The Marovo Lagoon

The Marovo Lagoon is the largest saltwater lagoon in the world by the claim its people make and few dispute: seven hundred square kilometres of water in the Western Province of the Solomons, held between the volcanic islands of New Georgia and Vangunu on one side and, on the other, a double barrier of raised coral islands — long, low, forested — that runs for a hundred kilometres with the open Solomon Sea beyond, and passes through it where the tide pours in and out and the sharks and the mantas hang in the current. It has no roads: everything moves by canoe and by fibreglass boat, from the airstrip at Seghe that the American Seabees laid in ten days in 1943 to the villages on the islands and the shores — Chea, Telina, Chubikopi, Batuna, Marovo island itself — where the carvers work ebony and kerosene wood into bowls and fish and canoe-prow spirits inlaid with nautilus shell, the finest carving in the Pacific and their living. On the barrier, Uepi Island Resort sits on the Charapoana Passage, one of the great dive sites of the world; on Gatokae, at the lagoon's end, the Wilderness Lodge is run by the village of Peava; and the whole complex has sat on the World Heritage tentative list since 2008, waiting.

The traveller flies from Honiara to Seghe in an hour on the small plane, is met by boat, and gives the lagoon at least five nights — at Uepi for the diving and the snorkelling straight off the jetty into the pass, where the sharks are; in a village stay or a small lodge on the lagoon side, where the traveller is welcomed with a fee to the landowners and a place at the table; a day by boat to the carving villages, where the pieces are bought from the hands that made them and the prices are quiet; the mangrove channels for the crocodiles at a distance and the birds; a walk into the forest of Vangunu; and, if the traveller can, a Saturday in an Adventist village, when nothing moves and the singing comes across the water. Munda and the Roviana Lagoon, with Gizo, are the neighbours to the west, a boat or a flight away.

The Guide's honesty: Marovo is remote and its comforts are simple — the lodges are wood and thatch, the electricity is solar and the hours are the sun's, the flights are small and change, and the traveller brings cash in Solomon dollars, patience, and repellent; the villages own the land and the water, and the customary fees, the Sabbath, the modest dress and the asking-first are the ways of the place; the lagoon is under pressure from logging on New Georgia and Vangunu that muddies the rivers and the reefs, and the traveller who buys a carving and sleeps in a village lodge is putting weight on the other side of that scale; the crocodiles are real and the swimming is where the villagers say; and the pass at Uepi on the incoming tide, with the water so clear the boat seems to float on nothing and the grey reef sharks turning below, is one of the great sights of the underwater Pacific.