The stunning South Pacific island most Australians don't visit - but should

There can be few more beautiful places on Earth to escape the crowds, whether you're a surfer or not.

When I land at Nusatupe Airport - on its own tiny island in the Solomon Islands' Western Province - I'm transported directly from the airport to my resort by boat. Few cars operate in this part of the Pacific: there are hardly any roads, and cars don't float. We motor across a blue lagoon where I see stingrays and fish - even a dugong - to an island five minutes' away where we pull up at the dock of a bar/restaurant area built on top of the lagoon.

The sheen of the water, this getting to and from between an island airport and an island resort, feels like arriving in Bora Bora - French Polynesia's mega-island beloved of the mega-rich and mega-famous. Only none of this is anything like Bora Bora. This island of Ghizo - and its surrounding islands in the Western Province - was one of the most visited regions for international tourists in the Solomon Islands, yet it still feels like the last frontier of the Pacific. Less than 30,000 visitors came to the Solomons prior to COVID-19 in 2019, compared to 300,000 in French Polynesia, and almost a million 2000 kilometres east in Fiji.

But in March 2020, the Solomons government suspended all flights to its islands because of the pandemic: the country was shut off completely from the outside world for more than 800 days, only opening again in mid 2022. Almost two years on, the Solomons government is still wondering how to get us back (visitation numbers are improving, but less than 500 Australians visited per month in the first quarter of this year). Yet, to get here from Australia's east coast takes barely three hours - with the introduction of a new flight route that takes me straight to an international airport (Munda) 10 minutes' flying time from Ghizo.

Australian surfers have been coming to this part of the Solomons - about 380 kilometres north-west of the capital city Honiara - for more than 20 years. The waves around Ghizo are some of the most uncrowded of the known surf breaks in the Pacific. But surfers are a secretive bunch. In a world overrun by others desperate to find the perfect wave, knowing one exists - a lot closer to home than the ones we flock to in Indonesia - is a secret worth guarding.

This surf season (though waves break year-round here, the best swells arrive between November and April) there's been fewer than 20 Australian surfers in Ghizo.

I'm staying at Fatboys Resort. Where most surf resorts cater for guests who do nothing else but surf, many guests here don't even know the two best breaks in the region are less than 15 minutes away by boat. Most guests are here because the Western Province offers some of the best diving in the world - from easily accessible World War II wrecks to reefs with some of the highest fish counts on Earth. We're also among excellent fishing grounds in the Pacific.

Divers and fishermen look on as we load up the boat with surfboards. My surf guide and boat driver is Jocul Ravia, co-president of the Western Solomon Islands Surf Association: the first local to surf in Ghizo. He learnt on an old board left behind by an Australian. "If it wasn't for you Aussies, we'd have no surfboards," he explains. "Kids in the villages share boards."

One of the two main surf breaks is around the corner from the port town of Gizo, the largest town in the Western Province. From the boat all I see is jungle along a ridge behind a tiny village, fringed by a white-sand beach. It's as idyllic as anything you ever wanted the South Pacific to be. "Titiana," Ravia points. "Even in Gizo Town there are people that don't know about this wave."

We anchor 100 metres off the beach, beside a head-high wave breaking left-to-right along the reef. It's far from perfect today - the swell is often flukey even during the peak surfing season - but it's all mine: and anyone from Australia's surfer-saturated east coast will tell you what a rarity that is. Small children watch us from the shore, a few of them paddle out across the reef. They're shy and keep their distance - but we wave them over and prompt them to ride the waves with us. Each time we ride one across the reef everyone hollers. I high-five a little boy as he rides past me on one half of a snapped surfboard.

There's another picture-perfect wave breaking right-to-left just across this bay by boat, beside another village. This is Pailongge: the better known of the two Gizo waves.

But there's more to do here than just surf so I throw a fishing line out as we motor further around the back of Ghizo Island to a third village, Saeraghi. Small kids take turns leaping out of gigantic tamanu trees which line the beach beside our boat, climbing higher and higher the closer we get. The water's the colour of milky jade in the shallows. There are hammocks laid out along the waterline, and bungalows visitors can rent. A church bell chimes and the kids sprint from the water to change, emerging from their homes with hair Bryl-creemed flat across their foreheads. After a lunch cooked on coals, we return to Pailongge for an afternoon surf. It's smaller, but it breaks perfectly across colourful reef that looks shallow only because of the almost total transparency of the water.

I surf twice a day for a week, without once seeing another foreign surfer. There are other surf breaks nearby, with names like Desperates and Mechanical, named by the surfers who discovered them. Surfing here reminds me of the simple pleasure that comes in riding a wave, and the camaraderie that follows from doing it together. It's been lacking at our crowded Australian surf beaches for decades.

Even a surf holiday is often an exercise in befuddlement: we don't necessarily want to ride death-defying waves in testosterone-fuelled surf camps or charter boats. But most options across Indonesia and the South Pacific cater to those seeking the perfect wave - and it's usually a bigger wave than we can handle. Surfing here doesn't feel like a conquest, it's just about fun.

Between surf trips, I eat local crayfish or Spanish mackerel or tuna in a restaurant over the water at Fatboys. There's an open-plan bar looking across to Kolombangara Island, with its extinct 1700-metre-high cone-shaped volcano. There's no TV at night and the Wi-Fi is patchy at best, but the fish that swim underneath attracted by the lights are enormous, and occasionally someone throws out a fish head or two and the black-tipped reef sharks put on quite a show.

The name "Fatboys" comes from a character in a Charles Dickens' novel whose life revolves around drinking, eating, sleeping and avoiding work - but there's plenty here to do. Some days I ride a surfboard behind a boat in the mirror-still waters, or I snorkel or paddle-board or kayak over giant clams and bright, vivid coral heads. Or I paddle or take a boat to JFK Island, a tiny island visitors come to for barbecue lunches, which John F Kennedy swam to during World War II when his boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer. I take a snorkelling tour one day over a Japanese fighter plane in shallow, clear water. These waters are full of World War II wrecks; each night at the bar divers tell me stories. Others travel to Skull Island; a small island near Munda where head-hunters left 50 human skulls.

On my last day I take a boat to a tiny islet opposite Gizo town. The co-president of the Western Solomon Islands Surf Association, Jeremy Baea, runs a wooden bungalow there set so close to the water we dive into the lagoon from its veranda. Baea runs surfers out to the waves any time they feel like surfing. "We need Australians here," he says. "One of our main goals with the Surf Association is to get young people involved in surfing to give them healthier options than drinking. The surfers that come here from Australia left surfboards behind. That's how there's any surfing here at all. Kids get to know the surfers and they get to know more about the world outside." But he says we need never worry about crowds in Ghizo. "There are never more than a few surfers out," he says. "There are so many waves in the Solomons no-one's ever even surfed."

Getting there: Solomon Airlines fly from Brisbane to Munda, 10 minutes' flying time from Gizo, every Saturday, or five times a week from Brisbane to Honaira, with connections to Gizo. flysolomons.com

Staying there: Fatboys Resort offers bungalows, a beach house and overwater bungalow, with rooms starting from $260 per night. They organise surfing, diving and fishing tours and other excursions. fatboysolomons.mydirectstay.com

Explore more: visitsolomons.com.sb

The writer travelled courtesy of Tourism Solomons.