UNEXPECTED PACIFIC PARADISE

Visiting Micronesia's islands and atolls offers an unexpected rare glimpse into remote communities steeped in centuries-old cultural traditions.

- ALASDAIR MCGREGOR

THIRTY YEARS AGO, while sailing north through the Great Barrier Reef, I devoured American travel writer Paul Theroux’s book The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific. On that sailing adventure I only skimmed the outer rim of the vast Pacific Ocean, but the deck of a yacht seemed just the place to properly absorb Theroux’s vivid account of the islands that lie scattered across the largest body of water on earth.

With Theroux I could dream of “little islands…each of which was a perfectly rounded piece of land, many of them just like drops of batter on a hot griddle, the ones that cook quickly”. But most of all, The Happy Isles of Oceania conjured up a picture of remoteness, of great distances from anywhere and everywhere, of the sorts of places that in our overly connected world are now almost impossible to find. To Theroux, the experience of the Pacific was “like the night sky, like outer space, and of island-hopping in that ocean being something like interplanetary travel”.

In November 2023, I embarked with Coral Expeditions on one of their wonderful forays away from the Australian coast, this time on a voyage marketed as: “Through the Islands and Atolls of Micronesia”. Having family in Fiji, I’d travelled the less-trodden tracks across its islands many times, but Micronesia was all new to me. And what a revelation it would prove to be.