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

Fall Issue of Planet Magazine Out Now

by Adrienne Wilson on

Every time Planet mag hits the shelves I feel as if I have this reader loyalty type thing to spread the word and paint the town with the news. If you’re not a subscriber I suggest you sign-up today. With just four issues a year it’s easy to let one slip by and well, you don’t want that do you? So how about I stop sounding preachy and things on the glossy and just tell you what’s inside this issue?

There’s the usual Satellite, Diary, Divinity, and Greenspace pages, but also inside, especially for fall and the 5th anniversary issue are pieces on Élodie Bouchez, Roberto Rossellini, Baptiste Ibar, Kirby Dick, and Katharine Hamnett among many others. As far as I’m concerned Planet magazine nails it when it comes to global culture!

And that’s my two cents for now.

World TV

by Erik Olsen on

Video is exploding on the Web, but unless you’re really interested in Chinese lip-synche rappers, fake teen diaries or monkeys touching themselves, it’s hard to find anything of much depth. Well, here’s a possible solution. If you haven’t seen it before Jump TV, is a rather interesting online subscription service will allows media fanatics to have channels from around the globe beamed directly to your computer.

From Thai TV Global to some British programming to Nepal 1 in India and TRT Int’l in Turkey, you can watch a snapshot of global programming as it unfolds. Apparently there is a cost for each channel, especially groupings of channnels like the “Romanian Package”, but perhaps that’s a small price to pay for global enlightenment.

This is the Life Contest

by Erik Olsen on

We mentioned a while back a pretty cool contest by the makers of Chivas Regal Scotch Whisky wherein they offered several lucky souls $100,000 and the opportunity to travel the world. The winners would globetrot and then send back their notes, photos and such on the various places they felt were the best in the world. The idea was to find “the best that life has to offer”. One assumes each leg of the journey involved quaffing Chivas…not that there’s anything wrong with that.

According to the listing at the time, said adventurers “must be curious, intelligent, with strong writing skills and a sense of the world around them”. If that doesn’t describe a gadling reader, I don’t know what does.

Well, the winners appear to be two people named Bill and Dana, and they offer their thoughts on these best places at the site here. So what are their findings? Well, here’s a sample to make you extra-special jealous:

Triptie

by Erik Olsen on

Another interesting concept in the Web 2.0 world of travel-related sites. Here is a site called Triptie that, as they put it seeks to create an “online community of travelers, all devoted to planning and sharing their trips.” The idea is that you become a member and go to the site and plan and upload your itinerary. Others have done the same, thus creating a kind of community of itineraries that, one assumes compiles a list of the best places to go, things to see, places to stay and eat etc. Sort of a take off on Amazon’s “people who bought XXX book also bought YYY book. That is, the presumption is that the brains and decisions of multiple travelers is better than those of a single traveler. Very Web 2.0, as i said. I have to say it looks intriguing. The site is in beta, but if you want to learn more, there is a nifty video that helps explain the concept further.

Troost’s Getting Stoned

by Erik Olsen on

I’ve been waiting to get my hands on the newest gut-busting travel tale by writer J. Maarten Troost so that I can review it here. His last (and first?) book Sex lives of Cannibals was absolutely superb. I reviewed it just after it came out and thought it one of the funniest travel books I’d read in a while, pretty much on par in its own way with the stuff Bill Bryson puts out (which is saying A LOT). There is immense appeal to Troost’s stories because he writes about the other side of paradise. He spirits off with his wife to exotic tropical locales that conjure up images of Corona ads or adolescent fantasies of topless native women fanning you with palm fronds on the beach, and he dispels the romantic allure of these places by revealing, well, the human reality of them. These islands, it turns out, are not quite as idyllic as Bronislaw Malinowski would have you believe.

Anyway, I promise I’ll get the book eventually, but in the meantime, I’d like to direct you to the superb review done over at Worldhum by Kristin Van Tassel, a writing teacher at Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas. I happened to by cruising around Worldhum and found the piece here and it reminded me how much I want to read the new Troost opus.