If fortune finds you flying over the Solomon Islands, do this: grab a window seat. A window seat for the incredible views, half a Valium for the rattling small plane nerves, and a psychedelic playlist to soundtrack the experience. Beneath you lay a kaleidoscope of islands, lagoons, reefs, and jungle-fringed beaches. Stare a while and patterns emerge: faces, punctuation marks, talismans. Some sections are as lovely as Tahiti’s outer isles yet appear entirely unmarked by humankind. You twist your head in acute angles and imagine pleasing intersections of swell, reef, and island. The mind races. It’s like you’ve found a new planet.

Eventually, the plane bumps down on a grass runway and you emerge, blink twice, and breathe in thick Solomon air. Your senses ping with unfamiliar portents. Things are happening or are about to happen. A storm builds blackly. A rooster crows murderously. A platoon of soldier crabs take the beach. A man with black skin and red teeth grins a welcome. You are here. But just because you are here doesn’t mean you know where you are. Only hours ago, you were in a shiny Brisbane airport, swimming in convenience and artificiality. You could have been in any modern globalised city. But when your twin prop comes to a rest on jungle-crowded Santa Isabel you know right away you’re in an untamed corner of planet Earth.

 Where are we again?                                                                                                            

“The natives of the Solomons are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for collecting human heads. Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned and to smite him a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column at the base of the brain….Heads are a medium of ...