I misspent a significant part of my youth near the Pacific Ocean, on the west coast of the USA. When I started wandering, it was natural for me to explore more of the Pacific area. When we were kids my folks would take us to Ensenada, on the west coast of Baja, California. Later, I had a rundown old house in Lincoln City, Oregon. I think I paid $75/month for it, a block from the shoreline. It was my first house.
Under Construction
Poverty was a way of life when I was a kid, so I never went anywhere that I couldn't drive to. Airfare was not an option, considering my modest finances, but one time I went down Baja with a girl I knew in her freshly rebuilt 1960 Chevy pickup, with her two kids in the back. We got as far as Bahia San Quentin. The only anglos we encountered were surfers, although we spent some time with the local fishermen on the beach. Years later, I made my first trip to Los Cabos. My little brother was getting married and we were scouting out locations for the bachelor party. I still like Cabo San Lucas, even if it's a tourist trap.
While not exactly on the Pacific, I've spent some time on the Sea of Cortez. The twin towns of Guyamas and San Carlos are a day's drive from my home in Phoenix, so I go there every now and then. Guyamas is the Mexican city, while San Carlos is the gringo suburb. I like it because it's not as much of a tourist trap as the border towns, there's good diving there, and it's relatively close. The area is interesting, too. There was a tracking station there for the Apollo space program, for one thing. Another is that the French came ashore there during their war with Mexico. What's that? A war between France and Mexico? That's right, chico! Cinco de Mayo celebrates a victory over the French, not Mexican independence. Mexicans don't get too worked up about Cinco de drink-o, it's a gringo thing. After all, what's the big deal about beating the French?
I've always wanted to do a jeep safari down the coast of the Sea of Corez, then take the ferry across to Baja and return to the US on the Baja side. Someday, I'll do that. There is a short route down to Guyamas, ferry to Santa Rosalia and north to the border. The longer route is down to Mazatlan, across to La Paz and all the way north on the length of Baja. I'd want to have a better handle on my spanish before I tried the longer route.
I haven't spent too much time in the central Pacific. One of the reasons is that there isn't too many places to explore in the middle of the ocean. I've been to Hawaii a couple of times, usually on my way to someplace else, but I like Hawaii. I've tramped around in the mountains of Oahu and the more remote north shore beaches, but I've never been to the other islands. Not yet, anyway.
My primary interest in the far Pacific is the south and west Pacific. I've been to Japan, briefly, while on the way to Indonesia and Micronesia. The little that I saw of Japan was facinating, I'd love to return someday. I have friends on Guam, so I need to get back there soon. I could spend years on Bali, just looking around. The place is fantastic, with volcanos, beaches, scuba diving, surfing, and one of the most interesting cultures I've ever seean. Bali was the frontier of Hinduism, and it remains a nearly monolithic Hindu culture in the middle of Indonesia, which is the world's biggest Islamic nation. Hindus are peaceful and they love art and beauty. Balinese farmers go to work in the morning leading flocks of ducks, who spend the day eating bugs in the rice paddys. There are "Duck Crossing" signs on the roadways, and they take these seriously. Remember, your Karma takes a hit if your car flattens a duck waddling across the road. The Balinese have a Kite Season, and this is a big deal. I flew into Denpasar airport during Kite Season and looking out the windows I could see hundreds of kites, all across the horizon. Some of the kites are so big that it takes a few guys to carry them to the field. Traffic stops while the men carry the kites down the road, and there's often a guy with a long pole whose job it is to lift the telephone wires out of the way. You just have to love a people who are passionate about things as simple as kite flying.
I've spent a few weeks in Micronesia, on Guam and also in Truk. Also called Chuuk, Truk is an atoll in the middle of the west Pacific. The diving there is excellent. I have a website dedicated to diving in Chuuk, linked to my South Pacific website. Briefly, the people are ethnic Micronesians who crossed the vast ocean in small boats, navigating without any aids as simple as a compass. They had the stars, the winds and the tides that they used to find little islands out in the middle of the Pacific. Micronesians are closely related to Polynesians, but they're more aggressive and competitive. The islands of Chuuk atoll are unique inasmuch as they are high and volcanic, enclosed in a barrier reef. Normally, one finds either islands or a low atoll, but not both. The Japanese had a major navy base at Truk, and the ruins of that base are both above and below the water. There are dozons of shipwrecks for scuba divers, full of aircraft, armor and munitions from the Pacific War.
On the way to Truk, you can see Micronesian island groups like Kosrae and Yap, famous for its stone money. These are all little rocks out in the middle of the Pacific, far from the beaten track.
One of the most unique places in the Pacific area is Irian Jaya, which is also called Papaua or West Papaua. Not to be confused with Papua New Guinea, Irian is the western half of the island known as New Guinea, and it's part of the country called Indonesia. The people are very independent, and there's a separatist movement. Christianity in all its forms is common here, while there has also been significant immigration of Muslims from the western islands of Indonesia. Irian is the wild hinterlands of Indonesia. Travellers have to apply for a visa from the local police, called a Surat Jalan to move into or out of any district in Irian. They carefuly track all visitors because the visitors disappear on a regular basis, and the police want to have a place to start looking for you if you don't turn up. I guess the idea is, they go to your last known whereabouts and start asking around. The separatist rebels kidnap people or they get lost in the bush, sometimes they turn up and sometimes they don't. It pays to be careful here.
There's a remote part of Irian Jaya that I haven't been to called the Baliem Valley, which is one of the last truely primative places on the planet. The locals live in a stone age culture, without such modern inventions as woven coth. It's still a hunter/gatherer society with some limited agriculture. As late as the 1990s, tribemen came out of the bush who had never developed vocal speach, they used sign language, as humans did back in the days when homo sapiens still had competition from the earlier species of human the race.
The diving in Iraian Jaya is centered in the Raja Empat islands, off the northwest corner of the mainland. Here, the Pacific meets the Indian Ocean and the combined ecosystems are fantastic. There is a variety of lifeforms here that is probably unmatched anywhere on the planet. Corals, fish, high invertibrates like crustaceans, they're all here and there are new species being discovered routinely. As you might imagine, the diving here is spectacular.
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