The South Pacific is always a good one, while many people have taken holidays in places like Fiji, Tonga, Australia and New Zealand – it is not so common to go to little islands like Nauru which is an Island nation once so rich they had their own airline and was one of the richest nations per capita, on earth, but now thanks to the mining that made them rich their island has nothing of value.

What about the Solomon Islands? An archipelago consisting of nearly 1000 islands with over 300 of them being habited. This truely is a place you can get lost. About 3 hours flight north east of Brisbane, Australia lies the capital of Honiara home to 30,000 or 40,000 people (depending on what you read). From there you can take flights out to regional areas of boats to just about any of the Islands. Flights always run a little off time – thanks to the relaxed time keeping ‘Island time’, it takes a little getting used to but even after several flights being weighed before entering the plane can be little disconcerting -  but they get you to the outer regions of the Solomon Islands.

If you want to see cultures relatively untouched by outside influences, then some of outer islands in the Western province are like a window to the past. Families living off food grown in their gardens, chickens and chlidren running around on the soft sand with the palm trees while others are out in their dug out canoes fishing to feed their families. Every now and then something will snap you out of it when someone mentions the result of a recent football game in England, or ask your opinion on a certain celebrity, but apart from the occasional jolt, the Solomon Islands represents the change to bliss isolation from a world travelling at thousands of miles an hour, to a world that has enough to get by and tomorrow’s problems will deal with themselves – we could all learn something from the Solomon Islanders.