|
Maybe its the Garden of Eden appearance of the islands themselves, cloaked in a chaos of green tangled jungle punctuated with colorful flowers and the songs of tropical birds. Or perhaps it's the broad smiles of the villagers as they paddle out to us in their hand-hewn canoes, peddling their vegetables and fruit, or freshly caught fish, or elegant carvings. Certainly the cocoa-skinned children, so easy to laugh and so wide of eye, shy while irresistably curious, are a part of it. And maybe the air is a factor, so soft you can feel its gentle caress. Like bookends designed by Peter Max,, sunrise and sunset bracket each day with a visual pageant of electrifying color. That must be part of it as well, part of the special magic that embraces one in the Solomon Islands. As it turns out, these are all just part of the warm-up act, for the marquee performance comes only later, comes only to a relative few, while at sea, after donning scuba gear, after slipping beneath the mirrored surface of this 85 degree water. And then nature's magic act approaches the climax of her performance. One day it might be killer whales, another day mandarin fish. Sperm whales in the morning, and ghost pipefish in the afternoon. Do you dream of drifting through the blue water, encapsulated in a rotating cavern of flashing silver barracuda, or of weaving your way through a forest of 10 to 15 ft. seafans. Do you dream of a place with 2,500 species of fish? Do the currents of your imagination carry you over undulating hills of pristine hard corals, over soft coral covered cliffs plunging hundreds of feet down? Do you dream of reefs with well over two hundred species of nudibranchs, and where every inch of bottom is like a Moroccan bazaar, with color, clutter and confusion forming a dazzling arabesque from another world? Do you dream of rolling weightlessly onto you back, peering up through the looking glass of the surface, and seeing the jungle overhanging from above as two worlds merge into a single fertile vision? |
