Paul Theroux · 1992 · sea
Paul Theroux's account of eighteen months paddling around the Pacific in a collapsible kayak, undertaken after his marriage ended and a cancer scare. He island-hopped from New Zealand to Hawaii by way of Melanesia and Polynesia, camping on beaches, and wrote the least genial and most personal of his travel books.
- 1Auckland
Theroux sets out from New Zealand with a folding kayak and a marriage just ended, intending to paddle whatever stretches of the Pacific he can and to be answerable to nobody for a year and a half.
- 2The Trobriands
In the Trobriand Islands, made famous by Malinowski, he finds yam houses, cricket played to local rules and an anthropology industry - and camps on beaches where the arrangement is negotiated with whoever owns them.
- 3The Solomons
Through the Solomons, still full of the wreckage of the Pacific war and of the missionaries who came after it - and Theroux is at his sourest here about what outsiders have made of Melanesia.
- 4Vanuatu
In Vanuatu he paddles among islands where cargo cult is a living religion and land diving is done off wooden towers - and finds the ni-Vanuatu almost the only people on the trip who seem entirely at ease.
- 5Fiji
Fiji after its coups is a country of two peoples not speaking to each other, and the tourism carries on around it - which gives Theroux his theme: the gap between the Pacific sold to visitors and the one people live in.
- 6Tonga
In Tonga he meets the king, paddles the Vava'u group and swims with whales - and the Happy Isles of the title start to look more plausible for a few chapters than they have anywhere else.
- 7Tahiti
French Polynesia is nuclear testing, subsidy and imported food, and he is scathing - and goes looking for the Marquesas of Melville and Gauguin, and finds them largely gone.
- 8Hawaii
The journey ends in Hawaii, where he had decided to live - the last of the Happy Isles and the most thoroughly Americanised, and the place where the book quietly stops travelling and settles.