Malaita is different. The people, an energetic breed, still make shell money used for bride price transactions and build their houses upon man-made coral islands. Tourism has barely begun to develop.

Auki’s waterfront market buzzed with activity, but even so it took another hour to fill a launch with enough other passengers to embark on the run down to Langalanga Lagoon. Here my hostess Serah Kei, and her family, form an extended community, their island cottages linked by walkways of crushed coral. Serah’s Lagoon Hideaway is a single over-water bungalow with walls of split bamboo, and furnished with distinctively feminine touches: potted plants, strings of gleaming cowrie shells framing doors and windows and a comfortable sofa looking out across the water from the verandah.

Serah arranged a demonstration of shell money manufacture: five people clad in traditional costume cut shells to the size of small buttons, buffed them, drilled holes in each, strung them up and applied the final polishing with a whetstone. The resulting necklaces, thick of ropes of shell buttons, are sold and traded all over the archipelago.

Langalanga was no forest-clad wilderness, but rather, a patchwork of activity with canoes and motor launches gliding constantly between man-made islets and even boat building yards.