Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific - Softcover

Theroux, Paul

4.02

6,352 ratings by Goodreads

9780449908587: Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449908585 ISBN 13: 9780449908587

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1993

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"Possibly his best travel book...an observant and frequently hilarious account of a trip that took him to 51 Pacific Islands."
TIME
Renowned travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux has been many places in his life and tried almost everything. But this trip in and around the lands of the Pacific may be his boldest, most fascinating yet. From New Zealand's rain forests, to crocodile-infested New Guinea, over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors, daring weather and coastlines, he travels by Kayak wherever the winds take him--and what he discovers is the world to explore and try to understand.

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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.

From Kirkus Reviews:

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 the screaming 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.) -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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