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

A Kinder Lodging

by Adrienne Wilson on

Outside has a nice piece on eco lodging and a list of the world’s ten best. Having done such great research they note that these eco lodges not only suggest that they cause no harm to the outdoors, but that they bring benefit to the whole community and economy. If anything they are unique. The Black Sheep Inn in Ecuador has dry composting toilets with little vegetable and flower gardens inside and it’s the teenie touches that provide splendor to these lodges. People enjoy the canyon views and the lodge loves the compliments about their restrooms. If you’re going to do it, then you should do it right and here is the list of places that make the list.

  • Turtle Island, Fiji

  • Asa Wright Nature Centre and Lodge, Trinidad

  • Birch Pond Lodge, Alaska

  • Wenhai Ecolodge, China

  • Posada Amazonas, Peru

  • Wilderness Lodge Lake Moeraki, New Zealand

  • Tassia Lodge, Kenya

  • Chumbe Island Coral Park, Tanzania

  • Selva Bananito Lodge, Costa Rica

  • Black Sheep Inn, Ecuador

Book Review: Sex Lives of Cannibals

by Erik Olsen on

Occasionally, we here at Gadling will do wee little book reviews for titles that strike our fancy. Nothing too grandiose, just a friendly recommendation when we find titles we like. There are quite a few excellent titles out there right now from ranging from hard core adventure stuff to funny slice-of-life stories by up and coming writers.

I just turned the last page on a book that gave me one of those deep belly laughs you rarely get while reading a book, let alone something in the travel genre, where stories range from the stodgy, acerbicness of Paul Theroux to the anything but funny, but wildly captivating adventure disasters like John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Yes, there have been some wonderfully witty books out in the last few years like, well, anything by Bill Bryson, or Tim Cahill, but most stuff is just not that funny.

Add to those that ARE funny, then, J. Maarten Troost’s the Sex Lives of Cannibals. It tells the story of Troost, who at 26 moved with his girlfriend to the far-off island of Tarawa, a remote South Pacific island in the Republic of Kiribati (which, to my surprise, is apparently pronounced Kir-ba-wa). Troost’s writing is elegant and rich, but wickedly funny. Think a mixture of Eric Hansen and Dave Eggers (the latter of whom, it seemed to me, had influenced Troost’s style). Tarawa is polluted, smelly and scarce of almost all the daily pleasures and contrivances we’ve come to enjoy as of a modern society. But what Tarawa does have is its tropical isolation, and from this simple quality, comes most of the odd and often miserable, situations Troost finds himself in. From his experiences with the local peeping Toms who spy he and his wife through their windows to the deranged beachcomber “Half-Dead Fred”, Troost peppers the book with one ridiculous scene after another, but after two years, when you think he’s had enough and can’t wait to return to the modernity of the US, he reflects on how much a tropical paradise he found, and then heads off with his wife to Fiji, where, it turns out, he ends up writing the book itself.

I loved this book and basically finished it in two days. It’s a great carry along if you’re doing any traveling this winter, and if you’re like me, it will make you consider bailing on your 9-5 gig for coconut trees and fish addled reefs.