Halfway to the Antarctic

Who wouldn’t be tempted by the mystique of remote islands?  After 12 days off-line, I’m home from a sea journey down through New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic islands to Australia’s own Macquarie Island and back. Heritage Expeditions operates this expedition cruise using a Russian research vessel.

Inhabited only by a few transient – and dedicated – researchers, the NZ islands remain zealously-guarded nature reserves, havens for penguins, albatross, sea lions and other wild creatures.

Male elephant seal moulting on Macquarie Island

Macquarie Island is Tasmanian territory, but manned year-round by a small band of scientists and support staff at an Australian Antarctic Division research base.

Rottnest, Rats Nest or retreat?

Yesterday’s excursion to the fabled Rottnest Island, the favourite Westralian weekend retreat 19 km off Fremantle, saw us fall into line with The System, for there seems no alternative unless you cast off in your own vessel. Exorbitant ferry fares and over-priced lunches were forgotten, however, as we disembarked from the hourly shuttle bus onto the first of several snow-white beaches, threw off our shoes and dipped our toes into translucent, turquoise waters. Later, we watched whales cavort offshore, discovered a pair of ospreys feeding their fledglings and made the acquaintance of Rottnest’s ubiquitous marsupial quokkas – without leaving the one sandy cove.

Rottnest means ‘rat’s nest’ in 17th century Dutch, but Willem de Vlamingh, the island’s first tourist, who landed here in 1696, was a little wide of the mark. The intrepid explorer captured and transported three of WA’s uniquely black swans to Batavia, capital of the Dutch East Indies, but like all his peers, found nothing else of note on this seeming barren coast. Later visitors collected rock salt from the island’s saline lakes then set up a penal camp for ‘enemy aliens’ during the war years.

Favourite yarns

Here is a selection of my older travel stories; from the Hindu Kush peaks of  Kashmir to Chihuahua’s Copper Canyon, from the legacy of a lost civilisation in Micronesia to the barren mountains of Arabia’s Musandam Peninsula.  Some of these places, if  not all, have changed hugely in the intervening years.

Total media saturation: the original version of this story about a 1992 ride on the old Forsayth Mixed Goods train out of Cairns, North Queensland, was one of my first and most successful pieces.

You can also browse many of my older Asian stories on the San Francisco-based ThingsAsian.

Kamchatka (4) to the Commander Islands

The fourth post in a series inspired by my July 2009 experiences on an expedition cruise to Kamchatka, in the Russian Far East.

From Kronotsky Reserve on the Kamchatka mainland we steamed west to the Commander Islands, the westernmost end of the Aleutian chain.  Most of the other Aleutian islands lie within US territory.  Here is the last resting place of the great navigator Vitus Bering on his return from Alaska.  Georg Steller, the expedition’s naturalist,  who then took charge of the expedition.

Village on Bering Island, Commander Islands, Russian Far East

Next morning we dropped anchor off the fog-bound village of Nikol’skoye, population something like 750, the only settlement on Bering Island.  Half the people of the village descend from Aleutian islanders brought from Alaska in the 1820s when the fur trade reached its height.  A very scrappy, treeless community of timber cabins and rusting machinery – much like those remote villages in National Geographic articles – although surprisingly a very smart school and an older cottage spruced up nicely as the island museum. 

Kamchatka expedition cruise (2) – Kuril Islands

Second in a series drawing upon my July 2009 experiences on an expedition cruise exploring the Kamchatka Peninsula, in the Russian Far East.

Steaming out of the naval port at Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, we enjoyed a spectacular passage out through the Avacha Bay then down the Kamchatka coast, passing snow-streaked volcanoes one after the other.  Lifeboat drill was a bit hairy, plus all sorts of briefing on how to prepare for shore excursions.

Drowned caldera of Ekarma Island, Kuril Islands, Russia

Our first two excursions aboard the Zodiac inflatable boats, first landing on fog-bound Onekotan Island and trekking a kilometre or two across a moorland terrain before turning back down to the black-sand beach.

Bali: Eat, Pray, Love

Where else to Eat, Pray, (and) Love? Elizabeth Gilbert’s personal journey in search of self-fulfilment reached its conclusion (ahem, climax) in Ubud, the spiritual heart of Bali.  Narcissistic navel-gazing? That didn’t bother the thousands who snapped up this gushy bestseller.

Wait for the movie, starring Julia Roberts, to reach a cinema near you… or experience the reality now, amongst the shimmering green rice paddies which surround Ubud.

Rice padi outside Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

The villagers of Bentuyung, where the Balinese scenes were shot on location, have pocketed their takings and gone back to what they do best: rice farming and ritual. You may find the main street blocked by a sea of white turbans as the hairy Barong demon and the shrine of Shiva the Destroyer are escorted back into the temple, accompanied by bells, brass gongs and cymbals.

The Solomon Islands (4) – Malaita

Back in Honiara, I found the harbour busy with ferries and freighters loading for the six-hour run to Auki on Malaita island, northeast of the capital.  It seems the shipowners chase cargoes, and passengers, wherever they can be found.  Who needs a schedule?

Bemused, I fronted up instead at Honiara’s Henderson Airport early next morning and purchased a seat on the short flight to Auki.  No need to check seat availability; there was one other passenger plus the pilot of the ten-seater Britton Norman Islander, an Australian woman.

Children at the airstrip, Auki, Malaita

Malaita is different.  The people, an energetic breed, still make shell money used for bride price transactions and build their houses upon man-made coral islands.  Tourism has barely begun to develop.

The Solomon Islands (3) – journey to New Georgia and Marovo Lagoon

Time now to explore a few more islands, by embarking at dawn on a weekly passenger ferry making the twelve-hour run from Gizo, back southeast towards Honiara. Before long I reached Munda, a tiny township on New Georgia Island. Munda is the gateway to the myriad islands and waterways of Roviana Lagoon or, if local politics permit, the mound of skulls bequeathed by past headhunters.

Next morning, two men in a boat bobbed gently out in the channel and watched the dawn come up over New Georgia. We were waiting for an inter-island freighter expected… sometime that morning. But, just after sun-up, a white blob did appear on the horizon as the good ship Bikoi steamed into view.

Inter-island freighter, Solomon Islands

The Solomon Islands (2) – Gizo, Western Province

Most visitors soon head for the Western Province, a cluster of islands bordering Papua New Guinea, where the waters teem with marine life, a mecca for surfers and snorkellers.

Solomon Airlines, the national carrier, operates a small fleet of prop-driven aircraft on its domestic island-hopping routes, complemented by sea-going passenger ferries and the occasional inter-island steamship operating on ‘island time’.  The ninety-minute Twin Otter flight – the co-pilot doubles as cabin crew – from Honiara to Gizo proved stunningly scenic, passing over emerald islands fringed with golden sand and scattered across turquoise waters.

Flying over the Solomon Islands

Ghizo Island is so compact that its airstrip has been carved out of an islet across the bay from the one-street town of Gizo (yes, a different spelling).

The Solomon Islands – Honiara, Guadalcanal (1)

The Solomon Islands have been termed the last frontier of South Pacific tourism, an unspoiled chain of islands, from coral atolls to restive volcanoes, populated mainly by the descendents of Melanesian headhunters, with a scattering of Polynesians, Micronesians and Chinese storekeepers.

So near, yet so far.  Three hours from Brisbane, Australia, but the Solomons might have well as been the far side of the moon when civil strife erupted a few years ago on Guadalcanal, the main island.   Then the April 2007 tsunami struck Ghizo Island, the hub of an embryonic tourism industry which had revolved largely around diving and fishing expeditions.

Then the bad news dried up.  And the air fares began to drop.  But would the natives be friendly?  Unlike neighbouring Vanuatu, the Solomons lacks packaged holiday resorts, so what was there to do above the water line? In May 2009, I decided there was only one way to find out.

Aerial view of Honiara

Honiara’s airport soon set the tone: drab, dimly-lit, Third World – but, more importantly,  friendly.  Spreading mango trees shaded the road outside the terminal, which soon became the main drag of Honiara, a dusty town fading out to thatched huts and banana palms.