Fun fact#790
Australia is wider than the Moon's diameter
Australia measures about 4,000 kilometres east to west, wider than the Moon's 3,475-kilometre diameter.
Oceania & the Pacific: 64 stories, quotes and facts
Islands navigated by swell and starlight, reefs visible from orbit, and the emptiest ocean on Earth.
Islands navigated by swell and starlight, reefs visible from orbit, and the emptiest ocean on Earth.
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Story#594
Kangaroos at the tee
The golf course had a local rule about kangaroos on the fairway. There were fourteen of them and none of them moved for anyone.
Fun fact#792
Australia has 10,000 beaches
Visiting a different Australian beach every day would take about 27 years to see them all.
Quote#807
Aloha means more
Aloha means hello, goodbye and love, and locals will tell you it is a way of behaving, not a greeting.
Fun fact#794
The Great Barrier Reef is visible from space
Stretching over 2,300 kilometres, the reef is the largest structure built by living organisms.
Story#597
Driving the Nullarbor
Ninety miles straight, no curve at all. We passed four road trains and one cyclist who waved with an energy that suggested he had not seen anyone for a while.
Fun fact#796
Uluru is mostly underground
The visible rock is the tip of a formation that continues several kilometres below the desert surface.
Story#601
Cassowary crossing
The signs say dangerous. Then one walks out of the rainforest two metres in front of the car and you understand the signs completely.
Fun fact#798
Australia has a pink lake
Lake Hillier stays bubblegum pink even in a bottle, thanks to salt-loving microorganisms.
Fun fact#800
Tasmania has the cleanest air
Air measured at Cape Grim after crossing the Southern Ocean is among the cleanest on Earth.
Story#605
Sydney to Bondi at six
The coastal walk at six in the morning was full of runners, swimmers and one man doing tai chi on a rock. Nobody had a phone out.
Fun fact#802
Australia's longest fence runs 5,600 km
The Dingo Fence stretches further than the distance from Berlin to Kabul, built to protect sheep country.
Fun fact#804
Melbourne's laneways became galleries
Once service alleys, Melbourne's laneways now hold legal street art walls, tiny bars and coffee counters.
Story#607
Uluru at the wrong hour
Everybody goes at sunset. We went at eleven in the morning in 38 degrees, saw four people, and the rock was a colour nobody photographs.
Fun fact#806
Sydney's opera house has a million tiles
Just over one million self-cleaning Swedish tiles cover the shells, in two subtly different finishes.
Quote#813
Mana
Mana: spiritual power and presence, carried by people and by places.
Fun fact#808
Australia has more camels than Arabia
Feral dromedaries introduced in the 1800s now number in the hundreds of thousands across the outback.
Story#611
The great ocean detour
We drove the whole road in one day, which is a mistake. Someone at a bakery in Apollo Bay told us to take three, and she was right.
Fun fact#810
Kangaroos cannot walk backwards
Their tail and leg structure prevents reverse movement, which is partly why the kangaroo appears on the coat of arms.
Story#615
Tasmanian silence
We stood at Cape Grim in wind that had crossed the Southern Ocean untouched. It smelled like nothing at all, which is apparently the point.
Fun fact#812
Wombat droppings are cubic
Wombats produce cube-shaped droppings thanks to uneven intestinal walls, so the pellets do not roll off rocks.
Fun fact#814
New Zealand has more sheep than people
The ratio has fallen from twenty to one in the 1980s to around five to one today, still comfortably ahead.
Story#619
Milford in the rain
Everyone hopes for sun. Locals told us to hope for rain, because that is when a thousand temporary waterfalls appear on the cliffs. They were right within an hour.
Fun fact#816
New Zealand had no land mammals
Before humans arrived the only native land mammals were bats, so birds filled almost every ecological role.
Fun fact#817
New Zealand was the last big land settled
Polynesian navigators reached Aotearoa around 1300 AD, making it one of the last large landmasses humans settled.
Story#621
The Tongariro crossing
Nineteen kilometres, four weather systems and a lake the colour of antifreeze. Somebody in shorts passed us going the other way at a run.
Fun fact#820
Milford Sound is really a fiord
Carved by glaciers rather than a river, Milford is technically a fiord, and it gets over six metres of rain a year.
Quote#818
Kaitiakitanga
Kaitiakitanga: guardianship of the land, on the understanding that you are only borrowing it.
Fun fact#821
New Zealand has a legally recognised river
In 2017 the Whanganui River was granted legal personhood, with guardians appointed to speak for it.
Story#625
Hitching in the South Island
We waited eleven minutes and got picked up by a shearer who talked about sheep for two hours and dropped us forty kilometres past his own turnoff.
Fun fact#824
Rotorua smells of sulphur
Geothermal activity vents hydrogen sulphide across the town, earning it the nickname Sulphur City.
Story#629
Glowworm ceiling
The boat went silent and the guide pulled us along a rope in the dark. The ceiling looked like a star map and was in fact several thousand hungry larvae.
Fun fact#826
Bungee jumping was commercialised in Queenstown
The first commercial bungee site opened at the Kawarau Bridge in 1988, inspired by Vanuatu land diving.
Fun fact#827
Vanuatu invented land diving
Naghol divers leap from wooden towers with vines tied to their ankles, a harvest ritual centuries older than bungee.
Story#631
Hangi under the ground
Food cooked in a pit with hot stones for four hours. The steam when they opened it was worth the entire wait and the whole meal tasted faintly of earth.
Fun fact#830
Fiji has more than 300 islands
Fiji comprises around 330 islands, of which about a third are permanently inhabited.
Quote#823
Turangawaewae
Turangawaewae: a place to stand, the ground where you feel connected and empowered.
Fun fact#831
Samoa skipped a day
In 2011 Samoa jumped the international date line for trade reasons, and 30 December simply never happened.
Story#635
Fiji time
The boat was due at ten. It came at half past twelve. Everyone we asked said Fiji time with a smile and we eventually stopped asking.
Fun fact#834
Tonga was never colonised
Tonga is the only Pacific nation never formally colonised, retaining its monarchy throughout.
Fun fact#835
Kiribati spans all four hemispheres
Kiribati's scattered atolls cross both the equator and the date line, giving it an enormous ocean territory.
Story#639
Kava circle
You clap once, take the cup, drink it in one, clap three times. Your tongue goes numb and the conversation slows down and improves.
Fun fact#837
Tuvalu earns money from a domain name
Licensing the .tv internet domain has provided a meaningful share of Tuvalu's national revenue.
Story#641
Land diving at Pentecost
The tower is built from vines and branches with no nails. The divers aim to touch the ground with their shoulders. The mothers watch from a distance and do not look away.
Fun fact#840
Nauru was the richest country per person
Phosphate mining briefly made Nauru extraordinarily wealthy before the deposits ran out in the 1990s.
Fun fact#841
Palau banned some sunscreens
Palau restricted reef-toxic sunscreen ingredients in 2020 to protect its coral, one of the first nations to do so.
Story#645
Sailing between atolls
Two days out of sight of land and then a line of palms appears that is only three metres above the water. You understand navigation differently after that.
Fun fact#844
Papua New Guinea has 800 languages
With over 800 living languages, Papua New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse country on Earth.
Quote#828
Songlines
Songlines: routes across the land recorded in song, a map you can sing rather than fold.
Fun fact#845
The Marshall Islands taught wave navigation
Navigators read ocean swells using stick charts, memorising wave patterns rather than carrying the charts to sea.
Story#649
The bus that circled the island
There are two buses: clockwise and anticlockwise. You cannot get lost, and if you miss yours the other one arrives eventually going the long way.
Fun fact#847
Polynesians navigated by stars and birds
Wayfinders crossed thousands of kilometres of open Pacific reading stars, swell direction, cloud shapes and bird flight.
Fun fact#850
Bora Bora is a sinking volcano
The central peaks are the remains of a volcano slowly subsiding inside its own coral ring.
Story#652
Diving with the mantas
They arrive silently and are far larger than anything in the briefing prepared you for. Our guide held up nine fingers, meaning nine metres of wingspan, and then just watched.
Fun fact#851
Tahiti's black sand comes from lava
Volcanic basalt ground down by waves gives many Tahitian beaches their dark colour.
Story#655
Waiting for the supply ship
The ship comes every few weeks and the whole island knows the day. Everything changes when it arrives: the shop, the menu, the mood.
Fun fact#853
New Caledonia has a heart-shaped mangrove
A naturally heart-shaped clearing in the mangroves of Voh became famous through aerial photography.
Fun fact#855
The Pacific holds half the world's water
The Pacific covers about a third of the planet's surface and contains roughly half of its free water.
Quote#833
Walkabout
Walkabout: a journey undertaken on foot to reconnect with country and self.
Story#659
Sunday singing
Nothing is open and everything is quiet, until the churches start. We sat outside on the grass and listened to four-part harmony coming through open windows for an hour.
Fun fact#857
The Mariana Trench is deeper than Everest is tall
Challenger Deep reaches about 10,900 metres, more than two kilometres deeper than Everest is high.
Fun fact#859
Point Nemo is the remotest place
The nearest humans to Point Nemo are often astronauts on the space station passing overhead.
Story#662
A sea that changed colour
The skipper said the reef changes every year now. He had been diving the same site for twenty-three years and pointed out exactly where the colour had gone.
Fun fact#954
The longest place name is in New Zealand
Taumata whakatangihanga koauau and its full 85-letter form is the longest official place name in an English-speaking country.
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