South Pacific FAQ

For answers to many questions about the South Pacific, read the latest Moon travel guide, such as South Pacific Handbook, or go to www.tripadvisor.com (or type in Trip Advisor in Google if the TT has bleeped my link to it). Most LP guides to the Pacific Islands are now being updated by committees-in-succession, who have no real knowledge of the places they are updating, Many only visit for a couple of weeks, yet re-write large segments of the original edition.

The LP FAQ is also good. It is always at the top of this column.

Trip Advisor may be good for the most popular places in the Pacific, but is practically useless for Solomon Islands. I have not seen a Moon Guide to Solomon Isalnds, so cannot comment.

I also often wonder how the new authors, with no previous experience with the areas they cover, and certainly no time to visit all the places covered in their part of the guide, manage to do such "thorough updating". ;-)
My firm impression is that much of their "research" these days is done at home surfing the web, then a large part of the rest of the info comes from local tour-operators. Hotel prices can be updated by phone. Only (some of ?) the main cities and key tourist spots actually get visited by them.

OG, Moon may not have a separate Solomons guide, but their South Pacific Handbook has more than 80 pages on the country, covering all provinces (all the way to Tikopia and Anuta!), while LP's "PNG and Solomon Islands" guide devotes 27 pages to the Solomons, only describing half the provinces, if I recall well.
So Moon still beats it, though I must admit that some of the practical info in it (particularly accomodation in the outer islands) is pretty dated.