Once known as the New Hebrides, Vanuatu is today a collection of spectacular, jungle cloaked islands strung out across the South Pacific lightly populated and seldom visited by tourists. It is the first place we have visited whose people are Melanesians as distinguished from the Polynesians who dominate every island east of here all the way to Easter Island. […]
Located far to the south of Port Vila, Tanna is at once the most remote and primitive of all Vanuatu islands. Its people live today as they have always lived. Those in the bush have one-room huts with a thatched roof and woven grass mat or bamboo walls. Some have floors raised above ground to deter the rats that are a constant bother. […]
Imagine if you will stepping from the most backward-looking, primitive African village onto the welcoming, fragrant byways of, say, Palm Beach’s Worth Avenue and you will pretty much have in your mind the startling transition from Vanuatu to New Caledonia. This place has a powerful and, I have to admit, welcomed Wow! factor. […]
Heavenly Delight
One cloudless evening as Indigo was making her way due east from Tahiti to one of the Tuamotu islands we were treated to one of the many wondrous sights the heavens have to offer. Just as the day’s declining light was shading the sky to opalescent blue a glorious full moon was rising directly on the bow. […]
Bed Time Muzz sounds like, what? A libidinous sport perhaps or another term for extreme bed head. Instead, the words are the names of the three best night spots in Noumea, each in turn frequented by the crew of Indigo and its owner. Bed bar is the most cleverly named, as in “Want to go to Bed with me?” and the newest of the lot. […]
Indigo has carried ever since its initial construction the yachting world’s highest and most stringent classification, Lloyd’s 100 A1. One of the many and excruciatingly detailed requirements for maintaining this seal of approval is that the vessel must undergo a major Lloyd’s monitored refit and survey each ten years, a period that expired just as we pulled into the Marine Industry Park, […]
For the first several weeks of the refit work, I stayed in the Brisbane CBD in a room on the 20th floor of the tired but well located Stamford Plaza Hotel. Sited on the Brisbane River Walk, alongside the Botanical Gardens, and just a block from the many cafes, restaurants and bars of Eagle Street Pier, it was a near ideal location from which to wander about the city. […]
After exhausting the possibilities of Brisbane and in search of new adventure, I booked a room at the sumptuous, if excessively ornate, Hotel Palazzo Versace situated at the north end of a roughly twenty mile long stretch of chock-a-block beach towns known as the Gold Coast, population 600,000. […]
We flew into Sydney first and spent a week or so there seeing all the must-see sights. Our hotel, the Shangri-La, though recently redone in the manner of say a Hilton, had by far the finest vistas of any hotel in the city. From its upper floors, and especially from its club floor lounge, we could see the sunrise over the Pacific, […]
1. FP, a colony of France, is one of the most expensive places in the world, prices of the most ordinary items breathtaking. Electricity is so costly that homes and shops are ill-lit and rarely air conditioned. Most homes have only cold water showers and the barest necessities of electric appliances. […]