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

Teva giving away adventure vacation to Fiji

by Kraig Becker on

Teva, the company that manufactures a host of great outdoor and travel footwear, is preparing to send a few lucky travelers on a once in a lifetime adventure to the South Pacific, where they’ll have the opportunity explore Fiji aboard a private yacht, while hiking, snorkeling, and rafting through beautiful tropical locations.

The Teva House 2011 contest will select one lucky winner from the U.S., the U.K., the Netherlands, Korea, and Australia, and award them a trip for two to Tui Tai, Fiji in April of 2011. Once there, they’ll spend 10 days living aboard a 140′ long luxury adventure class yacht while exploring remote places that few travelers ever have the opportunity to see. They’ll occupy their time by hiking jungle trails and snorkeling coral reefs that are 100 miles from the closest resorts, while meeting local villagers who seldom see visitors of any kind.

One of the highlights of the trip will be a whitewater rafting excursion, conducted by O.A.R.S., that will send the travelers down the Upper Navua Gorge on Viti Levu Island. Towering walls of black lava, overgrown with giant ferns and other jungle foliage, are the hallmark of this spectacular trip, which has been described as a “river of Eden” unlike any other place on Earth. That full day adventure will include lunch on a sandbar at the heart of the canyon and a chance to interact with villagers that still travel the river on their own handmade bamboo rafts.

For more information on this amazing trip and to enter the contest, simply go to TevaHouse.com and select the flag of your home country. Then, fill out the form and start working on your tan. It gets very sunny in Fiji.

[Photo credit: OARS]

Oprah fails to rescue Australian tourism

by Tom Johansmeyer on

Tourism is underwater in Australia, and it looks like even the most powerful woman in the world can’t turn it around. Originally, the country’s Tourism and Transport Forum thought Oprah Winfrey’s visit to Australia would be great for tourism, attracting visitors from around the world. Well, it looks like early expectations are being revisited. While Australians are still leaving the country on vacation in record numbers, the rest of the world isn’t returning the favor.

Overnight visits to Australia fell 1 percent for the year ending June 2010, according to the National Visitor Survey. But, visitor nights were up 0.4 percent and total spending climbed 1.9 percent – so, there is something of a silver lining here.

Before we decide that Oprah didn’t deliver, however, keep in mind that the number of visitors form the United States surged 8 percent. So, the talk show queen may still surprise the folks down under.

[photo by nayrb7 via Flickr]

How to take a round-the-world trip

by Alex Robertson Textor on

An open-ended round-the-world trip can be led by whimsy and happenstance and benefit accordingly from extremely loose planning. A more structured, time-limited round-the-world trip necessitates figuring out transportation in advance. With five weeks to play with, we fell into the latter camp.

I emailed AirTreks in the spring and dutifully submitted an itinerary through their global map booking request system. AirTreks prices round-the-world itineraries, for fares well under what one would pay for each individual stretch.

Around this time, we made another decision, one personally radical. We would fly business-class the entire way. Such a choice certainly isn’t unusual for many frequent fliers, but for a budget traveler like myself who travels in coach barring those rare times I’m upgraded or am flying on someone else’s dime, this was a big shift in approach. This choice amplified the unusual nature of the itinerary, underscoring the fact that this trip wouldn’t be repeated or emulated anytime soon.

Once we nailed our itinerary down and decided to go with business-class tickets the entire way, we requested a new estimate from AirTreks. Then Matt started to play with the oneworld Explorer round-the-world booking engine. This is where things got interesting. The oneworld Explorer fare was several thousand dollars cheaper than the AirTreks fare.

There was really no decision to make. Even our patient AirTreks consultant urged us to go for the oneworld fare. We made the purchase. Though shockingly expensive by my own personal standards and customary budgetary constraints, the entire journey in business-class turned out to cost a few hundred dollars more than a single first-class round-trip ticket from New York to London.As far as subsequent planning is concerned, things have been pretty low-tech. We’ve got a handful of guidebooks (all Lonely Planet, though this is simply an accident of timing and availability) and a few downloaded iPhone apps, which I’ll comment on if they turn out to be at all helpful.

Other planning focused on the tips of friends and acquaintances. My sister, a food writer, recommended some Sydney restaurants. Melbourne chef Tony Tan, who I’d had the good fortune of meeting on my previous visit to Melbourne, passed on a must-visit list of new Melbourne restaurants. A friend of Mauritian background provided contact information of a villa rental company with beautiful properties that were simply too expensive for our budget. The exchange that followed didn’t help us with accommodations, but it did allow us to clarify our focus for Mauritius.

For hotels we scanned our guidebooks for mid-range accommodations and then searched online to get a general sense of how hotels were reviewed. I’ve always taken TripAdvisor with a massive grain of salt, as I’ve found on several occasions that I don’t mind the sorts of hotels pilloried by TripAdvisor contributors. But we did use TripAdvisor this time as a kind of quality control verification source. In one case, we nixed an otherwise appealing hotel choice based on a number of reviews that suggested an ongoing cockroach infestation.

We poked around online to find low rates at good hotels. In both Sydney and Melbourne, location was the key consideration. In Sydney we wanted a central neighborhood, and we ended up with a boutique hotel in Potts Point booked through Venere. In Melbourne I lobbied for a stay in St. Kilda, an area I remembered very fondly from my last visit. There we found a furnished studio apartment.

For our single night in Johannesburg, we decided to stay in a guesthouse in Sandton, a Johannesburg neighborhood with good restaurants. In New Caledonia, Mauritius, and Réunion, we focused on well-priced guesthouses and hotels in areas beyond built-up coastal tourist strips. In London, we opted for the Hilton in Canary Wharf because we found a good deal for it on Hotwire. The most expensive nightly rate we’re paying for a hotel is $165. The least pricey is around $82.

We made most of our hotel reservations in advance, leaving a few nights free in New Caledonia (to give us some freedom if we decided to change accommodations) and Réunion (a by-product of our inability thus far to find an inexpensive guesthouse in one of the island’s inland Cirques, or calderas.) We wanted to put logistics to bed as completely as possible in advance. More open-ended itineraries would probably benefit from fewer advance reservations.

Check out other posts in the Capricorn Route series here.

(Image: Flickr/Vinni123)

Scary video shows cruise ship caught in high seas

by Jeremy Kressmann on

I’ve never been on a cruise. That said, I’m sure they are quite nice – and plenty of travelers speak highly of them. But I have to admit, the video above is not doing much to convince me to get on a cruise any time soon. Apparently back in 2008, a P&O Cruises ship out of New Zealand got caught in some nasty weather about 400 miles from shore. Even this massive cruise ship, carrying over 1700 passengers, was no match for the 20 foot swells and 60 mile-per-hour winds that came with the storm.

The scary video above, recently revealed from the ship’s CCTV cameras, documents the scene as a heap of lounge furniture and a few unlucky passengers get thrown around like bathtub toys. It was likely a terrifying moment, that thankfully, most of us will never experience.

Before you cancel that sea voyage in terror, consider this: 99.9% of cruises will never have anything like this happen to them. The P&O was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[Via Laughing Squid]

A round-the-world trip: Where?

by Alex Robertson Textor on

Once I’d dispensed with my unrestricted fantasies of scurrying from seldom-visited corner to seldom-visited corner (see Monday’s post) we got down to the essentials of figuring out where we wanted to go.

The Micronesian islands of Palau and Yap were our first priorities. Both destinations had been on our radar for years. Palau with its faintly stinging marine lake jellyfish and the Federated Micronesian state of Yap with its enormous stone money both struck us as appealing in a magical, fairytale sort of way.

Once we’d identified our trip duration and got into the planning phase, however, the inclusion of Micronesia on our itinerary became a less appealing prospect. The flights there and onward were long. We’d need to overnight in Guam at least once, possibly twice, and though that wouldn’t be a hardship exactly, we wanted if at all possible to avoid layovers in places where we wouldn’t also be spending several nights.

The final clincher was the cost of zipping around Micronesia, which would have made an unavoidably pricey itinerary even more expensive. If we had been planning a round-the-Pacific tour, there is no question that Palau and Yap would have been included, but for a round-the-world trip they weren’t quite right. Reluctantly we crossed Micronesia off the list.Where else did we want to travel? We’d settled into a Southern Hemisphere focus, and we were keen to get back to Australia. We both wanted to visit Sydney and Melbourne. For a jaunt to a third city in Australia, Matt had made noises about Cairns and I focused on Perth. The inclusion of these two cities would have made a round-the-world air ticket even more complicated (more on that on Friday) so we dropped them and decided to divide our time in Australia between Sydney and Melbourne.

Years of thinking about Palau and Yap had us fantasizing about a Pacific island and we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to visit one. We glanced across the region and zeroed in on a Pacific territory easily visited from Australia: New Caledonia, a French overseas “collectivity” three hours by plane from Sydney. We decided to sandwich six nights in New Caledonia between stays in Sydney and Melbourne. In New Caledonia we would spend most of our time on Lifou, one of New Caledonia’s Loyalty Islands, with a day reserved for checking out New Caledonia’s capital, Nouméa.

Beyond that, we wanted some time on Mauritius and the French overseas territory of Réunion, two Indian Ocean islands. To journey from Melbourne to Mauritius we’d need to break our rule against short layovers with a single night’s stay in Johannesburg. We’d then divide nine nights between Mauritius and Réunion, which is a short 50-minute flight from Mauritius.

From Mauritius we’d fly to London, where we’d spend the final days of our round-the-world itinerary visiting friends and exploring various East End neighborhoods.

Without further ado, here is the full itinerary: New York (via a stop to visit friends in New Orleans) to Sydney to Nouméa to Melbourne to Johannesburg to Mauritius to Réunion to London and then home to New York.

Seven stops in five weeks. After five years of daydreaming, it’d hard to believe that it’s now happening.

Check out other posts in the Capricorn Route series here.

(Image: Flickr/Eustaquio Santimano)