Solomon Islands
Arnavon Islands
Hawksbill turtles crawl ashore on islands managed by rival tribes who declared a conservation truce.
The hawksbill crawls ashore after dark, her shell glistening, flippers dragging furrows in the sand. A ranger crouches at the treeline with a notebook, recording her tag number by red torchlight. The only sounds are waves, breathing, and the scratch of a pen — the whole island exists for this moment and the truce that made it possible.
The Arnavon Islands are a cluster of small, mostly uninhabited islands in the Manning Strait between Choiseul and Isabel provinces in the Solomon Islands. They host one of the most significant hawksbill turtle nesting populations in the western Pacific. The islands are managed as the Arnavon Community Marine Conservation Area — a partnership between the Nature Conservancy and the Kia and Katupika communities, whose traditional custodianship overlaps the nesting beaches. The conservation agreement, established in the 1990s, required rival tribal groups to set aside longstanding disputes over marine tenure in favour of joint management. Rangers live on-site year-round, monitoring nesting activity, tagging turtles, and hosting the small number of visitors permitted to join patrols during nesting season.
Solo
Arnavon suits the solo traveller drawn to conservation work and genuine remoteness. Joining a ranger patrol during nesting season means long nights on empty beaches, basic station accommodation, and the privilege of witnessing a critically endangered species in one of its last strongholds.
Couple
Sharing a turtle patrol under Pacific stars, on an island managed by a community truce, is an experience that bonds through quiet intensity rather than adrenaline. The Arnavon Islands offer a rare kind of purpose-driven travel where every night on the beach contributes to something larger.
- The Arnavon Islands Community Marine Conservation Area was established in 1995 as one of the first community-managed marine protected areas in the Pacific; monitoring since then has tracked thousands of individual hawksbill turtles by their shell patterns.
- Hawksbill turtles nest here at a higher density than anywhere else in the Solomon Islands — night patrols with rangers mean walking behind females in the dark as they excavate and cover their nests.
- The three managing communities — Lauru, Maringo, and Kia — had been in territorial conflict over the islands for generations; the conservation agreement was the first formal cooperation in their history.
- Visitors camp with the rangers on an uninhabited island; participation in turtle patrols means tracking nesting females through the night and measuring hatchlings at dawn.
Ranger-station meals of reef fish and rice, simple fuel for turtle patrol nights.
Fresh coconut and papaya gathered from the uninhabited islets between monitoring shifts.
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