Island hopping through Oceania has been a dream, years in the making
Island Hopping Through Oceania
We hope to do some island hopping by boat, but mostly we'll be flying between destinations
Oceania has some of the least-visited countries on earth
Island hopping through Oceania is not straightforward
Our route island hopping through Oceania
Island hopping through Oceania:
The Route
Planning our island hopping route has taken many hours over multiple years
Island hopping through Oceania isn’t cheap
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Island hopping through Oceania is a logistical challenge at best. Coming up with a feasible route took multiple attempts. But once we had the route nailed down, the next question was how much to book in advance.
It was the perfect start to four months of island hopping through Oceania. Tropical heat, the jagged peaks of Mo’orea lit up orange in the early morning, an exotic island city slowly waking up around us as we waited for the Apetahi Express to Bora Bora.
As we finally stepped off the seven-hour ferry from Bora Bora back to Papeete, the capital of French Polynesia, I silently congratulated myself on my victory in keeping my lunch down.
Our plans for Vanuatu had been royally torpedoed by the liquidation of Air Vanuatu and the cancellation of our Air Calin flights to Port Vila, Vanuatu’s sleepy capital.
It was dark by the time we cleared customs, collected our bags, and climbed into a taxi bound for the city. After sleepy Port Vila, Honiara (capital of the Solomon Islands) seemed hectic, almost like an actual city.
We had wanted to set off promptly at 7 am for the roughly 40 km crossing from Savo Island to Roderick Bay, the final resting place of the wrecked 87-metre-long World Discoverer cruise ship. Yet, after our tumultuous journey to Savo Island, we should’ve known it wouldn’t be so simple.
Tuvalu is remote, very remote. It's often referred to as the least visited country in the world. And the only way to get there is onboard one of the four weekly flights from Fiji.
We landed in Funafuti, the pocket-sized capital of Tuvalu, with no plans and nowhere to stay. However, there was a method to this madness: We needed extreme flexibility to have any hope of reaching Tuvalu's outer islands. So, after passing through the diminutive airport with the other passengers, we crossed the road to the government building to see about a boat.
We slipped out of ‘Eua’s sheltered harbour on the lookout for whales. It didn’t take long to spot them, and after 30 minutes the first group of us were already face to face with the gentle giants. Three fully grown 30-ton humpbacks swam directly towards us, looked us in the eye, and dove beneath us at the last minute.
Nauru's existence is a quirk of history and geology. A tiny speck of an island 53 kilometres south of the equator, Nauru exists as a country because of one thing: phosphate.
As the plane arced across Tarawa's shallow lagoon in the milky early morning light of the Central Pacific, the skinny green islands of North Tarawa appeared serene. A long, intermittently interrupted line of coconut palms and swirling sand banks bordered the glassy, smooth lagoon.
The tide was on the wane, and the waters swirled and churned over the shallow reef that marked our entry into Abaiang’s lagoon. Its arc of palm-tree-green stretched north to south, bracketing the lagoon’s eastern side.
We spent three nights and two full days at Tabon Te Keekee, whiling away our time watching the locals fishing in the lagoon, collecting shellfish at low tide, and zipping back and forth between North and South Tarawa in their dinghies.
Eneko Island’s sparkling-white arc of sand glistened in the morning sun as we approached aboard the steel fishing charter that doubled as the island ferry. The swaying coconut palm backdrop and the copious coral beneath the boat completed the picture of tropical idyll as we glided into shore.
It was hands down the finest beach we’d seen in over sixty days of island hopping through Oceania, and we had it all to ourselves. We’d arrived on Arno Atoll on the thrice-weekly ferry after a short stop in Majuro to restock on supplies.
Kosrae is sometimes referred to as ‘the jewel of Micronesia’, with its jungle-clad mountains and fringing reef. Little-known and little-visited, Kosrae attracts very few tourists, and we were intrigued to learn more about this obscure destination.
Pohnpei is home to the Federated States of Micronesia’s (FSM’s) biggest tourist attraction, Nan Madol, and the country’s capital ‘city’, Palikir. As such, we expected Pohnpei to be more Western and better geared for tourism than Kosrae.
It is in Chuuk’s main lagoon where the state’s prime attraction lies: wreck diving. During WWII, as the Japanese retreated across the Pacific, the Americans sank a whole fleet of Japanese freighters in the sheltered waters here.
After so much off-the-beaten-track travel, we spent much of our time in Guam enjoying the western comforts on offer. When we weren’t sipping iced lattes in the foyer of The Westin Resort, though, we did do some exploration.