At home and abroad

It’s not like I didn’t know the Pacific Ocean is big. I mean, duh. I was paying attention back in fifth grade geography. Since then, I’ve flown across the Pacific more times than I can count. And yet… just how big that ocean is somehow never sank in until I began preparing for this trip. 

As part of the preparations, Steve and I read a marvelous book called Sea People about how the Polynesians managed to spread throughout the vast expanses of water — more than 12,000 miles across and another 10,000 miles from north to south. As author Christina Thompson points out, you could fit all the earth’s land masses into the Pacific and still have room for another continent as big as North and South America. 

It fills up half the globe.

Getting from San Diego to Port Moresby (the capital of Papua New Guinea) takes more than 24 hours via the most direct connections. It’s either grueling (flying in Economy) or hellaciously expensive (in a lie-flat seat routing through somewhere like Singapore.) So we decided to try an offbeat alternative — what I’ve come to call my hop, skip, and jump approach. At the moment, as I’m writing this, we’re flying from San Diego to Honolulu. There we’ll rest in an airport hotel for a couple of hours, then continue southeast to Apia, the capital of Samoa.

We’ll sleep there for two nights, then make the short flight from Samoa to Fiji.  Sleep there for two more nights, then hop again to the Solomon Islands. These flights don’t run every day. Due to the quirky schedules, we have less time in Samoa and Fiji than I would have wanted, and more time (five days) in the Solomons. From there the jump to Port Moresby is another piece of cake — just two hours and 20 minutes. 

It’s an experiment. Maybe we’ll conclude it was nuts. We won’t be returning the same way. I have something else cooked up for that. At the moment, however, our return in five weeks feels almost unimaginably distant.