Solomon Islands
Blessed with sun-soaked beaches and crystalline waters, the Solomon Islands is remote, unspoilt and made up of nearly a thousand islands and atolls, offering world-class snorkelling, scuba diving, fishing and surfing.
In the Solomon Islands you can discover an old-fashioned experience of travelling in the Pacific region. The islands are surprisingly unchanged from how they were decades ago unlike many of their often over-developed ocean neighbours. Unlike Fiji or Tahiti, here the infrastructure is often primitive and the roads unpaved, but the lack of glitzy cocktail bars and posing around the pool is more than made up for by that feeling of a land which time forgot, and some extraordinarily beautiful landscape.
Located in between Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands consist of nearly a thousand islands with just a fifth of these inhabited. The rapidly growing urban capital, Honiara, is situated on the main island, Guadalcanal which is dominated by the 2,335m high Mount Popomanaseu, the highest point in the Solomon Islands.
Visually, the Solomons are stunning, with the sort of scenery you will have seen on many a wildlife documentary; picture-perfect islands fringed by turquoise sea, verdant, pristine jungle and vast blue lagoons. You’ll even find some rusty relics of World War II hidden in the depths of the rainforest.
Traditional tribal culture is still alive in the Solomons where you’ll see whole villages of palm-leaf roofed wooden houses with the laid back inhabitants taking life at a slow pace; the majority of Solomon Islanders still live in rural villages and survive by subsistence farming of crops, hunting and fishing.
There’s lots of action for adventurous types both on land and in the ocean, as you’d expect in one of the best preserved and most pristine environments in the South Pacific. Under the sea there are intriguing wrecks for divers to explore along with some challenging drop-offs. For surfers you’ll find empty beaches where you can ride the waves away from the crowds, take a kayak ride or snorkel pristine coral reefs. Inland you can trek up an extinct volcano.
Blessed with sun-soaked beaches and crystalline waters, the Solomon Islands is remote, unspoilt and made up of nearly a thousand islands and atolls.
