Oceania

Travel through Oceania by country:

Australia, Indonesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu

Travel through Oceania by popular city:

Auckland, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, Wellington

Travel through Oceania by popular things to do:

Cook Islands, Sydney Opera House

Travel through Oceania with our writers:

In the Corner of the World, Work and Play in Queensland

Photo of the Day (04.15.2008)

by Martha Edwards on


I picked this photo by Kouiskas as the photo of the day because it looks almost too good be real, you know? Everything is perfect, from the colours of the earth to the fluffiness of the clouds. Postcard-perfect photos are usually fairly elusive, down to nothing more than the stroke of luck that you happened to visit a site on the ideal day. And it’s why we bring our cameras everywhere — we’re afraid of missing that perfect photo opportunity.

Got any perfect photos to share? Share them with us — join the Gadling Flickr Pool.

Naked Nomad presumed dead; left multi-million dollar estate

by Iva Skoch on

Let’s set this straight. According to hard evidence I have gathered, Victor Flanagan, an Australian also known as “Naked Nomad,” didn’t walk around naked all the time. He wore a sarong when walking through towns and a pair of thongs for when there were too many prickles on the road. Sellout.

He spent at least the last decade living in Papua New Guinea, where he walked from Australia sometime in the 1990s. And, he was found dead lying in a canoe – without any clothing — in a PNG jungle, news.com.au reports.

Last week, more than a decade after he last spoke to his sister, the Supreme Court in Perth declared Naked Nomad “presumed dead”. This is a relevant piece of information because he left all his property–primarily the multi-million dollar beachfront property near Busselton–to his sister. Flanagan had inherited the property after their father’s death but didn’t have much use for it since he primarily just wanted to be in touch with nature and spend his life walking around naked.

Naked Nomad really isn’t that different from multimillionaires, after all. Multi-million beach front property is only fun if you can do nothing all day, but walk around naked.

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Man smuggles iguanas in fake leg

by Iva Skoch on

I never get tired of people’s inventions when it comes to smuggling stuff across the border. Take Jereme James, a 34-year old Californian man, who tried to smuggle iguanas into the US inside his prosthetic leg.

James was caught and convicted on two counts of smuggling and possessing endangered animals. He allegedly stole three baby Fiji Island banded iguanas from an ecological preserve while on a trip to the South Pacific islands in 2002 and smuggled them by concealing them in the compartment of a prosthetic leg. The iguanas are threatened with extinction because of habitat loss and are considered an endangered species, AFP reports.

OK, so things didn’t work out so well for the iguana smuggler who now faces jail. But, how many people actually get away with stuff like that all the time? How many have I been on a plane with?

Air New Zealand fumigates its passengers

by Jeffrey White on

I’m going to admit to a little ignorance about this strange story in the New Zealand Herald this morning, concerning an Air New Zealand flight yesterday that was fumigated with passengers still on board.

A man is complaining of a sore throat, and a baby caught in the noxious fog gagged and threw up.

Passengers were left with no official explanation for the spraying, but one traveler who spoke to the Herald said that one of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry officers who carried out the spraying explained that the airplane had its “bio-security certificate” expire and thus needed manual fumigation.

The plane had come from Fiji and was fumigated on the tarmac of Auckland International Airport.

I can sum up my ignorance thusly: Just what is a airplane bio-security certificate? It seems to me that this is something particular to New Zealand; there is, after all, an official agency called the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Bio-security New Zealand. But then again, maybe this is something so common as to usually be ignored.

What doesn’t seem common is dousing a bunch of passengers with chemicals while they sit in their seats, covering their noses and trying not to breath too much. One man described the ordeal as like a sauna, only without the heat.

Next time your pissed sitting on the tarmac be at least thankful that the plane’s doors do not fly open and man in gas masks come on board.

Find an internet cafe anywhere in the world

by Iva Skoch on

As I was searching for an internet cafe in London this week, I thought it would be really helpful to have a site that lists them all and allows you to search based on your location. And guess what. Of course, that exact site already exists.

Cybercafes.com contains a database of over 4000 internet cafes in 141 countries. So, if you, like me are staying in the Embankment area of London and are looking for a place to log in, you will find there is easyInternetcafe at Strand 54. Which is, incidentally, where I am right now.

I must say, though, at £2 ($4) an hour, it is a little overpriced. You can find places nearby that charge only £.5 per hour, although arguable not as easy to use and consistent as easyInternet.