Sailing voyage reveals Pacific islands' beauty, diversity of rich culture

Sometimes the biggest things are the easiest to overlook. Spin a globe, and the Pacific Ocean takes up almost an entire hemisphere. Averaging more than two miles deep, it is so vast that you could drop every continent into it and still have room for another Asia.

In the Jet Age, the Pacific is usually just a tedious overnight on the way to Japan or Australia. Yet sprinkled across this ocean are 30,000 islands, one quarter of them in the fabled South Pacific. The 500 inhabited isles in that region are supposed to be the closest our planet comes to paradise, and last October my wife and I got to see some of them.

Our vehicle was the 46-foot sailboat Mahina Tiare III, operated by Friday Harbor's John Neal and Amanda Swan Neal. It took us two weeks to meander 835 miles, a distance we had earlier traversed in just two hours by jet.

Along the way we stopped at nine islands, caught our own yellowfin tuna, weathered a near-gale, and discovered a laid-back friendliness so different from the pressure-packed United States as to be almost disorienting.

By American instinct, we would tend to tense when a stranger wanted to shake our hands. Salesman? Beggar? Religious proselytizer? No, just someone saying hi and welcome, occasionally even wearing a "USA" T-shirt. Weird, huh?

WILLIAM DIETRICH / THE SEATTLE TIMES The children of Samoa are charmers who love to pose for pictures.

Did we find paradise? Hardly. No island is an island anymore, immune from human problems, global fads, or news. But we did find a mix of beauty, culture and warmth that made the long trip worthwhile.

Fiji is exactly 12 time zones from Greenwich, England, and our journey straddled the International Date Line. We flew 10-1/2 hours from Los Angeles to the hub at Fiji, back east two hours to Samoa, and then sailed back across the dateline to Fiji again, finally returning to L.A. and then Seattle. As a result we skipped a Friday, had two Saturdays, skipped a Wednesday, and had two Thursdays, arriving on our doorstep "before" our return flight had even departed.

We also went from the Polynesian culture of Samoa, part of the same racial grouping as Tahiti and Hawaii, to the Melanesian culture of Fiji, where people have darker skin and curlier hair. Moreover, the New Zealand and British colonialism of Samoa and Fiji, where English is the official language, contrasted to the French colonies of Wallis and Futuna, which we also visited. And the large Indian immigrant communities of Fiji gave us a little taste of Delhi and Bombay. The South Pacific is far more culturally diverse, with a richer and more complex history, than I suspected.

Sailing adventure

WILLIAM DIETRICH / THE SEATTLE TIMES Ed and Barbara Evanish, two other students on the sailboat voyage, walk the beach of idyllic Nukutopo Island. The sailboat Mahina Tiare III is anchored at the edge of a reef in the background.

My wife, Holly, and I had two reasons for our journey. One was to enjoy the tropical Pacific, of course. Eighty-degree water! Fresh papaya! Coral reefs! The other was to gain sailing experience. While we've explored inland Northwest waters, we're ocean novices. The chance to get offshore experience with the Neals, who combined have 400,000 miles of sailing experience from Antarctica to Alaska, was a way to try offshore passage-making without do-it-yourself risk.

We shared the boat with the Neals and four other adult students. Any immediate plan for tropical intimacy was temporarily surrendered to bunk berths, differing night watches and a round of classes.

Nonetheless we found the sail fascinating, taking us to anchorages we otherwise could never have visited.

Differences between islands

WILLIAM DIETRICH / THE SEATTLE TIMES Sailing student Roberto Pedreira hoists a yellowfin tuna we caught.

The South Pacific's overall environment was surprisingly different from Hawaii: hotter, friendlier, emptier and poorer. Samoan prices for restaurant meals are about half those of the U.S., and the base wage for residents is only about 65 U.S. cents an hour. Imagine a cross between Hawaii and Central America.

The islands typically had a fringe of settlement on their coasts and were almost wilderness in the interior, where the few houses were decades back in time.

There were also striking differences between islands in race, language, religious denomination and wealth. The money France pours into Wallis meant the cars were newer, and the tiny mall slicker, than independent Samoa.

Samoa, not to be confused with American Samoa just to the east, is a cluster of four inhabited islands that combined are just slightly bigger than Rhode Island. Its population of about 175,000 has been independent from New Zealand since 1962. With only two destination luxury resorts and a workforce still employed chiefly by subsistence agriculture and fishing, Samoa is as close to "unspoiled" Polynesia as you can get.

It is sultry. At 14 degrees from the equator, compared with Hawaii's 20 degrees, Samoa is noticeably hotter, averaging about 80 F according to guidebooks. When we were there in the Samoan spring (October), temperatures peaked in the humid 90s. Fiji, at 17 degrees south, was noticeably cooler. On the plus side, ocean temperatures are also warmer than Hawaii.

One problem for Northern Hemisphere visitors is that the driest, coolest time in the South Pacific, their winter, is our summer. Accordingly, the ideal visiting time for the islands we experienced is May through September. However, while November through March is the rainy season, one native hostess said she liked it best.

Be prepared to have preconceptions challenged. While explorers and anthropologists painted alluring pictures of sexual freedom, the Pacific islands today are dominated by missionary influence. There is a church in every village, Sunday services are almost mandatory, and women usually dress with neck to heel modesty. Visitors are asked to dress conservatively as well.

Slow down, too. Because of the low incomes, many walk, and you'll also share the road with pigs and chickens. Show common-sense courtesy, and it will be returned.

From luxury to $10 a night

The South Pacific, outside tourist meccas such as Tahiti and Bora Bora, is also a good place for budget travelers. If cost is no object, the higher-priced resorts are sublime. But there are also numerous "backpacker" lodges that cater to those willing to share a dormitory and bathroom, and even open-air fales (in Samoa) or bures (in Fiji) that are roofed, open-air platforms (the words mean "house") where tourists can sleep for as little as $10 a night.

In our case, we boarded our 46-foot Hallberg-Rassy sloop from a dinghy in Apia (typical of the South Pacific, there was no boat dock or marina) and set a course to the southwest toward Fiji. The open ocean was rolling, influenced by storms as distant as Antarctica, but many islands had protective coral reefs and large lagoons.

Even though we were well within the populated island belt of the South Pacific, the ocean was strikingly empty compared with our home waters. We saw one ship in the week from Samoa to Savusavu in Fiji, and few other yachts. Instead, our companion was the Cosmos. The night sky on the unlit ocean was so thick with stars that the Milky Way looked like a streak of paint, and the moon tinseled the sea silver. Sunrise and sunset were almost always through a fiery bank of horizon clouds, and the grays of pre-dawn would give way to deep tropic ocean blue far richer than the opalescent green of home.

At one point we caught a 40-pound yellowfin tuna on a hand fishing line, and Amanda sat on the pitching aft deck to fillet it into steaks (worth $15 a pound at home) with the efficiency of a practiced fishmonger. It fed us for three days.

Abundant variety of islands

The bulk of our time was occupied by sailing classes. We learned ocean navigation, safety equipment, storm tactics, weather forecasting, and so on, giving us our first taste of night, offshore sailing in heavy winds. But we also had time to visit a remarkable variety of islands.

Wallis, 270 miles and two days and nights from Fiji, is sleepy and somewhat impractical for air visitors unless you can find a bargain multi-island fare, but it is one of the places of which South Pacific dreams are made. The flat main island of Uvea is surrounded by a vast lagoon behind a fringing reef. Inside are 22 smaller volcanic and sand islands, swaying palms, riotous flowers, and stores in which crew member Kim Korkman, a Finn who now lives in New Zealand, found a delectable array of French cheeses and fresh bread.

Like the other out-of-the-way islands we stopped at, Wallis-Uvea was not exactly a hotbed of tourist activity. The lone hotel restaurant was already reserved, island tours had been suspended by the sole entrepreneur who briefly offered them in his pickup, and the Saturday market was closed due to a brief tropical squall.

Out in the lagoon, however, was swimming-pool water in every shade of blue imaginable, and anchorages it would take weeks to fully explore. The reef island of Faioa had a classic crescent of white sand with ocean breakers crashing on the other side, while tiny Nukutapo was such a perfect little knob it was hard to believe. A sand beach for bathing curved on one side, while steps led up through flowers to a Christian shrine overlooking the lagoon on top. We anchored at the edge of a small inner reef, and while snorkeling its edge you could watch fish 60 and 70 feet below.

Futuna Island, another 130 miles on, was quite different in geology. It reared out of the water like the Na Pali Coast of Kauai, and had no protective lagoon and thus no sandy beaches. Quiet and lush, it is so infrequently visited by boats or tourists that we were a curiosity to children, who swarmed around Mahina Tiare and another French boat in dugout canoes, even though their parents use modern skiffs and motorbikes.

It was another 270-mile passage to the archipelago of Fiji, where we had the biggest winds and waves of our passage, the swells reaching 15 feet. Now the night was completely black except for huge sheets of foam hissing off our stern, and as the boat slewed and rolled, warm spray would wet whoever had a turn at the helm. Thanks to a solid boat, the expertise of the Neals, and the reassuring glow of the compass and GPS telling us where we were, we felt safe despite reefs on either side.

We cleared customs at Savasavu on the northern main island of Vanua Levu and welcomed freshwater showers, good restaurants (an excellent meal for two with a bottle of Australian wine cost about $25, U.S.) and a cross-island truck tour to the town of Lambasa, a sugarcane capital dominated by Indian immigrants. Vegetables, curries and grain were heaped in an open-air market, as women in beautiful saris pointed to their wares. We were the only tourists we saw.

Then we sailed to the historic whaling town of Levuka on the Fijian island of Ovalau. There John Neal's Fijian friend Joseva Drega invited us to his home to share kava, a mild sedative drink that looks and tastes a bit like dishwater but which is nonetheless a mark of hospitality in the islands. The Fijians were even friendlier than the Samoans, with tourists rare enough on Ovalau that they are not yet jaded.

At nearby Leluvia, the "Isle of Love," we got a closer look at one of the more primitive hostels for the hardy. Again, the sand and palm outpost fits every South Pacific dream you've ever had and is fringed by coral for good snorkeling. Two young women, one from Ireland and another from Italy, reported they got lodging and meals for about $20 U.S., but the Fijian bure was a shack with a door that wouldn't close, the shared toilet was primitive, and the food was basic Fijian. Essentially, they were camping.

We ended our sailboat trip at Fiji's capital of Suva on the main island of Viti Levu, tired, tanned and somewhat overwhelmed by the combination of varied anchorages and intensive instruction. To decompress we stayed two nights at the luxury Musket Cove resort in Fiji's Mamanuca Islands, where a bure was $200 U.S. a night and meals were closer to U.S. prices. Some visitors had package deals that brought down the price.

We came away from the South Pacific with impressions of dazzling color, a rich diversity of culture, severe political problems as paradise tries to find its place in the modern world, and a pace that will slow your heart rate — if you can stay out of the Internet cafes and off the phone.