New Georgia

Munda is New Georgia’s main town — a small airstrip, a handful of guesthouses, a market, and a population of people who seem genuinely surprised when anyone comes to visit who isn’t a researcher, a missionary, or seriously committed to diving. It’s the right kind of surprised: curious rather than suspicious, and quick to resolve into helpfulness.

I flew in from Honiara on a small plane that crossed from Guadalcanal over open water and then over the green density of the New Georgia Group — island after island, connected by channels and passages, almost no visible human infrastructure except the occasional village clearing. From the air, New Georgia looks like what it is: a large, heavily forested island that history briefly turned into one of the most violently contested pieces of ground in the Pacific, and that has since returned, with remarkable completeness, to itself.

The WWII Landscape

The 1943 New Georgia Campaign — the American push to take Munda’s Japanese airfield — left physical traces everywhere. In the jungle south of Munda, Japanese artillery pieces still point at angles nobody corrected, their barrels rusted into the positions they held in August 1943. American landing craft sit half-buried in beaches that have grown up around them. Tank traps that failed their purpose now collect rainwater. The airfield the whole campaign was fought over became Munda’s civilian airport, which seems like the appropriate resolution.

The best access to the WWII sites is through local guides, who know which pieces of jungle to push through and which artillery positions are accessible without a machete. Zipolo Habu Lodge organises these walks and its guides are the product of families who grew up around this history — they talk about it with a particular intimacy, noting where their grandfathers hid during the fighting, which crashed plane belonged to which side.

Diving the Wrecks

The waters around New Georgia absorbed a significant portion of both fleets. I dived three wrecks over two days with a guide from Munda — a Japanese transport at shallow depth where coral has completely colonised the superstructure, a deeper American vessel where the cargo holds were still partly intact and home to enormous grouper using the darkness as cover, and a Zero fighter in about twelve metres that looks almost whole from a distance and falls apart at closer inspection into a collection of scattered aluminium sections.

The coral growth on the shallower wrecks is extraordinary — decades of reef succession on artificial substrate. What was once a warship is now an argument for the reef’s persistence.

Roviana Lagoon

Beyond the WWII sites, Roviana Lagoon extends east of Munda and has the same quality of sheltered, brilliant water as the rest of the Western Solomons. Snorkelling over the coral gardens inside the reef is good enough to occupy several afternoons. The villages around the lagoon — Roviana, Munda, Nusa Roviana — have a lifestyle that still revolves substantially around fishing, and the fish market in Munda on weekend mornings is a small, lively gathering of people who caught things before dawn.

I ate barracuda grilled over a wood fire two evenings in a row and was not sorry.

When to go: May through October is the reliable dry season — calm seas, good dive visibility, and lower humidity make this the obvious choice. The airstrip at Munda is well-maintained and receives regular flights from Honiara, making New Georgia one of the more accessible Western Province destinations. December through March brings rains and occasional cyclone watches; dive operators sometimes suspend operations during the worst weeks.