I found Nemo and an island paradise

Saturday 4 November 2006

Well, my trip to Western Province was an interesting experience! Gizo is definitely a much nicer place to be than Honiara. It’s a smaller, one-street town, the people are generally a bit friendlier, the market is REALLY good (smaller than Honiara, but heaps of fresh fish every afternoon), it’s cleaner, less dusty and nowhere near as smelly. And it’s closer to lots of really nice places out west too. The only disadvantage is the number of tourists, and the (mainly British) medical students who seem to be journeying to SI and Western Province in particular en masse.

After a delayed flight we (Dale, the WWF South Pacific coordinator and I) touched down for a refueling stop in Munda, where Julian Moti recently sneaked back to the Solomon Islands courtesy of the PNG defence force. Then onto Gizo, where the airstrip is actually on a separate island (not sure if this is because there’s not enough flat land on Ghizo Island, or just so that the single boat taxi operator can make a killing through this essential service…). Arriving lunchless and starving I then had to walk past the market; masses of very fresh looking fish, fish and chips, fruit, etc etc. and go straight to the office to meet the staff. It was pushing 4 on a Friday, and normal office hours are 8 – 4:30, so we were stretching company loyalty expecting people to wait around for too long.

We just went around the table doing quick introductions, and having people talk a little bit about their projects or what they are working on. Everyone was really nice, and it seems like an interesting range of projects that WWF-SI has going. Most of the work is on marine conservation in the Western part of SI; particularly assisting communities to assess their resources and use patterns, identify areas of conservation priority, develop management plans for various kinds of protected areas, monitor species and populations, education and awareness raising, and training in alternative sustainable livelihoods. The first project technical report since I started was due on Tuesday, so that forced me to get my head around at least one of the projects. The project manager had written it, I just had to edit and check that the donor requirements had been met, and check the financial reports for this and another project which also had a financial report due. I was pretty nervous about going back to the project manager with the fairly significant changes I had made, but it seemed to go down OK, and we got the report in on time. Unfortunately the weird procedures for financial reporting have meant that the financial reports will be a little late to the donors, but oh well… maybe I should have incorporated a report on the meaning of ‘Solomon Time’.

Last Sunday I took a day off and went on a snorkeling trip with Dive Gizo. The trip cost SBD150 (or about AUD30, I think), and first off we went to a reef wall off an island called Naru (ha ha). It was really amazing, easily the best snorkeling I’ve every done. Not that I’ve done all that much, but it definitely beat anything I’ve seen on the Great Barrier Reef or in PNG. A recent rapid environmental assessment showed that bits of Western Province have some of the highest fish and coral diversity in the world. Getting even more technical, I saw some Nemos (they do look pretty nice hiding out in the anemones (?) as the common photos show), Angelfish, Parrotfish, and a whole lot of others that I don’t know the name of. And those blue starfish that I was raving about earlier – common as anything, saw lots of them just walking along the seaside around Gizo. The person who went diving on the same trip saw a turtle and sharks, too.

Munda is a really sweet place; very small, again very pretty on the seaside, and very friendly. I came here to go to the AGM of the Tetepare Descendents’ Association, which manages the conservation and use of Tetepare Island. This is a fantastic ‘good news’ conservation story – I’ll post a link to their website when it’s working again. The AGM went all day, and I’ll have no excuse to complain about AGMs of Australian associations after sitting through that in a stinking hot hall, not to mention being coopted into being a returning officer for the voting in of committee members, which turned into a fairly complicated process…

Today I went for a really nice walk in the morning along a seaside road, then up into the island past some gardens and into the bush. It was raining when I headed off, so nice and cool. I wandered around for a while, and there seemed to be roads everywhere so I was pretty confident that when I was ready to head back I could just pick one heading in the right direction. Forgot that I have a terrible sense of direction, and luckily the sun came out and I realized that I was heading in completely the wrong direction to find Munda again, and my plane back to Honiara. I got just a little concerned, especially after I tried a couple of other roads that looked promising but eventually dwindled and disappeared at seemingly random destinations. I ended up having to retrace my steps, and made it back just in time for the plane.

I can’t really say that it’s nice to be back in Honiara, ‘though I am enjoying my last few days of living in a nice house, and plan to stuff myself with dairy products before moving west, where they’re not really available. Also making the most of broadband… don’t know how much more download-intensive blogging there’ll be!