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

Word for the Travel Wise (08/23/06)

by Adrienne Wilson on

Papua New Guinea is a mysterious place to me. The name alone chimes of mysterious unspoken things man probably shouldn’t witness, but due to the nature of man, will do anything to do so. I imagine indigenous brown-skin tribes in loin cloth with darts filled with snake venom lurking in the wild. I see pale-skin explorers intruding and crossing boundaries to discover their secrets. Secrets that should be left alone and buried in the minds of the eldest and wisest member of the tribe. What do I really know? Considering that I’ve never thought to travel to Papua New Guinea I don’t know much at all, but if someone were to ask me what visions come to mind then those would be only a few. If I’m horribly wrong about the things in my head please feel free to put me in my place. I can handle it.

Today’s word is a Pidgin (Tok Pisin) word used in Papua New Guinea:

natnat – mosquito

As noted in Wikipedia the word ‘tok’ means word or speech and the word ‘pisin’ means pidgin and is a Creole language spoken by about 4 million people as a second language and over a hundred thousand as a first. It is spoken in the northern mainland of Papua New Guinea. If you scroll down further you’ll find a nice list of words and some pronunciation examples. As an added bonus you can learn even more words by venturing into the online Tok Pisin phrasebook, also provided by Wiki. They’ve actually got a great handful of links which I suggest going through them all if you’re really into learning this lang. One last site I’ll note here though is Robert Eklund’s Tok Pisin page. It had pictures of signs, people and some audio clips. Looks a winner to learning the very basics.

Oil Travelogue at Chicago Tribune

by Erik Olsen on

This isn’t exactly the kind of trip you’re going to want to take with the family, but it is a worthy trip to make online, at least.

This fine interactive over at the Chicago Tribune, takes a long, interactive and video look at where a gallon of gas comes from .The reporter, Pulitzer-Prize winner Paul Salopek, traversed the globe to find out where our gas comes from, how we’re able to drive those SUVs, what is that stuff, exactly that comes out of the pump .It is a superb piece of travel/issue-oriented journalism and is worth spending a lunchtime watching. In addition to the video interactive, there is also a series of articles.

I give this a big thumbs up.

Point It

by Adrienne Wilson on

A friend of mine was just telling me about this revolutionary book helping travelers globally become better communicators – Point It. I know we’ve had to have mentioned it here before, but it’s worthy of another blurb. The concept is quite easy. Let’s say you’re in a European restaurant. I’ll be more specific and say mmm… Latvia. You want to tell the waiter you do not wish to have Latvian bacon buns, but you know neither word in the lang. You’re stuck and destined to have this fine Lativan appetizer unless you can point your way out of it. You turn to your trusty Point It guide hoping it has bacon buns pictured with a huge red “X” in there somewhere. Does it? Heck, if I know – my copy is in the post, but you get the idea. If you don’t know how to say it there are 1,200 pictures so – point it.

via Flight 001

World Wide Panorama: Gardens

by Erik Olsen on

I’m not sure how I missed this since I have participated in several of the World Wide pano projects, but I did. I think it has to do with the fact that the WWP people send out notifications about the project via emails and I get so many of them, that I just started deleting them without reading them.

That sucks for me, because I’ve enjoyed shooting panos for this project since early on. And more than that, I’ve enjoyed seeing all the other work of all the other participants. People literally from around the globe shoot and upload beautiful (and sometimes not) panoramic photographs to the WWP site and you can spend lots of time just cruising around and checking them out. Which leads me to the point of it all. The newest project is called gardens and is worth your time.

Each quarter at the equinox for solstice they do a new series, and you’re supposed to shoot your pano according to a theme. Market was one theme, and so forth. So this time around it’s gardens and the interpretations are varied and wonderful, as usual.

Anti-Americanism Editorial

by Erik Olsen on

We’ve been hearing so much lately about anti-Americanism, it’s almost a cliche as a story. Yeah, yeah, they hate us, we know it. What can we do? Somewhat lost in the debate are the reasons why there appears to be so much disgruntlement (nice word!) with the American way. Sure, the policies of the Bush Administration appear to be to blame…a lot of people around the world don’t like what we’re doing in Iraq. But as this editorial in the LA Times attempts to point out, there’s more to the question than meets to eye.

Julia E. Sweig is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a new book called “Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century.” She points to a host of other issues that have caused people around world to get their panties in a bunch. The Cold war legacy, she says, left a residue of dissatisfaction with American policy. All that nasty business in Latin America and South east Asia, stuff that, she suggest, we’ve kind of forgotten (she nicely quotes Gore Vidal, who quipped we should be called the United States of Amnesia). Then there is the matter of our power. everyone hates the big guy, that’s just natural, so much of the antipathy has to do with being number one.

Let’s see, what else. Oh, yeah, globalization. We’ve run around telling everyone how great free markets are and then when some countries like Peru or Bolivia give the free market thing a try and come up more poor than they were before, they grow skeptical. Add into that equation all this business with American farm subsidies not really being free market after all, and you can see why there’s some doubting Thomasses out there.

My opinion is that this whole-anti-American thing will likely pass. We’re still a country whose heart is in the right place and is a wonderful place to live and visit . I suspect that once this nasty Iraq business is behind us and once the Arab/Israeli imbroglio hits a stasis again (as it will, though it will never be solved), folks will lighten up a bit about America. I could be wrong, but if America is still loathed in five years, I’ll be surprised.

In the meantime, what I suggest we do is hold a contest around the globe for some 5,000 people from every country. We’ll pay for them to come here and hang out with us for a few weeks. Then, when they go back, they’ll tell all their friends about what we’re really like.

Problem solved. See?