I’ve been watching South Pacific on BBC, and all the gorgeous images of tiny islands and endless ocean have got me wondering just what it would take to go explore the South Pacific. I’ve come up with a couple of options:
Find an expedition – There are variety of organisations that run scientific or cultural expeditions. Attaching yourself to one of these is a sure ticket to a unique experience, and learn a good deal as well.
Get a job – With some fairly basic searching, I found that there are reasonably well paying jobs, like this one, scattered around the South Pacific. Rather than taking a gap year, why not take a job in an exotic destination and use your new home as a base of exploration.
It’s worth noting that I’m not the first person to think of this. In The Sex Lives of Cannibals The author moves with his wife as she takes a job for an NGO in Kiribati. Suffice to say that it wasn’t the paradise that he’d hoped for. But in the end the adventure won them both over. After the returned to the States, they promptly decided to head back to the South Pacific.
On a boat – It isn’t as expensive as you might think to charter a boat to cruise around the South Pacific. Of course you need a team of at least four, and a couple of you are going to need to know how to sail.
Photo: Flickr user apdurruti under Creative Commons.
Ben (a Brit!) has won the best job in the world competition. The lucky bastard will now rake in USD 100,000 and blog about how awesome it is to live in paradise. Tough break, huh?
He’s got an impressive adventure laden resume, including a road trip around Africa. In fact, it looks like he’s using his Africa trip blog to blog about Queensland now. If I come across a more official Island caretaker blog then I’ll toss the link up, but in the meantime, you can follow his stay in paradise on his Afritrex blog.
I continue to have a slight obsession with the Island Reef Job, the Queensland advertisement wherein you get paid $100,000 to live in and advertise the Whitsunday Islands for 6 months. Applications closed a week and a bit ago, and now the videos of the 50 short list candidates are up. The videos are fun all around, as you might expect of 50 videos picked from 30,000, and I think it would be fun to hang out with most of these folks, they seem like fun. Check them out and make sure to vote!
Tourism Queendsland is running what may be the best ad campaign ever. They put out a few adverts and a swarm of press releases advertising the dream “job” of being an island caretaker in the Whitsunday Islands. Basically they’ll give you USD 100,000 to roam around the Islands taking pictures and making videos of how amazingly beautiful they are. The description (PDF because their site appears to be bogged down with traffic):
The role of Island Caretaker is a six-month contract, based on luxurious Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef. It’s a live-in position with flexible working hours and key responsibilities include exploring the islands of the Great Barrier Reef to discover what the area has to offer. You’ll be required to report back on your adventures to Tourism Queensland headquarters in Brisbane (and the rest of the world) via weekly blogs, photo diary, video updates and ongoing media interviews. On offer is a unique opportunity to help promote the wondrous Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.
This is a brilliant ad campaign. Just about every media outlet has picked up the story, example: BBC, CNN, AFP, etc. Even TechCrunch. You simply can’t buy that type of advertising. It’s amazing. Their website has basically been shut down from the traffic since yesterday.
Of course I encourage all of you to apply for the job. The Whitsundays are an absolute paradise. I spent just shy of a week on Pine Island with my family, and idylic doesn’t even begin to describe the sailing, deserted beaches that stretch on forever, and twisted Mangrove swamps with rays darting about. It’s well worth the 15-20 minutes it will take to get an application together for a shot at 6 months of that.
Dark Roasted Blend, a Neatorama-like site, has an interesting post on the most remote inhabited place on earth: Tristan de Cunha. It sounds like a rather tough place to travel to since there is only one mail boat a year, and no airstrip. But still, it does sound like it would be an interesting trip if you could get it together, and it gets my brain cranking on a trip visiting the remotest places on earth.
