Choiseul Province - Solomon Islands

Last week I embarked on another great work trip to the Pacific Islands, this time to Choiseul Province in the Solomon Islands.  In total, the round trip took me 9 flights and 4 counties to complete with stops in Singapore, Australia and Papua New Guinea.  I spent a quick night in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands when I first arrived.  Honiara is located on Guadalcanal Island, home of a famous WW2 battle.

The next morning I took an early flight on a Twin Otter prop plane out to Taro, the provincial capital of Choiseul and home for the next couple nights.

We were based in Taro for 2 days for consultation and planning workshops

And then headed out for 3 days of site visits in the communities to see the climate change projects that are being implemented.  There are no roads in Choiseul (only logging roads, not even the runway is paved) so all travel is by boat.  After a wet 3 hour boat ride to our first village, we started to pull up to shore and were greeted with a traditional welcome.

Luckily the weather cleared and we had calm seas and sun for the rest of the site visits.

 There are no real hotels in the province so we slept in community guesthouse like the two following photos.

With no restaurants, we were reliant on the small shops in the villages for food.  This was a pretty typical dinner in the field.

Mt. Kinabalu trek

Aftern a short, but still overnight flight to Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, followed by an early morning drive into the outskirts of the Mt. Kinabalu National Park, we finally arrived at about 3:45AM.  We spent Thursday hanging out and exploring some of the lower elevations of the park before heading out on Friday AM for the two day climb to the summit.'

We got lucky with the weather and had some fog, but not rain for the first part of the ascent to the base camp on Mt. Kinabalu.

On day 2 we left at 2:30AM and started the 3 hour slog in the dark up to the summit at 13,500 ft.  It was freeing cold, but but well worth it once the sun finally came out.

Then it was all the way back down the mountain and back to Manila the following day.