In an age where we’ve discovered it all, this paradise shouldn’t exist

Pete Blanche is the happiest 82-year-old on Earth. He has the best seat at a bar so close to the water that come high tide on a full moon, it laps at the bottom steps. His beachfront home is a 200-metre barefoot stroll along a crescent-shaped white-sand beach, just past a shallow, clear-water creek.

Pete talks a bit, but you want to listen; for he’s got stories worth hearing. Though I suspect it’s also because everyone here, whether they’ll tell you or not, is trying to work out how they can be as happy as Pete is when they’re 82.

Santa Isobel island: Where the waters are impossibly clear.Credit: Papatura Solomon Islands

“When you’ve found paradise, why the hell would you want to leave?” he asks. He is speaking of his adopted home, Solomon Islands.

Blanche and his 80-year-old wife, Marg, spent 15 years searching for the best spot in these islands for the retreat they always wanted to build.

“We came round this corner on a boat and we went: ‘this is it’, it was love at first sight,” he says. “A big white-sand bay, fresh water in the forest beside it, big fish to catch, surf everywhere and no tourists for hundreds of kilometres.”

In an age where surely we’ve discovered it all, places like Papatura Retreat aren’t even meant to exist. But all I have to do is fly from Brisbane to Honiara, a two-and-a-half hour flight, to connect with a 55-minute flight which lands on a grass runway on an island called Santa Isabel.

Could there be a more perfect spot for a surf retreat?

There’s someone waiting in a boat beside a beach, and it takes them eight minutes to get me here. I drop my bags, take a seven-minute boat ride and I’m surfing near-perfect waves hours before the sun goes down.

Papatura Retreat isn’t for everyone. It’s basic in the sense that its toilets don’t flush (they’re of the composting variety) and there’s no air-conditioning or TV. But every room is absolute waterfront and local fishermen deliver fresh lobster a few times a week (and the local chef had guidance from a Michelin-trained chef who was stuck in the Solomons during the pandemic).

Rooms are made of traditional materials like sago and wild betel nut palm and are connected by wooden raised walkways above the forest.

When Blanche, who came here from Queensland after falling for the Solomons initially on a holiday in the mid-1990s, found this place in 2007 he bunkered down under tarps with one worker for three months, chasing goannas out of his outdoor kitchen.

Green turtles swim out the front of the lodge every day.

Then his family joined. Sons Darren and Nick helped with construction, while the rest of the family, consisting of Marg and daughter Kym, helped get the place up and running.

They found eager staff in a village on Santa Isabel 20 minutes away by boat. It’s where you’ll find the only other surfers on Santa Isabel, like seasoned surf guide, Jimmy, who never knew it was possible to ride the waves which broke all around his home until Pete and his family arrived.

There are more than 10 possible wave sites within a few kilometres of the lodge, shared between a total of 14 surfers staying at any one time.

Most of it breaks on offshore coral reef, though it’s not as sharp and dangerous as what you’ll find further east in Fiji, or French Polynesia or Samoa. There are even a couple of family-friendly waves breaking over a seagrass bottom close to Jimmy’s village. The water is impossibly clear everywhere, and some days dolphins join us on the ride in and out.

Bungalows are built from traditional materials.

There’s no commercial fishing for hundreds of kilometres, so anyone’s likely to catch a big fish just by throwing in a line. Guests vie for a spot on the wall of the Papatura Blue Water Fishing Club where the best catches get written up in chalk. Guests troll for Spanish mackerel, yellow-fin tuna and other pelagic species, though the rivers here are just as bountiful, full of spot tail bass and Mangrove Jack.

There’s diving too: everything from learn-to-dive courses straight off the beach, to boat dives over World War II wrecks and along coral walls that plunge down kilometres, attracting all sorts of marine species. Boats leave each morning with surfers, fishermen and divers.

But some days I prefer not to rush my breakfast, then I hang back and snorkel with the green turtles in the sea grass out front, or wander through the rainforest to cool down in freshwater cascades, just beyond Pete and Marg’s home.

“When I go, I want someone to spread my ashes out there over the reef,” he says pointing out from the lodge. “I never want to leave this place.”

Pete Blanche sitting at his favourite spot overlooking the water.

The details

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visitsolomons.com.sb

Fly

Solomon Airlines fly five times a week from Brisbane to Honiara, with connections to Suavanao, eight minutes by boat from Papatura Retreat, see flysolomons.com

Stay

Stay in a range of lodges and bungalows, seven-night land only packages (surfing and fishing are add-ons) including all meals, transfers to airport and non-motorised water activities from $1450 a person, see papatura.com

The writer travelled courtesy of Tourism Solomons.