifteen-seater, about the length of a transport truck. It was a plain creature, with a door that opened in its nose to stuff in the luggage, and another in the midsection for more storage. The flag of the Solomon Islands was painted on its oversized tail. The door, which doubled as a staircase, had four steps to let us inside.
Because it was a small plane, every seat offered a clear sightline to the surrounding scene. We pulled off the grass runway, rising over the same coral reef that had toyed with our boat a couple of days earlier. The windows on the other side revealed the green hill, which faded to turquoise as we gained altitude in the rich, wet air. The mountain rose beside us, a continuous slope that plunged deep beneath the water’s surface, shifting from bright to cobalt blue.
The plane barely reached 3000 feet for the entire journey, which followed a route south-east along the Solomon Islands archipelago. We flew low enough that there was a cell connection onboard, something I knew because the pilot was on his phone during the entire flight. So much for ‘Please turn off your mobile devices’ to avoid messing with aircraft navigation.
After a couple of hours, we had a refuelling stop at Nusatupe, at another make-do terminal, a one-room concrete shack on a battered golf course of a runway. And then it was back in the air for a few more hours, until our final resting spot was announced by the low mountains of Guadalcanal island.
Skirting the base of the mountain range was a city of considerable size. My chest tightened. Boarding a plane on a grass field was one thing, but this was actual civilisation, with a proper airport that would be equipped with all the standard security and screening measures. As the plane began its descent, I prepared a portfolio of alibis, in case someone on the ground felt a need to pry.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ I rehearsed. ‘I am Ian, the backpacker who has inexplicably fallen in love with your fair city of Honiara.’
Fortunately, perhaps, the world was spared my masterful performance. The disembarking process went as smoothly as in any tourism video, and soon enough I was in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands, on my way to the Airbnb that Nina had booked. Just like a real tourist! My alibi had started to merge with my real life. One day soon, I hoped, I could stop with the stories.
In the meantime, there were more tales to tell. On the drive to my homestay, I told the mother of the Fijian family who were to be my hosts – they had kindly picked me up at the airport – that I was returning from a short tour of the natural riches of Choiseul Bay. Busy tourist that I was, my intention was to stay in Honiara for just a brief visit.
I never imagined I’d still be there six months later.