In the last post I wrote about the Vilu War Museum on Guadalcanal.   Getting there was half the fun. 

We were on a tour traveling in a Toyota Coaster.  My first Coaster trip was in 1985.  I was covering an Alaska peace delegation during the Contra War in Nicaragua.  That Toaster was not airconditioned and we called it tie Toaster Coaster.  The one on Guadalcanal was, thankfully, airconditioned, but still had the cramped seats of a bus designed for a population of smaller people.  The road was a genuine third world experience.  It was 25 kilometers, or about 15 and a half miles to the Vilu War Museum.  That is fewer miles than driving from one end of Sitka’s road system to the other.  It took us I hour and 20 minutes one way.

The roads are in bad repair.  It’s the rainy season and the day we were there was the first day without rain in two weeks.  The roads were potholed and washed.  Trees were down all along the right of way. 

Just outside of Honiara, when you travel east (we were assured that the roads were really good going west) you stopped seeing electric wires. Water and sewer also did not extend far.  Famlies cook with wood or, according to the guide, bottled gas.  You see bundles of firewood for sale along the roadside.  Some houses have solar panels but most do without power.  “The bush” starts very close to the capital.

This is a poor area but it’s well fed.  Our guide said that food just falls off the trees, mangos, breadfruit, bananas to name a few, and there are fish in the ocean.   Much of the region is on a limited cash economy.  I saw lot of people with cell phones and a number of “top up” stations.  I suspect they are to recharge sim cards, but on later stops we saw cell phone charging booths in the markets.  The Solomon Islands is poor country.  It ranks 151 out of 189 on the Human Development Index.  While the country has rich natural resources like gold and timber, it is beset with natural disasters like cyclones.  It also has the highest communicable disease burden in the Pacific region, especially malaria.  

But yet our guide tells us it is a friendly and happy country.  We saw lots of smiles and almost everyone waves as we drove by.  The World Happiness Index begs to differ, saying that poverty and disease keep the levels of happiness down.  That’s an index put together by development specialists.  The alternative “Happy Planet” index ranks the Soloman Islands as very happy, 20^th out of 178 nations. The World Happiness Index is based on things like economic wellbeing, good governance, education and living standard.  Happy Planet is based on life expectancy, subjective wellbeing (whatever that means), and living in harmony with the environment.  Although there were huge amounts of trash in the ditches along the roadside, especially plastics.  Take your choice.

On our way out of Honiara we saw people parading to church.  Churches here are well attended.

It was a Sunday and most of the proper shops were closed but was a lot of commerce going on along the roadside.  The ride, for me, was more interesting than the destinations and our slow speed made watching roadside life easier than if we were traveling 30 miles per hour.  Fortunately for our comfort but unfortunately for my pictures the Coaster’s windows were tinted.

Before setting out on our 15 mile journey we made some stops in Honairia, including the American War Memorial to those lost in the Battles on Guadalcanal in 1942 and ‘43.  The battles were turning points.  The US stopped the Japanese from building an airfield on the island which would have allowed them to project power southward and would have helped them hamper US assistance to Australia.  And when the United States took that airfield it allowed us to begin to project power toward Japanese strongholds. 

We also drove by the monument to the Coast Watchers who provided vital intelligence during the war.  It was one such coast watcher who rescued John Kennedy in this region after a Japanese destroyer rammed PT 109.