It is a trip of early starts, cash in your pocket and one big plan a day. This is not a resort destination or one with a cultural agenda: it is a destination for going to look at one very specific thing and staying to look at it.
01 A bird that does not incubate its eggs
The protagonist is the Melanesian megapode, a bird of 34 to 39 centimetres with a compact body, huge feet and a short crest, found in the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomons. What makes it different is not how it looks: it is how it breeds.
Instead of warming the eggs with its body, it looks for ground that is already hot: geothermally heated soil, sun-baked sand or decomposing roots. It digs a burrow between 20 and 90 centimetres wide and leaves the eggs 30 to 90 centimetres down, where the temperature sits around 36 or 37 degrees.
Geology does the rest. Incubation lasts six to ten weeks and the eggs carry a very high proportion of yolk, 65 to 69 per cent, against 15 to 40 per cent in an ordinary bird. That is why the chicks come out of the ground fully formed and walk away alone: they never meet their parents.
On Savo those sandy clearings are called egg fields and belong to the villages, which manage and harvest them: around a hundred eggs a day, a little larger than duck eggs, eaten on the island or traded with other villages. The species is listed as of least concern.
02 A 485-metre volcano within sight of the city
Savo is a 485-metre stratovolcano rising out of the sea some 35 kilometres from Honiara. On clear days you can see it from the capital's shore, and that closeness is exactly what makes the day trip possible.
It is still active. Its last eruption is placed between 1835 and 1847, and monitoring services work with an estimated frequency of one eruption every one to three hundred years. In the meantime the heat escapes where it can: hot springs, boiling mud pools and geysers scattered through the interior.
A little over three thousand people live on the island — 3,137 at the 2009 count — and they speak Savosavo, a Papuan language, as well as Gela. The climb to the crater takes about two hours one way, always with a village guide, and it is steep and humid: not technical, but not a stroll either.
03 How you get there and how long it takes
The journey has two legs. First you leave Honiara heading west along the north-coast road, about three quarters of an hour to the villages at the end, where the boats go from. Then an outboard-powered canoe crosses the strait in roughly half an hour.
The crossing is short but open, and that is the reason to come between June and September: with the south-east trade wind the sea is predictable and the trip is done early and without drama. In the monsoon season, November to April, there is more swell and more days when you simply do not go.
You land at the boat-landing village, where the local guide who takes you to the egg fields, the hot springs, the waterfall or the crater is waiting, depending on what the day allows. Decide in the morning rather than at midday: the volcano climb in the heat is another thing entirely.
04 What the city is for on this trip
Honiara is not the destination, but it does three indispensable things. It is where the international airport is, eleven kilometres from the centre. It is where you get cash, because outside the city almost everything is paid in notes and in Solomon Islands dollars. And it is where you buy the food.
The central market, on Mendana Avenue with its back to the water, is the compulsory stop the evening before: fruit, vegetables and the day's fish. For a day out, that plus water covers it.
If you have a spare morning, the city has the national museum and a cultural centre with traditional houses built inside it, plus the botanical gardens. That is half a day, no more, and it fits well on the arrival or departure day.
05 How to build three days
Day one, city: arrival, changing money, the museum and cultural centre in the afternoon and a walk through the market to settle the next day's shopping. Early dinner and an alarm set.
Day two, the whole island: leave at first light heading west, cross early, egg fields and hot springs in the morning, a swim and lunch in the village, and back in mid-afternoon before the wind gets up. If you prefer the crater, swap the entire morning for the climb and leave the fields for after lunch.
Day three, coast: the eastern road towards the rivers and the plain, or a second boat trip if the sea allows. And if you have one more night, repeat the island: here that is not wasting a day, it is the plan.
