* indicates a book that appears in our feature "Around the World in 80+ Books" published in the April 2002 issue of National Geographic Traveler.
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone Before,by Tony Horwitz (2002). In 1768, Captain James Cook set out from England to explore the vast Pacific Ocean. As he noted in his journal, "Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before, but as far as I think it possible for man to go." Over 200 years later, author Horwitz boards a replica of Cook's Endeavour and lives like an 18th-century sailor to follow the path of the Pacific's most famous explorer. From the Maoris of New Zealand to the king of Tonga, Horwitz combines Cook's biography with his own humorous travel narrative as he retraces the steps of an early quest.
*Full Circle: One Man's Journey by Air, Train, Boat and Occasionally Very Sore Feet Around the 50,000 Miles of the Pacific Rim, by Michael Palin and photographer Basil Pao (1997). Michael Palin (of Monty Python fame) uses wit and a keen eye to propel him through a brisk 245-day tour that delivers richly on the book's playful title.
Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific,by Paul Theroux (1993). Theroux spends 18 months in a collapsible kayak, bumming around, hopping between 51 islands in the South Pacific, and finding adventure at every turn. From the rain forests of New Zealand to an awkward conversation with the 400-pound king of Tonga, Theroux's accounts are hilarious and insightful, and combine to form a weird and witty collage that illustrates the unseen side of island life.
South Sea Tales, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1999). Stevenson lived the last years of his life in Samoa with his family. This collection of six Pacific-set short stories ranges from a tale about a wish-granting bottle in Hawaii ("The Bottle Imp") to a novella about a bigoted British trader who discovers that his marriage to a native Polynesian girl is a sham ("The Beach of Falesa").
Tales from the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics,by Alexander Frater (2004). The tropics aren't for everyone, but this Vanuatu native convinces us that it's not all about sweltering heat, torrential rain, and malaria. Whether he is dining with the Queen of Tonga in a leper colony or floating down the steamy rivers of Mandalay, Frater finds fascination and excitement with everything torrid.
Australia
*Australian Colors: Images of the Outback, photographs and text by Bill Bachman (1994). The culmination of a two-year adventure, this photo book celebrates the bush from its Aboriginal roots to its present mosaic of cultures and urban spaces.
Chasing Kangaroos: A Continent, a Scientist, and a Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Creature, by Tim Flannery (2004). It's all kangaroo all the time as Melbourne paleontologist Flannery goes in search of fossils of the intriguing marsupials. In this memoir he explores Australia's natural history (and learns of folk tales of flesh-eating kangaroos) as he meets with kangaroo hunters and advocates, farmers, Aborigines, and other scientists in the vast Australian outback.
*Cold Beer and Crocodiles: A Bicycle Journey into Australia,by Roff Smith (2000). What's a man to do when, after 15 years, he doesn't understand his adopted country? If that man is Yankee journalist Roff Smith, he grabs his bike and makes a nine-month, 10,000-mile circuit of the place. He discovers a people who defy categorization but welcome visitors with (what else?) beer.
From Alice to Ocean: Alone Across the Outback,by Robyn Davidson (1992). With only four camels and a dog to accompany her, Davidson sets off on a 1,700-mile trek across the deserts of Western Australia. She encounters both the bad—having to kill wild camels that were trying to attack her own—and the good, like hunting with the Aborigines. Vivid photos by Rick Smolan accompany the text.
Greater Nowheres: Wanderings Across the Outback, by Dave Finkelstein and Jack London (2005). This comic memoir trails an odd couple traveling through Australia in pursuit of the infamous saltwater crocodile. Their goal, however, takes a backseat to their meetings with local kangaroo hunters and bush rangers, and the surprising things they stumble upon—all adding to the offbeat charm of the Australia they discover.
*In a Sunburned Country,by Bill Bryson (2000). Bryson would probably be the perfect desert-island companion—an acerbic naturalist and historian who just can't keep an absurd moment or thought to himself. His Australia story teems with toxic caterpillars and ridiculous place-names ("Tittybong," for one).
In Tasmania, by Nicholas Shakespeare (2006). Set in timeless Tasmania, a former English penal colony, Shakespeare unfolds 200 years of Tasmanian history through his visits with quirky distant relatives, discovery of the cliffs of Maria Island National Park, and encounters with the descendants of Tasmanian Aborigines.
Keep Australia on Your Left: A True Story of an Attempt to Circumnavigate Australia by Kayak, by Eric Stiller (2000). "The Australian coastline is a nightmare of tightly coiled inlets and rocky coves and sheer rock cliff faces and bays as huge and forbidding as Saharan deserts," writes Stiller, a kayak salesman, at the onset of his journey. The story follows him and his male-model companion on their dramatic kayak trip through the Tasman Sea (sharks, crocodiles, and toxic jellyfish), and their adventures on land (outrageous nights in remote towns).
One for the Road, by Tony Horwitz (1987). After moving to Sydney with his Australian bride, Horwitz is anxious to explore his adopted home. But it's not the city he wants to see. All warnings set aside, Horwitz hitchhikes 7,000 miles (11,265 kilometers) through the Australian outback—through Queensland, Alice Springs, Darwin, and Perth—and survives a cyclone, encounters opal diggers and a jackeroo, and learns the ways of the bush in a sunburned land.
Sean & David's Long Drive,by Sean Condon (1996). With a 1966 Ford Falcon and no plan, two adventuresome Australians take off from their home in a Melbourne suburb and head west on the Great Ocean Road—just the beginning of a 8,700-mile (14,000-kilometer) journey that has them meeting up with some of the outback's locals and going on what Condon calls a "croc spotting" adventure.
*The Songlines,by Bruce Chatwin (1987). More lyrical than anthropological, The Songlines explores the "labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia," the "dreaming-tracks" or "songlines" of the Aboriginals. But in the end, this, like so many of his books, is a tale of Chatwin's ecstatically nomadic tilt.
*30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account,by Peter Carey (2001). "A metropolis is, by definition, inexhaustible, and by the time I departed, thirty days later, Sydney was as unknowable to me as it had been on that clear April morning when I arrived," concludes Carey. But his impressionistic ramble through his homeland is telling indeed.
*Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1,700 Miles of Australian Outback,by Robyn Davidson (1980). Davidson is your typical crazy aunt. With her dog and four camels as companions, she walks across the landscapes and contradictions of rural Australia. She's at times touchy, confrontational, vulnerable, and loopy, but her story is a page-turner.
*A House in Bali, by Colin McPhee (1947). The book should be called "An Anthropological Brahms goes to Bali." In the 1930s Canadian musicologist Colin McPhee became enchanted by the clear, metallic music of the gamelan, a xylophone-like instrument indigenous to Indonesia. He returned from the country's rice paddies years later with this lovingly composed tribute to the people and music of a faraway Hindu paradise.
East Timor
The Crossing: A Story of East Timor,by Luis Cardoso (1997). In this memoir, Cardoso recounts growing up in east Timor during the 1960s and 1970s, struggling to find his own identity in a nation also struggling to emerge from centuries of colonial rule (first Portugal, then Indonesia). The crossing of the title refers to transitions: from childhood to adulthood, from colonization to independence.
French Polynesia
Breadfruit,by Célestine Hitiura Vaite (2000). Life is good on the island of Tahiti for professional cleaner Materena Mahi, her man, Pito, and their three kids—until Pito comes home drunk one day and proposes marriage. This sets Materena off in a flurry of wedding plans, involving her large and voluble clan—despite the fact that Pito has since sobered up and gotten cold feet. This warm and humorous debut novel by Tahiti-born Vaite won the 2004 Prix Litteraire Des Étudiants and is part of a trilogy starring Materena that's full of the flavor of contemporary life in French Polynesia.
Micronesia
*The Edge of Paradise: America in Micronesia,by P. F. Kluge (1991). How far away from the United States can you get without falling off the map? Kluge asks this question as he returns to the isolated atolls of Micronesia two decades after serving there as a Peace Corps volunteer. He discovers that—for better or worse—pop music and cold beer have a way of uniting even the most disparate worlds.
The Sex Lives of Cannibals, by J. Maarten Troost (2004). Jobless and (almost) homeless out of graduate school, Troost and girlfriend Sylvia head to the end of the world, to Tarawa in the Republic of Kiribati. While Sylvia takes on non-profit work, Troost learns that the tropical paradise he hoped for isn't as romantic as he thought. In the first of two travelogues of his life in the South Pacific, Troost introduces a comic cast of characters and learns of their unique culture and customs (like the importance of kava) on the sandy beaches of Kiribati.
New Zealand
The Bone People,by Keri Hulme (1983). With characters Hulme pulls from real-life experiences and a dream she had when she was 18, this novel takes readers deep into the heart of New Zealand, a nation still plagued by colonialism. Hulme weaves Maori heritage and history into this gripping tale of love, death, and redemption.
Kiwi Tracks,by Andrew Stevenson (1999). New Zealand has enough sandy beaches, lush forests, and snow-capped mountains to send any outdoor enthusiast to nirvana.Stevenson trods the country's rich landscapes, gets stuck in a blizzard, stays in a Maori settlement, and encounters many colorful characters during his four-month "tramp" along New Zealand's famous trails.
Southern Exposure: A Solo Sea Kayaking Journey Around New Zealand's South Island,by Chris Duff (2003). Duff's 1,700-mile (2,736-kilometer) circumnavigation of New Zealand's South Island provides a fresh, kayak-level view of this natural wonderland. Though an experienced kayaker, Duff still capsizes a couple of times along the way, but these adventures add some suspense and humor to vivid descriptions of New Zealand's often unforgiving waters and Fiordland coast.
Straying from the Flock: Travels in New Zealand,by Alexander Elder (2005). On his second adventure to the southern edge of the Pacific, Dr. Elder treks everywhere between the Bluff and the Cape (the southernmost tip of the South Island to the northernmost tip of the North) in true Kiwi fashion—working on local farms and sleeping in homestays—during his two-month visit.
Papua New Guinea
Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea,by Kira Salak (2004). Salak, who is a National Geographic Society Emerging Explorer, ventures through Papua New Guinea by canoe and on foot to create this insider's look at a culturally and historically rich land. Her travels lead her into an exhilarating trek through the jungle and a conversation with the leader of a separatist guerrilla movement opposing the Indonesian occupation of Western New Guinea.
*Where Masks Still Dance: New Guinea, by Chris Rainier (1996). Over the course of ten years, photographer Chris Rainier documented the aboriginal tribes of Papua New Guinea and Irian Jaya in hauntingly black-and-white images. In short essays, he recounts the adventures behind the photographs and explores the influence of modern technology on these indigenous people.
Solomon Islands
Solomon Time: An Unlikely Quest in the South Pacific,by Will Randall (2002). Tired of life in England, Randall heads to the Solomon Islands with a mission to help its residents improve their standard of living. Randall decides that starting a chicken farm would be most beneficial to the islanders of Mendali, but soon learns that chasing chickens around an island surrounded by shark-infested waters is no easy task. Randall's comedic storytelling comes alive with the characters he befriends, including a one-eyed pygmy.
Tuvalu
Time & Tide: The Islands of Tuvalu,by Peter Bennetts and Tony Wheeler (2001). Photographer Bennetts and Lonely Planet founder Wheeler collaborated on this colorful photo essay of Tuvalu's geography and people. The authors combined over 120 beautifully composed and lit pictures of the island's coral atolls with eleven profiles of Tuvaluans, resulting in a rare portrait of this tiny, forgotten island in the South Pacific.
