839 Circumambulating with Nicos; South Pacific Islands

22:37This is the normal world. Wars and robbers and killers are the most extreme rarity on earth. It's one in a thousand or in 10 ,000 that you will be robbed or be attacked.

22:53Rick Steves:And everything's relative. I mean, if you dissect it way down, America is dangerous. There are other countries that have warnings against going to America. statistically, you're at much greater danger on the streets of the United States. So if you're comfortable walking down the streets of Dallas or Minneapolis or New York, you're going to be comfortable in Rangoon, you know? Yes. It's amazing to me. That's so important. And then for me, if people are bold, if people are extroverts, if people are not afraid of culture shock, if they connect, adding to this circumambulating, this beautiful connections are forever approach that you espouse, we are making travel a force for peace.

23:33Rick Steves:Can you make a case for somebody who wishes the world had more stability and peace and understanding about how travel can contribute to that? Well, I'm not sure I should be saying that. But had Donald Trump and his surrounding visited Iran once in their life, there wouldn't have been a war. Amen. You know, I produced a TV show on Iran. I spent a lot of time and money and effort making a one-hour special on Iran when we were bombing Baghdad. And I just felt like it's good style to know people before you bomb them. And when you know people, sometimes you've got to bomb people. You know, I'm not unrealistic about that.

24:16You can't demonize 93 million Iranians with a history of 3 ,000 years.

24:22Rick Steves:There you go. And what most Americans know about Iran, they learned in the hostage crisis. and that was just a media festival. So that's a whole other interview. But the point is, we make the world a more peaceful place when we travel because if you go where you're not supposed to go, you meet the enemy and the enemy meets you and then it makes it tougher for their propaganda to demonize us and when we come home, it makes it tougher for our propaganda to demonize them. Our guest on Travel with Rick Steves is Nikos Hadjikostas. He's a world traveler and something of a master chess player, parrot trainer, festival organizer, and durian connoisseur.

25:00Rick Steves:He writes on how we can enhance the journey of our lives on Substack, and his books include The Eternal Ragpicker and Destination Earth. His website? NikosHajikostas.com You know, in your book, The Eternal Ragpicker, I love reading it because, to be honest, I didn't have time to read the whole thing, but I read a lot of essays, and they are bite-sized little essays, three or four pages, and whatever tickles your fancy, you know, just pick it up and read it. I read one called On Busyness and I just think this is the new norm, being busy. And you mentioned how the irony is when it's a holiday, it's supposed to be a holy day, a time of calm and rest and reflection, but it's the exact opposite.

25:45Rick Steves:That's when people are the most stressed out and that's just symptomatic of a screwy vision of how we're supposed to live our lives. We brag about being busy these days, as it's almost a shame not to be busy. Tell me about your take on busyness and how you learned that through your travels. Well, I think that we should be moving in the opposite direction. And I give the example between doing and being. We are obsessed with doing. We want to do things, to be busy. But we are not preoccupied with being. And I give the example of traveling and deciding to visit a park and sit on a bench, let's say in China, and observe the Chinese passing by, singing, dancing, and so on, just sitting still.

26:35Then you see the world passing by, and without doing anything, you are being transformed, and your being changes. So that's the difference between doing and being. By sitting on a bench, you become transformed because you are engaged in leisure. So leisure can be transformative, not just doing.

27:00Rick Steves:You know, Nikos, I've noticed something because I've talked to a lot of people lately who have left America and for various reasons. and when they settle down in their new homeland, they are astounded at how there's another reality than what they thought was the only reality. The American intensity, the American aggressiveness, the American busyness is a choice. We don't know there's an option. When I grew up, my parents said, there is a work ethic. There is one work ethic, the American work ethic. And you realize, no, there's a choice of work ethics. My Norwegian relatives have a different work ethic.

27:36Rick Steves:My friends in Spain certainly have a different work ethic. And the people, my friends who are now living in another country, they realized they were imprisoned in our intensity. And if you want peace, you can have it. You don't need to leave the culture, but it's the norm in other parts of the world. Yes. But you also have American thinkers who wrote about it in the previous century who spoke about leisure. And it's an old thing, but we forgot about it. And it's almost subversive now because, you know, busyness is advertised on TV. These successful people are not the idle nobility. They're the people with Bluetooth headsets, multitasking.

28:17Rick Steves:That's what success is now. Yes, but throughout history, it was the opposite. I know. That's the irony. The kings had leisure. That's the irony. The lords had stayed at home and read books. Well, that's the trick for us traveling is to be in the moment. And a lot of times in my travels as a tour guide and a writer or writing guidebooks, I'll say, okay, we've done all the due diligence of understanding the Giotto and the Botticelli and, you know, the Leonardo. Now, just stop and be silent. Listen to the white noise of what's around you. I love to just stop and be there. You just got to make a point of it.

28:54Rick Steves:White noise, children playing, a vast church filled with pilgrims, a beer hall, a farmer's market, the world waking up on a Greek island and you hear that asylum of roosters crowing. Just be there and absorb it. It's a rare thing, and it's odd that we have to remind people, stop, put the phone down, don't take a picture, don't take a selfie, just absorb it. This is why we live, to enjoy life and become one with life with a capital L. If we are constantly busy, focused on what we want to achieve, we miss everything else that surrounds our being, which is life with a capital L. It's a great irony, and it's a beautiful thing about travel because you learn a little bit more about your home sometimes by leaving it and looking at it from a distance, and then we can fine-tune things.

29:45Rick Steves:We don't need to embrace everything we encounter, but we can realize, oh, there's an option. I could live my life that way instead of this way. And you go home and you become the oddball. Oh, you've traveled. Wow. Nikos, I love the idea that you attack the world aspiring to see it as a single destination. Well, if that single destination had a voice, considering all the complexity in our world right now, what would that global voice say as a friend of America? The world is full of love, full of people who are eager to know you, to understand you, and you have to go out of your way to understand them.

30:28And once you do that, you see that there are no abstractions like enemies and people who want to do harm to you. But there are real people like you and me who wake up in the morning, go about their jobs and have the same worries as you and me.

30:46Rick Steves:Nikos Hadjikostas, thank you so much for joining us and happy travels. I'll look forward to our next conversation. Me too. Thank you so much for inviting me. .

31:15Rick Steves:We have links to Nikos Hadjikostas in the notes we post for this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. A thousand years ago, the people on one of the most remote pieces of land on Earth, what we now call Easter Island, positioned their giant head statues, or moai, to invoke the gods so that they would provide them with security and prosperity. Well, 10 centuries later, a careful approach to tourism appears to be one way that's coming true. In a minute, cultural historian James Grant Peterkin returns to travel with Rick Steves with an overview on the islands and cultures that are scattered across the world's largest and deepest ocean in the legendary South Pacific.

32:00Rick Steves:As a trained linguist and cultural historian, James Grant Peterkin firmly believes, like I do, that the more we understand about a place, the more we'll enjoy it. And though he grew up in Scotland, his first visit to the South Pacific as a young student sparked a deep fascination with the region's languages and cultures. He lived and worked on Easter Island for 20 years, learning the language, serving as the British Honorary Council, and eventually he began running his own tour company. James is now a worldwide travel lecturer. He's authored four books, including his Travel Enrichment series on the South Pacific, and he joins us now on Travel with Rick Steves to share some of his favorite stories to understand the South Pacific's cultural and historical value.

32:43Rick Steves:James, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. You're from Scotland. What drew you to the sea as a young child and ultimately to the South Pacific? Well, my father was in the military, and so we had something of an international upbringing. So I always had, I suppose, some sort of traveling bug inside me. And then when I began doing my university studies, there was the option to go and spend a year somewhere as unusual as we wanted studying the local language. and that's when I decided I would try and go as far away as I possibly could from the UK and that's where I decided to focus on Easter Island and the Rapa Nui language which is spoken there.

33:26Rick Steves:You wrote in your book, These islands possess an alluring and unexpected magnetism, something I discovered for myself having stumbled into the South Pacific almost by chance in 1996 and I've struggled to leave ever since. What keeps you there? I mean, this is quite remarkable that you'd go somewhere on a one-year study experience and then end up spending a good part of your life there. Well, it's always been something quite difficult to express, certainly to express tidally in words. But I suppose there was a, I mean, the island, Easter Island, the South Pacific is a beautiful part of the world, as we know.

34:02I mean, it's one of great sort of natural beauty and natural wealth. But at the same time, it was also the culture that I felt once I arrived there. There was certainly a period of adaptation. It wasn't an easy community and society to necessarily break into at the beginning. But I found that once I had, and particularly by learning the language, I suddenly found myself feeling extremely integrated. And it then just became a very difficult place to leave. And there's a certain energy on Easter Island, as you can probably imagine, by being so remote and so isolated, that I found it utterly captivating.

34:38Rick Steves:now you and I are similar we're tour guides and we're kind of frustrated by a lot of people who spend a lot of time and money traveling without spending much energy and taking with them some understanding of what they're going to be looking at and South Pacific I think would be particularly frustrating in that regard because it's got so much romantic appeal but people go there with no understanding of the culture you're a scholar a romantic a person who's embraced the culture to actually become a local and you're a tour guide What, from your experience, should we appreciate before we fly into this dream vacation in the South Pacific?

35:14Well, I think the first thing is to understand that within this enormous, vast ocean made up of all these different islands, that there are very different cultures in amongst all of that vast ocean. And that therefore, I think the mistake that's often made with the South Pacific is that people know a bit about Hawaiian culture. They therefore assume that the rest of the South Pacific is just a continuation of what they perhaps have seen in Hawaii and go with that expectation. Sometimes they therefore are disappointed when they find much more basic facilities and things like that than they would find in Waikiki or anywhere like that.

35:52So I think the first thing is to understand the rich variety that you get in the South Pacific, and also the fact that you've had these fascinating outsiders that have come into this part of the world, and they too have left their own legacy there as well.

36:08Rick Steves:This is Travel with Rick Steves, and we're talking with cultural historian James Grant Peterkin. He's compiled a dozen stories from the South Pacific in the latest edition of his Travel Enrichment series, which includes titles on the transatlantic and South America. He's also written A Companion Guide to Easter Island as a guide to his adopted home for 20 years. His website is jamesgrantpeterkin.com. So, James, I like how in your... Do you call it a guidebook, or is it... It's a series of stories, really, so it's not... It's a guidebook in disguise. It's really background reading for someone who's either preparing for a trip to, in this case, the South Pacific, or to perhaps read while they're in the region.

36:49Rick Steves:And reading through it, I felt it was kind of like a guidebook in disguise because it gave me insights into the cultures and the diversity you're talking about and the long history. And that's what you were talking about is what we bring to our sightseeing enables us to get more out of it when we finally get there. Now, in your book, right from the start, you make it clear. There's 25 ,000 islands in the Pacific Ocean and it's not all one society, but it has a fascinating origin, about 4 ,000 B.C. Imagine this, the original islanders left Taiwan in canoes, and eventually, it must have taken centuries and centuries, they populated the entire South Pacific.

37:29Rick Steves:Give us a little insight into that incredible, incredible story. Yes, so this is clearly a seafaring people, but a very curious one as well, because you could argue that there was no need to set off to go and try and find small, brand new virgin islands on which to settle. But for some reason, they did. And therefore, as you say, over centuries, they began gradually exploring more and more of the Pacific. There was absolutely no one living in this part of the world at this time. So every island they came to was uninhabited. It was, in some cases, full of resources. And they gradually then spread all the way across the Pacific, reaching as far as Hawaii in the north, Easter Island, as you said, in the far east, and even as far south as New Zealand, Aotearoa, populating each one as they went and settling there.

38:22And we have permanent populations on all of these islands to this day. So all of these islands were virgin islands. They had never seen people. Exactly, which is why this story of this enormous great voyaging people is even more incredible, that they came across islands that in some cases, you know, of course, they had to build a society from scratch there. They had to work out what there was on the island. And if they didn't have things on the island, they would have to import them from other islands. And so you get this entire network of trading and moving people around the Pacific that ultimately culminates in the Polynesians as we know them today.

38:59Rick Steves:So now, when you think about this vast stretch of our planet, it's a tiny amount of real estate and a tiny percent of the population of the human species, but it is a lot of territory. It's a lot of sea, and it stretches basically from Taiwan to Chile to New Zealand, right, if you made a triangle like that. Is this one common Polynesian culture with related languages, related religion, related tropical climate. Does it have that in common or how diverse would it be? Do we underestimate the diversity of this, I guess is my question. So I think to give you an unsatisfactory answer, it's both because when we think of the Polynesian Triangle, and this is the area between Hawaii in the north, Easter Island and New Zealand.

39:49So this is the kind of final bit of that human settlement. It's fascinating because when you see Polynesians together, they all refer to each other as cousins, you know, because they do have this clear understanding that they all came from the same roots, if you like. But at the same time, the mistake that people make is to think that Hawaii is the same as New Zealand, which is the same as Easter Island, which clearly isn't the case.

40:13Rick Steves:By the way, this is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with cultural historian James Grant Fiederken. His book is The Travel Enrichment Series, South Pacific. It's 12 stories to enlighten your journey. James, when we think about this notion that the Polynesian people, that triangle going from Hawaii to the Easter Islands to New Zealand, they're confronted with challenges. They're confronted with climate change and they're confronted with the influence of China. Let's start off right away. How has the influence of China crept into this world and what's the feeling if you're a Polynesian person?

40:49Well, it's really that the Pacific has always been in China's backyard, if you like. It's a part of the world that most other countries have tended to slightly overlook and to forget about. And in the last 20, 30 years, China's been making a dedicated effort to perhaps to certainly bring some of these small island nations who have important votes at places like the United Nations to bring them onto their side. And so what you've started to see is a lot of Chinese investment in some of these islands. Many people would say that these islands have become indebted to China, and therefore there's a risk that they lose something of their sovereignty as a result.

41:33It's a complex political situation that countries like Australia and New Zealand and the US have now slightly woken up to and realized that they had forgotten really about the South Pacific or the Pacific Islands for a long time.

41:46Rick Steves:And we could wake up a little bit too late being asleep at the wheel and find that China dominates and has sort of woven these communities into its realm. So I think it's a real risk. And it's been noteworthy that several Western countries have reopened embassies and things like that on Pacific islands, or they've established new ones, because they now realize the geopolitics of the Pacific for really the first time, certainly since World War II, has suddenly become extremely important again. And then we've got the specter of climate change. And I know there are certain islands that are already buying property on other islands that are less likely to be submerged as the sea level rises, anticipating that the day will come when their home islands will no longer be inhabitable.

42:37Rick Steves:What's the reality for these islanders when it comes to climate change? Well, the issue is that many of these islands are only a few feet above sea level now. And so they're incredibly low. They're therefore very vulnerable to any changes in sea temperature and in sea levels. But it's not just sea level changes. It's also extreme weather that we're seeing more of in our home countries as well. But all of these things affect small, isolated islands much harder than they would do on a large continent surrounded by people. So I think this is interesting, James. Excuse me, that's interesting because I think it's so vivid to me the violent weather in the United States right now and how it is wrecking havoc on communities.

43:23Rick Steves:I never think of idyllic South Pacific islands as having to endure this violent weather. But is the weather getting more violent as climate change becomes more apparent? Well, certainly it seems that the frequency of cyclones, for example, so these incredibly strong winds that they get in certain parts of the Pacific would appear to be more frequent. Some people would say that's because reporting is so much better. But, you know, and the damage, either flooding or, you know, strong winds will do to a small, sometimes very poor island is, of course, life changing for an entire generation. It's horrible when you think of a poor island.

44:04Rick Steves:And a lot of times the infrastructure of a poor island is a perimeter road that circles the island at sea level. And there's no real infrastructure into the interior. and one horrible storm can wipe out that road and the island doesn't have the resources to rebuild. There's just some very harsh realities coming on for these small and fragile and poor communities as the fury of climate change takes hold. Part of the economy, I'm sure, for islands you could say across the board, an important part is tourism, and this is a travel show. Could you take the last couple minutes that we have, James, and share with us your take on how we can put together a good itinerary and how we can best appreciate not just the beauty and the natural wonder, but the cultural wonder as well.

44:51So I think the most important, or if one's able to, is to take in several islands in one trip because then you can really start to compare cultures, history, and start to appreciate some of these nuances, some of these differences that we've been talking about. The way that airline itineraries now work, it's not as easy as it used to be. They used to have kind of milk runs across the entire Pacific where you could stop in three or four different islands between Los Angeles and Sydney, for example. That's no longer the case. But you can still, if you are creative, you can decide to focus on a few island groups.

45:31And then I would say really get in and try and explore those groups and go to different islands. Don't just go to the main island, which tends to be quite touristy. It's sometimes, you know, it's where most of the tourism is focused. If you can always get out to outer islands within groups, so outer islands in Tonga, outer islands in Fiji, then that's where I feel the real rewards are to be had.

45:55Rick Steves:So the outer islands, generally you'd have to fly into the main island and then would you take a boat connection generally to the outer islands? So you can normally fly to them. I mean, they're small planes. You can also get, I used to do a lot of taking cargo ships from the main island out to the outer islands. But I would always realize when I then came back to the main island before flying off, that if I hadn't seen that outer island, I would have had no real understanding of what the, you know, what that nation was really about. That is critical. And it relates to my next question, which frustratingly, you don't have the milk run kind of flight schedules any longer, as you mentioned.

46:34Rick Steves:so you might think, well, the nice alternative is a cruise itinerary, sailing at night and visiting a series of islands on successive days, a series of different cultures, different countries. But again, that will take you to the main ports on the Maid Islands, and you've got to take the initiative to get away from those ports if you're going to use the convenience of a cruise ship to visit a series of islands. Is that doable, do you think, Or are you doomed to just the big hula show kind of aspect of each island when you take a cruise tour? No, no. I think if you pick the right itinerary in the Pacific, then actually cruise ships are a very good means of seeing a lot of islands in a relatively short period of time.

47:15Particularly if you pick small ships that are able to get into smaller ports, you know, slightly the ability to therefore visit some of these outer islands. then I always tell people that's an excellent way to see the South Pacific. I mean, you could just focus, say, on French Polynesia. Even if you only had two weeks, you could get one ship that spent two weeks going around all of the different islands. And that would give you a brilliant overview of what French Polynesia is really about.

47:43Rick Steves:Our South Pacific guest, James Grant Peterkin, is scheduled to be a featured speaker on several upcoming Oceania and region cruises, departing Vancouver, Miami and Barcelona. His website lists his speaking schedule and has links to his TED Talk and his book about living on Easter Island. James has also written a travel enrichment series with a dozen stories each to enhance journeys to Southeast Asia, Australia, the South Pacific, South America, and on the transatlantic crossing. That's at jamesgrantpeterkin.com. And, James, we're out of time, but I'd like to finish with just... We haven't really done justice to the dimension of your South Pacific book that really is cultural insights via these stories that humanize these communities.

48:33Rick Steves:What's the story that you like to use as an example of how the more we understand, the more we get out of our visits? What's a favorite story from your book you'd like to share? So to be honest, when I wrote that book, they were all nearly all characters that I really admired, people that I enjoyed learning more about and subsequently then teaching and talking about their lives. I suppose, I mean, because I spent so many years living on Easter Island, I've always had, of course, a special, I suppose, favoritism towards the history of Easter Island, because I think it embodies just what an unusual part of the world the South Pacific is, which people often don't appreciate.

49:15But I think, you know, I grew up reading the books of Thor Heyerdahl, for example, and, you know, his Contiki expedition. And it was only really when I got to Polynesia that I could actually really understand what that voyage had really been. You know, the fact that six Scandinavian men got onto a balsa raft in South America and drifted into the Pacific, unsure even where they were going to end up. And of course, they ended up in French Polynesia in the very heart of the Pacific. But I think it was stories like that that made me realize that the South Pacific really appealed to adventurous people, that it's a part of the world that hasn't yet become so comfortable, that it does require a bit of planning.

49:55It does require a bit of adventurous spirit to really get out there and see it.

50:01Rick Steves:And you'll be well rewarded if you design the trip properly and, as you like to emphasize, bring some understanding with you to your sightseeing and recognize that it's got natural wonders, but it's also got cultural wonders. James Grant Peterkin, author of South Pacific, thanks so much for being with us and sharing your passion for this part of the world. Thank you, Rick, for having me.

50:27Rick Steves:Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton, Kaz Muralhall and Donna Bardsley at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gerzoff. Website uploads are by Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court. Our theme music is by Jerry Frank. You'll find more about our guests at ricksteves.com slash radio, and we'll see you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. Thanks for listening. In our online travel store, you can choose from 80 different Rick Steves guidebooks covering just about every country, region, and major city in Europe, as well as books on history, art, Italian food, cruising, and festivals, plus phrasebooks and planning maps.

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