The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific

by Paul Theroux

Overview

The author of The Great Railway Bazaar explores the South Pacific by kayak: “This exhilarating epic ranks with [his] best travel books” (Publishers Weekly).
 
In one of his most exotic and adventuresome journeys, travel writer Paul Theroux embarks on an eighteen-month tour of the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. Beginning in New Zealand's rain forests and ultimately coming to shore thousands of miles away in Hawaii, Theroux paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines.
 
Along the way, Theroux meets the king of Tonga, encounters street gangs in Auckland, and investigates a cargo cult in Vanuatu. From Australia to Tahiti, Fiji, Easter Island, and beyond, this exhilarating tropical epic is full of disarming observations and high adventure.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547525181
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/11/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	530
Sales rank:	370,983
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and Cape Cod.

Table of Contents

Meganesia
New Zealand: The Land of the Long White Cloud     17
New Zealand: Sloshing Through the South Island     25
Waffling in White Australia     36
Walkabout in Woop Woop     53
North of the Never-Never     73
Melanesia
Buoyant in the Peaceful Trobriands     105
Aground in the Troubled Trobriands     129
The Solomons: Down and Dirty in Guadalcanal     152
The Solomons: In the Egg Fields of Savo Island     164
Vanuatu: Cannibals and Missionaries     186
The Oddest Island in Vanuatu     201
Fiji: The Divided Island of Viti Levu     218
Fiji: Vanua Levu and the Islets of Bligh Water     239
Polynesia
Tonga: The Royal Island of Tongatapu     265
Tonga: Alone on the Desert Islands of Vava'u     293
In the Backwaters of Western Samoa     320
American Samoa: The Littered Lagoon     346
Tahiti: The Windward Shore of the Island of Love     360
A Voyage to the Marquesas     382
The Cook Islands: In the Lagoon of Aitutaki     410
Easter Island: Beyond the Surf Zone of Rapa Nui     435
Easter Island: The Old Canoe Ramp at Tongariki     456
Paradise
O'ahu: Open Espionage inHonolulu     473
Kaua'i: Following the Dolphins on the Na Pali Coast     494
Ni'ihau and Lana'i: Some Men Are Islands     502
The Big Island: Paddling in the State of Grace     513

Editorial Reviews

Despite the euphoric title, Oceania as Theroux ( Riding the Iron Rooster ) experienced it was only occasionally a carefree paradise. In the Trobriand Islands, celebrated by anthropologists for their supposed sexual freedom, the novelist and travel writer found prostitution and fear of rape. Samoa struck him as noisy, vandalized, with American-style conspicuous consumption. The intrepid Theroux discussed world politics with the king of Tonga, encountered class consciousness in Honolulu, mingled with street gangs in Auckland, and lived in a bamboo hut in Vanuatu (formerly New Hebrides), where he investigated a cargo cult and rumors of cannibalism. In Australia he braved the Woop Woop (remote outback) to camp with Aborigines. This exhilarating epic ranks with Theroux's best travel books. It is full of disarming observations, high adventure and memorable characters rendered with keen irony. First serial to New York Times Magazine; BOMC featured alternate; QPB alternate. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The best-selling author of My Secret History ( LJ 4/1/89) and Riding the Iron Rooster ( LJ 6/15/88) spent 18 months in a one-man collapsible kayak exploring such exotic Pacific islands as New Zealand, Australia, the Soloman and Cook Islands, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Easter Island, and Hawaii. Never a kind-hearted chronicler of place, he sets out on this voyage in an especially dour mood, leaving behind a failed marriage and expecting to be diagnosed with cancer at any moment. Soon after he escapes the crowded towns of Australia, however, he starts to lose some of his harsh edge and enjoy his travels, which ultimately heal him. A brilliant storyteller with an eye for the absurd, Theroux takes the reader to little-known places where time seems to have stood still and people lead simple lives totally unrelated to 20th-century America. Highly recommended for all libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/92.-- Lisa J. Cochenet, Rhinelander Dist. Lib., Wis.

Library Journal

The peripatetic author of Riding the Iron Rooster, etc., etc., ventures with a collapsible kayak to the remote and scattered islands of the South Pacific. With a farewell to his marriage, and loneliness at his back, Theroux begins his extraordinary mission in New Zealand's Fiordland ("As long as there is wilderness there is hope"), moves on to Australia (a continent "terrified by its own emptiness"), and then to Melanesia, Polynesia—Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, New Guinea's Trobriands, etc.—and, finally, Hawaii. He paddles the sea, he says, in the wake of myth-makers Melville, Stevenson, Gauguin, Maugham, and the Frenchman Captain Bougainville, who, in 1768, believed he'd found not only the Garden of Eden but Venus when a "barebreasted Tahitian girl" climbed into his ship from a canoe. To keen-eyed Theroux, the Polynesian islands are "pleasant and feckless" but far from paradise. Even Gauguin's Marquesas are "dramatic at a distance" but "close up—muddy and jungly and priest-ridden." Traditional islands are "riddled with magic, superstition, myths, dangers, rivalries and its old routines." Always interesting are Theroux's encounters with archaeologists who have disproved Thor Heyerdahl's popularizing theories about Polynesia. Sifting through human and animal bones, they study a still-mysterious people who carved some 800 stone statues on Easter Island and who boasted navigational skills that sent them migrating during what was Europe's Dark Ages. A sense of being beyond the reach of civilization comes when, in his intrepid kayak, off Easter Island and between the rock-battering surf and the Pacific, Theroux removes his headphones, "hears the immense roar of waves and thescreaming wind," and is terrified. A vast and contemplative book, seeing the "Pacific as a universe, and the islands like stars in all that space." Informative not only for the voyager, but also for those wanting a new perspective on the Western continents of home. (Sorely lacking a map.)

Kirkus Reviews

"Engaging and at times brilliant...he goes places where the rest of us might fear to paddle, often beaching his kayak on a small South Pacific island without the foggiest idea whether those awaiting him will be friendly, indifferent, or anxious to give him a good thwack...well worth reading." USA Today

"A superb blend of sharp-eyed observation and pungently expressed opinion. It's hardly paradise, this lovely part of the world, but Theroux makes it endlessly fascinating." Newsday

"Feisty, eloquent, and vast in scope...a multilayered odyssey." The San Francisco Chronicle

"Perceptive, terribly readable, and wickedly funny...[An] exhilarating book." --Book Review The Los Angeles Times

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