It's not often you'll see a hosepipe used to catch fish, but the lad opposite me, brandishing a fearsome-looking rusty harpoon, used a length as his snorkel. With just that length of hose, a rusty iron arrow and a rubber slingshot to shoot it underwater, he sets out every afternoon to spear his family's fish supper. Watching him paddle away in a dugout canoe, I felt more than just a twinge of envy. The Pacific Ocean was as calm as a mirror, the Bounty-advert beach that I stood on sparkled in the afternoon sun.
It's difficult to find anywhere quite as far from the UK as the Solomon Islands, 900 tropical paradises scattered through the Pacific Ocean, four hours' flying time from Australia's east coast.
A former British protectorate with a population of nearly 600,000, the Solomons range in size from Guadalcanal's 2,000 square miles to outcrops of a few square metres, and just 341 are inhabited.
If they know anything about the archipelago at all, travellers are most likely to have heard of the tourist resorts in the Western Province, where wrecks and coral reefs off islands such as Gizo and New Georgia have long been a mecca for scuba divers willing to head way off the beaten track to be rewarded by world‑class sea life. Yet recently the Solomons have seen a growth in both historical and eco-tourism, as they recover from a civil war that started a decade ago. A ceasefire is now in place.
This is set to increase further now the country has been brought into the spotlight by the HBO series The Pacific, which is on sale on DVD at the front of every supermarket and music shop in the UK this week, and which was set and made in the Solomons.
The series brings to life the event which still defines these islands' history, the second world war, in which the Solomons saw battles between Japanese and American troops fighting for control of the Pacific. Everywhere on Guadalcanal, the main island, are places linked to the war.
I arrived there recently, in the capital city of Honiara, after a stay in Brisbane. Aside from a few beautiful beachfront hotels, Honiara isn't really a place to linger. It's usually a transit point for travellers desperate to get out to the pristine beaches, diving and eco adventures of the further-flung islands. But for those interested in Guadalcanal's historical significance, short war tours with local guides are surprisingly moving and a great excuse to explore the island's beautiful scenery.
At Bonigi beach, I snorkelled through the sandy surf of the Pacific waves, flailing madly when a shark-like yoghurt pot struck my head, until suddenly, 10 metres from the shore, the water cleared and multifarious fish, coral and sponges dotted against the ruby rust of a sunken Japanese transport wreck sprang into view. Shoals shimmered through gaps in the hull and swirling anemones stuck to sunken guns.
At Bloody Ridge, overlooking lush green countryside, a few hundred US marines held off a charge of more than 3,000 Japanese soldiers, a battle captured in all its brutality in the opening episodes of The Pacific. East of Honiara is the beautiful Tetere beach, where deep-blue waves broke on ash-grey sand which stretched away as far as I could see and the sweet smell of mangoes rose from drying husks littering the dunes. Yet landing craft rust away quietly at the back of the beach and I recognised the spot from the show, a scene with thousands of young soldiers wading into the surf. It's hard to imagine such things could have happened here.
Vilu, a war museum west of Honiara, was in fact just a lush garden strewn with rusting field guns, tanks and crumbling fighter planes. I watched the curator Eric's grandson, who could not be more than 14, scale a 40ft coconut palm barefoot, casually twisting off the massive green fruit and letting them fall to the ground before dropping nonchalantly back to earth and handing me a beheaded coconut to drink from.
But the real Solomons aren't defined by this one island, or by its history. As soon as I set out by boat into the dazzling blues and greens of the Pacific, I understood that this beautiful country is defined, more than anything, by the ocean that surrounds it.
Ideally as a traveller here you would spend months exploring the entire archipelago, but with only a week to spare between stays in Brisbane I just had time to explore the nearest group, the Florida Islands, a cluster gathered around the island of Nggela, about an hour's boat ride north of Honiara.
Several boat and dive companies operating out of Honiara offer one- or two-day trips there, giving visitors the chance to leave Guadalcanal and experience some of the incredible snorkelling and diving that the smaller islands have to offer.
I set out from Honiara yacht club, a beachfront bar, with Stanley the boatman, who steered through the waves while keeping an eye out for floating coconuts.
The ocean stretched out ahead, a vast plain of blue, suddenly broken by the spurt from the crested back of a pilot whale. As we neared Nggela's shore our boat was chased inland by a 30-strong pod of dolphins. After just under an hour on the water, we arrived at a picturesque village called Boro. Children clustered around the boat, wanting to play. A tour of Boro gave us some idea of what life on the islands is like. A peaceful idyll of subsistence fishing and farming which, sadly, is now increasingly threatened by falling fish stocks.
We set off again in the boat, passing the wrecked hull of an American transport ship, which rose up out of the water like a giant crocodile, and a real crocodile basking nearby. The next stop was the smaller island of Tulagi, which served as the old colonial capital. It is now a slightly shabby place, but walking between the ruined colonial buildings there provided a good chance to go inland, into the jungle that covers most of the islands.
Just a few steps from the beach and I was immersed in vegetation. Real humming, squirming, sweating, rustling, bursting, screaming jungle, filled with the noise of a million buzzing insects and birds, a sound like a parrot losing a battle with a Flymo. A short distance away from Tulagi, a flurry of flying-fish escorted the boat in to the smaller island of Mana, famed for its coral reef.
This one was truly idyllic, surrounded by the kind of sea that can only be defined by cliche. Snorkelling there amid the coral, starfish and hundreds of small neon flashes, I floated over a shoal of wide-eyed, six-inch fish, each marked with a bright yellow racing stripe, moving as a single body. I dived down and was surrounded by a swirling mass of fish, always just out of reach.
In the afternoon I watched a fisherman unloading the most fearsome-looking beasts from his boat. Coconut crabs are an arachnophobe's worst nightmare: these foot-wide crustaceans look like giant tarantulas and have claws strong enough to crack open a coconut, their principal food. I ate one for dinner that night, at the Tulagi Guest House, washing down the mound of crab flesh, that tasted ever so slightly of coconut, with the local SolBrew lager while I watched a full orange moon rising over the water, like a sunset in reverse.
The Solomons are home to several tourist resorts. Best known are the dive destinations of Gizo (on Gizo island) and Munda on New Georgia, which both have small airports and flights from Honiara several times a week. These islands are well set up to receive tourists and have hotels and resorts to suit a range of budgets – you can even hire your own private islands through the Gizo Hotel. While companies such as Bilikiki Cruises, based in Honiara, offer island-hopping diving trips and fishing holidays from the comfort of a "live aboard" charter boat.
Luxury tourism here is small-scale: the Heritage Park Hotel opened on the site of the former governor general's residence in the centre of Honiara last year, and the Uepi Island Resort, on a small barrier reef island on the Marovo Lagoon, has just 32 beds.
For me, however, the more basic the better on such holidays. On many of the smaller islands you can slide from a boat into crystal-clear water and believe you are the first person to step on this sand.
Local conservation groups are doing what they can to ensure the islands are protected. Back on Guadalcanal, I met Willie Atu from The Nature Conservancy (TNC), an organisation that works with islanders to conserve fish stocks and the islands' iconic turtle populations. The organisation's great success story is the Arnavons, a tiny collection of islands off the most visited Western Province, which are the last refuge of the critically endangered Hawksbill turtle. Ownership of the Arnavons was disputed by three local tribes based on the larger nearby islands of Choiseul, Wagina and Santa Isabel, but when it became apparent that the turtle's numbers were dwindling because of overhunting for their meat and their shells, which are used in tribal crafts, these tribes came together to establish and maintain a marine protected area (MPA).
"The Hawksbill is an important resource," says Peter Ramohia, a marine scientist with TNC. "Many coastal communities in the Solomon Islands rely on this resource for their food and livelihood. If we lose the turtle, everything goes with it: we lose the food, we lose the income from shells and we lose our culture."
The project, begun in 1995, has been a great success, winning the United Nations Development Programme's Equator Prize for conservation in 2008. The Arnavons are now used as an example to other communities in the Solomons, many of which are working to establish their own protected areas and benefiting from the rise in fish stocks and eco-tourism that follows.
The model of eco tourism has been taken up by other communities working with TNC in Choiseul province, where several new eco-lodges have been set up in recent years. Tourists wishing to go off the beaten track can now fly from Gizo to the town of Taro in northern Choiseul. Landing on the grass airstrip, you will be met by a guide from the Poroporo community and taken on a short boat ride to the Pasa eco-lodge, on a small island within the Parama marine protected area. For about £15-£20 a night you will get basic lodging (bring your own mozzie net) and meals cooked by friendly locals in a traditional motu (stone oven). On your doorstep are 200 hectares of protected sea offering frequent encounters with turtles, sharks and large parrotfish, as well as many other species no longer seen outside of MPAs. From there, the truly adventurous can hire a boat and make their way down Choiseul's south coast, visiting other MPAs and eventually reaching the Arnavons.
They may be a hell of a long way away, but the Solomons are becoming a serious eco-adventure option.
