Early morning market trip this morning for some fruit shopping and a look around Honiara, the Solomon Islands capital. Its an awesome, hot stink-pit full of the best of the edible world – just a shame that a strong stench of fish pervades the fruit market section.
After the shopping expedition I went walkabout, coconut in hand, down towards the sea on the outskirts of town. I had never seen a plastic beach before so I found it a little disturbing but after realising how much building material the kids had for their fort I discovered that it wasn’t all bad. It’s funny how kids can make the best of fun from the worst of situations. As it turned out though it was mostly bad – the shanties the kids lived in were on ground a bit less than half-a-meter above sea-level and they had to be built on poles to stay above the storm surges.
Mid day’s too hot for me so I sweated it out on the deck in the shade in my room at the Chester Rest House. I ventured out later for a walk up to an Allied Forces war memorial on the hill-top above town. On the way up I met a bunch of dudes of all ages playing guitars and singing. One knew a tune for Po Karikari Ana and after five minutes I had them all singing the words while they were jazzing up the tune and adding some melodies.
After writing down the words for them so they could learn to perform it at a club in town tonight, I continued up to the memorial. Tis a pretty sweet little spot with a good view of town and an informal residential area. The hills are all pretty steep sided so there’s loads of houses built on poles dug into the slope. Saw the guitar boys on the way home and they sung me the song about SolBrew (the local beer) that they had just made up – turns out they’re not so different from Kiwis. Tell you what, t’was pretty cool just jamming with half a dozen extremely talented musicians playing broken guitars, sitting on a broken concrete wall at the road-side on a tropical island.
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