louiseinlimbo

The only sensible flights out of Vanuatu for me were those to Australia, so I decided to visit a friend in Sydney who I hadn't seen for quite a few years.  She'd kindly offered to host me for as long as I wanted, and I envisaged a week of sleeping, editing my photos from the Pacific, and catching up with online stuff.  However, I got there to find that (a) she had a full programme of entertainment mapped out, and (b) she has no wifi in her apartment but relies on data on her phone - which I couldn't even hotspot to as she has only limited data.  Not that I'm complaining, it was great to see her, there was a shopping mall with virtually unlimited wifi only a short bus ride away, and I accepted that I would just have to delay the other stuff until I moved on to my next destination. So we went out for a number of lovely walks (Sydney is such a well-located city, with so many beautiful bays around the coastline there and lots of greenery - and birds! - inside the city), and...

I didn't really want to end my posts on the Pacific islands with the last sad one on the small, struggling countries, as some of the larger islands such as Palau, Samoa and the Solomon Islands were very different.  Mostly clean and tidy, for one thing, with beautiful, lush countryside, and a much more upbeat feel.  The above picture, for example, is just a street through a small town / village in Samoa - full of flowers and with no litter! The Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (in Samoa) is beautiful, but represents something else I found surprising about these countries - the strong role of the Christian faith.  There are churches everywhere, lots of very well-maintained and decorated tombs and graveyards - and no topless women!  Somehow my image of this part of the world encompassed women in grass skirts, with chains of flowers around the head/neck ... but with nothing on the top half of the body.  But that has been stopped by the Christian religion, espe...

Like Nauru, Kiribati and Tuvalu were quite sad places to visit, both for their history (rusting tanks, gun emplacements, etc) and for the litter, abandoned cars, etc, from their present-day occupants.  But also from the threat of rising sea level resulting from climate change. Tuvalu is taking steps (largely funded by the UNDP's Green Climate Fund) to build up its landmass against the sea, with thousands of sacks of some 'geotextile' mineral - imported from Fiji - providing a barrier, within which they have deposited some 250,000 cubic metres of sand dredged from the sea the other side. now filling an area covering some 7 hectares. The aim is to provide flood-free land to protect against sea level rise and the larger waves which come with cyclones.  I read that on completion in early 2024, this will be the highest land on the island – around 2.4 metres above the highest tide – and should remain flood-free and safe for at least the next 80 years. Of course it is good to se...

  Nauru is apparently the least-visited country in the world; according to their tourist office (who are involved in processing the visas) most years see around 100 visitors.  Although it would surely be a useful source of income, they don’t do much to help this situation – the only island country in the Pacific for which a visa is required, and this the state of the swimming pool at our hotel (the best hotel on the island). We did though get given a tour of the parliament building, including into the debating chamber itself, where we sat down in the MPs' seats and idly flicked through the draft bills in front of us.  Until someone came into the chamber in a panic, telling us that we shouldn't have been allowed access to those seats ... very unprofessional but quite interesting! The country was first sighted by a European in 1798, and was named Pleasant Island.  It has a total land area of just 21.2 square km, with a circumference of some 19km – a few of us walked al...

Finding myself in a very comfortable resort in the Cook Islands, watching Man Utd beat Wigan on the bar TV – sound down, but they are playing an Afrobeats playlist, with four Burna Boy tracks during the last 45 minutes, so I’m not complaining!  & then a Wigan player named Aasgaard gets booked which seems so appropriate given the very camp male staff serving me After the match I go for a swim, followed by a walk in the sand alongside the turquoise sea.  What am I doing here??! Well, I’m in the last week of a month-long group tour around the islands of the Pacific.  Changes to flight schedules meant that Vanuatu was dropped (although many of us fly there after this tour ends) with the Cook Islands slotted in as the replacement, en route from Tonga to the Solomon Islands.  A flight cancellation meant that we missed Micronesia (but had extra days in Palau), and weight restrictions meant that five of us had an extra day in Samoa but one less in Tonga … it’s a cra...

Whilst the mummies were the highlight, there was much more on my itinerary for my 30 days in the Philippines.  I was grateful that I no longer scuba dive, as that shortened the list somewhat, but there were still UNESCO-listed churches, rice terraces, old (Spanish colonial era) cities, and subterranean cave-tunnel, not to mention the natural wonders of Bohol island and the karst coast of El Nido.  Too much to fit in, really, but who knows whether I will have the time/money to visit the Philippines again? The churches were impressive, as was the old centre of the city of Vigan (although the latter was pretty touristy), but the natural wonders were my favourites.  I paid for a guided day tour of the island of Bohol, to save time, and this included a visit to the Tarsier Sanctuary.  The tarsier - see picture to the left - is the smallest (and cutest) primate in the world, with a head around half the size of its body.  It's nocturnal, but thankfully this one opened ...

A 30-day visa for a country made up of more than 7,000 islands … what to see and do in the time??  One thing I HAD to see (although it meant a different itinerary for two days for my friend and I) was the mummies of the Benguet region.  I’d read online that their location is no longer publicised, since one of the mummies was stolen in 2017 (why??!), but was able to find out how to get to the Timbac mummy cave.  This trip started with an early morning two-hour shared minivan to a small town in the mountainous interior.  I was directed towards a group of local men, who asked where I wanted to go.  As I referred to my hand-written notes on a scrap of paper (copied from a response to a facebook post), one of the men struggling to understand my pronunciation looked at the paper … and he saw the bracketed PHP500+, being the price I’d been advised to pay for a taxi from this town to the mummy cave at Timbac (some £7, for British readers).  He couldn’t help but rea...