23 Mar 2025

The Early Bird gets the worm in Honiara

Our adventure was off to an exciting start as at 3 am, while most were sleeping, the ‘Early Birders’ headed ashore for Honiara at 4.30 am. They drove in the dark to Mount Austen, where they spent the morning birding. Enjoying the clearing conditions as the sun rose, they had excellent rare sightings of some of the area's endemic birds.

The Grand Pacific Odyssey guests departed Heritage Adventurer under a grey morning sky, heading to the Honiara Wharf at 7 am. We boarded buses for a morning tour of Honiara, the capital and largest city of the Solomon Islands. Honiara is situated on the northwest coast of the island of Guadalcanal, a name that features prominently in US history with many US Marines lost during the Pacific Campaign of WWII. Honiara translates as ‘place of the east wind’ in the local language.

Our first destination this morning was the small Kukum Market. Locals proudly displayed a colourful and artistically presented assortment of fruits and vegetables, suggesting that as with everywhere else in the world of commerce, the best-presented wares were the ones that garnered the most sales. However, for the nature lovers in the group, a large male Blythe’s Hornbill on the power lines across the road soon became a distraction. As more photographs were taken of the hornbill, the conversation shifted around the hope that the bird might be ‘wild’, alas it was just one more example of the shop retailer's creative skill in enticing curious locals to his store!

Images © C. Finch, Heritage Expeditions