By far my favorite tale of the Pacific is the whale that exploded on a…
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All aboard the arks
Sausalito is an eccentric conglomeration of communities, from mega-mansions to floating piles of trash. Sausalito…
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The Philippines: the craziness starts in Woodside.
In 1988 US marshals were seizing property Imelda Marcos owned in Hawaii, Europe and in…
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The 9,300 flights of the Fu-Go balloons
It was November in 1944, less than a year before The War snapped to an…
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Malaita, the island of the white headhunter
Headhunting in the Solomon Islands region was a common practice long before the white man…
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The tragic voyage of Nicolai Rezanov
Nicolai Rezanov was born in St. Petersburg in 1764. He mastered five languages by the age…
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The floating islands of the Uros
Venturing a bit inland from the Pacific we encounter the sixty or so floating islands…
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Japan—the crazy bits
Ahhh Japan. Land of fan waving Geishas and polite people bowing and everyone gazing heavenward…
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Cape Horn, no Covid, no panhandlers…no nothing, but snow and shipwrecks
For centuries the most dreaded sea passage in the world was Cape Horn. The Horn…
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Nauru, land of disenchantment
In 1975, the tiny island of Nauru had the highest GDP per capita in the…
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Papua New Guinea, bigtime penis envy down under
The central highlands of the island of New Guinea was the last place on earth…
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Drake’s Bay—Part 2, The Voyage of the San Augustin
In 1565, Phillip II of Spain claimed the Philippine Islands (hence the name) to take…
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Drake’s Bay – Shipwrecks and lies.
In 1579, Sir Francis Drake was circumnavigating the globe for good Queen Bess when he…
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The State of Yap
Yap is a state of the Federated States of Micronesia that’s part of the Carolina…
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The Last Voyage of the Wateree
The USS Wateree was a sidewheel steamship built in Philadelphia in 1863 to patrol the…
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The Island of Borneo’s crown jewel—Brunei
Ask most folks where the oil-rich Muslim nation of Brunei is and they place it…
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Treasure Island
Smack dab in the middle of San Francisco Bay is an island of relatively recent…
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Kowloon or Nam Kam, City of Darkness
Part of Hong Kong is an island in the Pacific Ocean called Hong Kong Island,…
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Bikini Atoll
If you look up ‘most dangerous islands’ in the world, you always find Bikini Atoll…
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The Island of Sumbawa
I used to think that the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883 was THE BIG ONE,…
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