Gizo

The Western Province around Gizo saw some of the most intense naval fighting of the entire Pacific campaign, the 1942-1943 battles for the Solomon Islands leaving behind a scattered undersea record that's still being explored today. A Japanese Zero fighter plane rests close enough to shore for a short swim to reach it, largely intact and now wrapped in decades of coral growth, one entry point among dozens of wrecks, ships and aircraft both, spread across the surrounding waters.

That density of wartime wreckage has made Gizo one of the Pacific's more serious wreck-diving destinations, without the crowds or polished dive-tourism infrastructure found at better-marketed sites elsewhere in the region. Local operators run trips to specific wrecks with genuine historical detail attached, not generic reef tours retrofitted with a wartime label, a distinction divers who've done both tend to notice quickly.

Kennedy Island, known locally as Kasolo, adds a specific, well-documented piece of history to the area. Future U.S. President John F. Kennedy swam ashore here in 1943 after his patrol boat, PT-109, was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer nearby, and the island, small enough to walk around in minutes, remains a popular half-day trip from Gizo combining that history with an essentially empty stretch of sand.

Gizo town itself functions as the practical hub for the wider Western Province, a market, guesthouses, and dive operators clustered around a compact waterfront, with day trips reaching outlying islands like Kolombangara, a near-perfect volcanic cone visible from town, and Ranongga, where village visits offer a more direct look at Solomon Islands life away from any tourism infrastructure at all.

Getting to Gizo takes a domestic flight from Honiara or a considerably longer ferry crossing, and once there, infrastructure stays genuinely modest, guesthouses rather than resorts, limited medical facilities, and a pace shaped more by fishing and local commerce than by tourism. For travelers drawn to WWII history and diving specifically, that modesty is largely the point, wrecks left in place rather than roped into a museum experience.