Locals and travellers mingle at Gizo's Fatboys bar in the Solomon Islands. Every time Solomon Islands guide Ravia takes people to Skull Island, there are fewer offerings of precious shell money piled around the skulls of the head-hunted, which are stacked up like ancient war trophies.
For centuries the people of what is now the island nation's Western Province engaged in ritual war, building mighty war canoes and conducting head-hunting raids on neighbouring islands, in the belief that power was stored in the heads of their victims and strength could be gained by capturing them.
The victors would take the skulls back to sites like Skull Island as offerings to the "bigman chest", where the heads of thousands of ancestral chiefs are stored in above-ground burial chambers. I lean close and eyeball the skulls of vanquished warriors, getting lost in the power of this ancient symbol of man's ability to think and act and make love and war. Ravia's mind is elsewhere too, doubtless thinking of bygone days, and he has to snap back to the present when some tourists touch his shoulder and ask him to take a photo of them grinning madly in front of the skulls.
It's an even bigger jump in time when a short boat ride takes us back to the civilisation of Lola Island, sitting at the bar at Zipolo Habu resort, drinking cola and eating crayfish omelettes, looking out at calm waters and a lime-green yacht. The skulls of ancient chiefs on Skull Island, in the Solomons. Apparently, Eddie, an elder from Madou village across the water who accompanied us on our visit, is the last in the line of Skull Island chiefs and tries to keep vigil.
Talk of ghosts seems a bit less threatening at Zipolo Habu or, for that matter, at the nearby town of Gizo, a minute boat trip away and the gateway to this part of the Solomons. Gizo's airstrip is a grassy, potholed runway, from which passengers are transported by speedboat to the township itself, where corrugated iron buildings, palms and sunflowers line the seafront and canoes bob around close to shore. In the main street groups of boys in bandanas ride their bikes around so slowly they almost defy gravity.
