It was 2002, and I was just starting a year of graduate management studies at Oxford University. My friend Roland, an Egyptologist in my college whom I’d met “in hall” (i.e., at one of the nightly formal, gowns-required dinners that passes for normal mealtime at Oxford), toured me around the museum’s labyrinth of curiously labeled curio cabinets: “Snuff-Taking Equipment,” “Amulets, Cures and Charms,” and “Treatment of Dead Enemies,” where I came nose to nose with some shrunken human heads.

Examining the case marked “Origins of Writing,” we were approached by a cheerful, clipboard-wielding volunteer who wanted to record our feedback. I remember Roland, who was fluent in more dead languages than living ones, remarking: “Oh, this place is wonderful! But I’m afraid I do have to tell you: this cuneiform tablet is upside down.” The docent flushed; I laughed. To a mere mortal, this is like noticing that a Japanese flag is hanging backward. But that’s Roland for you.

Read “Where Shrunken Heads are a Big Attraction” in it’s entirety.

Besides, the truth is: there are times when you just want mentoring — a dash of practical advice and useful perspective from a clear-headed, compassionate outsider with considerable know-how.

That’s why I’m offering this affordable package to give you personal attention and professional insights, deep and double-quick.

And it is quick. As one of my clients from 2009 testifies:

“We had Jeremy here in Swedish Lapland for two days only, and we were impressed and a little surprised how quickly and fully he grasped our situation and could speak meaningfully about it. The ideas he came up with were both imaginative and appropriate. We are happy we found him and are looking now to involve him in several more projects.”

Here’s the thing: in the last decade, it’s been my immense privilege to visit more than 60 countries and 200 cities, and to advise clients on every continent. From Northern Ireland to East Timor, from Rio to Riga, I’ve given PowerPoints saying “Here’s what you guys should be doing.” Few if any place branding practitioners working today have anything like the worldliness and experience I do. And since I also write travel articles (for The Wall Street Journal) and hold two business degrees (from Wharton and Oxford), I’m uniquely capable of relating to your most important customers, be they tourists or investors or both.

My career and my passion for studying the world up close up have cultivated my ability to think both critically and creatively about places big and small. They’ve imbued in me a powerful sense of place. And crucially, they allowed me to hone the skills and understanding required to listen to my clients and make my insights and wisdom relevant and valuable and actionable — fast.

With my 3-day immediate-benefits consulting package, I will:

• Research a destination, then visit and explore it, in order to audit its strengths and weaknesses;
• Meet with the important players, discuss place branding issues and principles, ask probing questions and listen carefully;
• Compile my best ideas about the branding policies, marketing strategy and communications tactics of that place.

Importantly, I will make sure that some of my recommendations are “quick wins” that you can implement right away, and if possible, within existing budgets.

Write me now for details. Please summarize your most pressing branding or marketing issue so that my response can take it into consideration.

Thanks–   Jeremy

Editor Simon Anholt asked Jeremy Hildreth for his ‘ big picture ’ thoughts on the state of the place branding field – where it is, and where it might be going.

This article employs many evocative metaphors to define and describe the benefits and hazards of place branding. The article takes the view that, broadly speaking, successful place branding results when certain mistakes are avoided and certain other challenges are imaginatively and thoughtfully resolved.

The article proposes a generic, narrative meta-model of place branding, which any place may refer to regardless of the present level of development of its product, perception or promotion. Some of the tools of place branding – including graphic design, advertising, marketing communications, architecture and exports – are explored. And mention is made of the innovations and refinements that are needed in the near future, including cross-fertilization of the place branding discipline with insights from such fields as evolutionary science.

The article concludes by likening the current state of place branding to an old map of the world, where the continents have all been discovered and are in the right places but some of the landmasses are misshapen and many are are still marked unexplored.

You’re welcome to download the full article for free here, HOWEVER, in order to keep within the bounds of the publisher’s [rather hidebound in my view] notion that posting the paper to a public website would discourage people from purchasing an expensive subscription to the journal (whereas I reckon a free sample would spur business, more than likely), to gain access to my lovely paper you’ll have to shoot me a quick email and I’ll send you the password.

So I guess that's not the wine cellar, then....

Just as a writer bears ultimate responsibility for being understood, “If you’re a place, it’s up to you to present yourself legibly,” to make sure people can get your story.

This is some of the advice I give in a casual but insightful essay that Thinkingplace have published in their quarterly. I use examples from my work in East Timor and Northern Ireland. The piece was inspired by something I saw on a jog around Vilnius last year — something which was there but wasn’t there (you’ll have to read my tale to find out what I’m talking about).

I called the article The Seen an the Unseen. The title is an homage to my favourite 19th century economist Fredric Bastiat, who wrote an unbelievably brilliant polemic of the same name which you should stop everything and read immediately even before you read my article (or at least, certainly, before you vote in the next election).

PS The idea of legibility in place branding is immensely pragmatic. I’ve loved it since I laid eyes on it six years ago via the Bristol Legible City project.

Sat 3/23/02 12:28 PM

It was 90 degrees in the shade today.

Fortunately, we spent most of our time in the air conditioned sixth car of  the weekly government excursion train to the River Kwai Bridge.

The highlight of today’s 15-hour, $5 roundtrip rail adventure obviously was the bridge, which we were able first to walk across (whilst whistling the appropriate melody, of course), and then to cross while aboard the train. Beyond the bridge was another section of track, the section known as the Death Railway because of the incredible number of lives its construction claimed.

In the afternoon, we stopped at a town the name of which I didn’t catch. Here we drank milk straight from coconuts bought from street vendors and wandered the dusty backroads among a zillion stray dogs. Here also a strange thing happened:  as we browsed in a Video CD store, laughing at the amazing array of karaoke discs available in this desolate Thai town, we espied a monk in an orange robe coming toward the store. After making a purchase (no vow of silence, I guess, for this guy), he crossed the street and hopped into the backseat of, of all things, a waiting BMW sedan. Perhaps there’s something I don’t know about the monastic lifestyle.

Of course Thailand is full of things you don’t see every day. Such as kickboxing, Thai style, which we viewed at the Rajadamnern Stadium on Wednesday night. Thai boxers use very lightweight gloves. But they don’t seem to punch as much as they kick. They also spend a lot of time in a clinch kneeing each other in the gut. All this they do to music that sounds to my untrained ear like something Bin Laden might play in his cave (as distinguished from some other traditional Thai music we’ve heard which is very nice.). Interestingly, they also have ring girls who hold up the round numbers, but they are extremely conservatively dressed; supposedly the Thais are much more conservative than Bangkok’s reputation would have us believe.

The best fight we saw ended halfway through the first round. Red held Blue in a kind of headlock while he kneed him repeatedly in the stomach, lifting Blue’s feet off the mat — just like one sees in kid’s cartoons! — with each powerful upward thrust. After about four such thrusts, Blue collapsed in a heap and had to be removed from the ring on a stretch-frame litter, specially designed to roll right under the lowest rope. This was done in typical Thai fashion, which is to say with stunning alacrity. They didn’t even wait for Ferdi Pacheco the fight doctor to come down and make sure the guy was all right before carting him off.

Speaking of off, Chris and I are off to Burma dark and early tomorrow morning. We plan to spend about two days in Rangoon before traveling north to Mandalay then into China. I do not know what to expect from Burma email-wise, but I’ll write again as soon as I can.

Best regards,

Jeremy

Dispatch #2 from Kunming, China

Tue 3/19/02 8:46 AM

In this Chinese city of 3.3 million, there are few outward signs of communism.

On the contrary, Kunming is a grimy, bustling semi-metropolis teeming with commerce. It has more in common with what I expected to find, and did find, in Hong Kong than with what I expected from Red China.

There is a bank on every corner, and there are people buying and selling things literally everywhere. Even the walls of the pedestrian walkways that cross below busy intersections are lined with clothing dealers. There and in the many bazaars, if you show even the slightest interest in something, the proprietor often will punch the price into a pocket calculator and hold it up it to you. If you frown, he (or more typically, she) will hand over the calculator to let you lodge a counter offer. It’s a simple enough mechanism through which I’ve managed to make a number of transactions, all without need of exchanging a single word.

This is good, too, because hardly anyone here speaks English, and we’ve met only one or two folks whose skills approach partial fluency. We can’t read any of the signs, either. But somehow we’re getting on, and getting around, just fine. We have a map of the city that’s labeled in Chinese and English. When we get in a taxi we point with a pencil to the spot on the map (with the Chinese label) where we want to go. When we want to go home, we show the driver the card from our hotel which is printed in Chinese on one side.

There’s even a Wal-Mart in Kunming — three low-ceilinged storeys of merchandise priced so inexpensively as to make an American Wal-Mart feel like a Rodeo Drive boutique. Pop CDs for $1.25, bicyles for $14, and live eels — yes, live eels, and also some variety of aquatic turtle — for $1 per kilogram. I didn’t catch the prices on the dried fish (that aisle didn’t smell too good, so I didn’t tarry), though I noticed in the aisle-of-hanging-dried-sides-of-livestock (located next to the tupperware and thermos aisle) that for $4 you could buy what appeared to be the better half of a medium-size pig.

Which reminds me, unfortunately, I haven’t eaten yet and must now sign off and go do so. Actually, even if the ingredients don’t look so hot, Yunnanese food itself is quite good. The specialty of the province is a dish called across-the-bridge noodles. There’s an interesting story behind the name that makes the name make sense, but personally I think they should be called across-you-shirt noodles because that’s where the greasy things end up when I try to pick them up with chopsticks.

Thanks for reading!

Cheers,

Jeremy

Sun 3/17/02 6:25 AM

Dear Friends,

We’re now in Kunming, capital of the Yunann province of the People’s Republic of China. We’ll be here only long enough to arrange permission and transportation for the Burma road, then we’ll head out. In the meantime, we’re enjoying spending $12 USD per night for a hotel room and $1.25 USD for all-you-can-eat buffets.

Yesterday we were in Macau was a colony of Portugal from some 400 years ago up until 1999 when they basically dumped it into Chinese hands. It’s now a Special Administrative Region of the PRC, as is Hong Kong, only its ties to the mainland government are stronger than those of HK. It’s ties to HK, however, are quite strong and of a more or less carnal variety.

Macau is to Hong Kong something like Atlantic City is to New York City and Philadelphia. Since about 90% of Macau’s deal is hookers and casinos, and seeing as we arrived on the 9am ferry and departed at 3 in the afternoon, Chris and I missed entirely what most visitors come to Macau entirely for. (The one taxi driver we had in Hong Kong who spoke any English explained to us that one can get, so to speak, more bang for his buck in Macau: “Thousand dollars in Hong Kong,” he said, “no happy. Thousand dollars in Macau — happy! happy! happy! Haw haw haw!” [a grand HK is about $150 USD]).

To the casual tourist’s eye, Macau consists of a lot of overcrowded, substandard high rises and a lot of overcrowded diesel buses filled with Chinese tourists (who are every bit as avid with their picture taking as the stereotypical Japanese tourists, let me tell you). Meanwhile, I had come to Macau expecting some kind of Sino-Latin feel. But other than bilingual signage in Portuguese and a number of mediocre “Spanish colonial” style edifices, I didn’t find what I was looking for.

There were a few highlights. The view across the harbor to the Chinese mainland from the Sao Paulo ruins was, as they say, breathtaking, even while shrouded in mist (the weather’s not been great so far this trip) which imparted a bit of ominous mystery.

On the advice of a German whom we met on the ferry, we ate lunch at the Clube Militar de Macau (special, higher non-member price: 130 palacas [20 bucks]). To my knowledge, Portugal is justly unknown for its cuisine, though the meal we had at the Club was quite tasty and perhaps the best Portuguese food I’ve chanced to eat. I especially liked the pickled broadbeans, which are like super-sized limas with a prominent black streak down the trailing edge.

The most interesting thing we found in Macau was a performance of a Chinese opera, which we stumbled upon on a market side street. It seemed an unlikely spot for such an event, but we rounded the corner and there it was, on an elevated, permanent stage, with a further elevated orchestra pit and bona fide PA system (because, I guess, the gongs and cymbals need to be louder than they already are). P.J. O’Rourke once described Chinese music as sounding like a truck full of windchimes colliding with a stack of oil drums during a bird call contest. The opera had a tinge of that but was altogether listenable, if inscrutable. There was but one other foreigner in the crowd, and we stood beside a pile of stinking durian fruit and watched the show for about ten minutes, thrilled by our first real Chinese cultural experience.

Now we’re in the PRC, but other than noticing that the newly minted currency features Mao (I mean, would the Germans, if they still had their own notes, put Hitler on them?), I’m reserving even first impressions.

Regards to all,

Jeremy

Subject: Dispatch from Hong Kong

Dear friends,

As I travel the world for the next three months, I’ve promised to keep in touch with all of you as much as possible. Please feel free but not obligated to reply to these dispatches.

I arrived in Hong Kong two days ago, rendesvouing (did I spell that right? I don’t think so) with my travelling partner and good friend Chris Robbins, whom I met in college, and who is cutting class for the next month in order to join me here in Asia. We’ve been doing the usual HK tourists things (the Star Ferry, etc.), but being us, we’ve also done a few unconventional things.

We started out by having dinner at the Foreign Correspondents Club with Kin Ming Liu, who runs the Apple Daily, the second largest Chinese language paper in HK. Kin Ming used to be on the editorial side of the paper, where he ran several articles by both Chris and me, carefully translated into Cantonese.  The Apple Daily is highly critical of the Beijing government, and it’s reporters are not welcome in mainland China. Kin Ming enjoys being an unapologetic pro-market radical, however, and we enjoyed hearing is stories and his view that the Brits made a mistake in handing back HK to the PRC in 1997.

Chris, a third-year law student in Miami, was interested in the court system here in HK. Thus we spent this morning in the district court in Wan Chai listening to the case of ???, a young Chinese man who swam here from the PRC several months ago. Upon his arrival, he wanted (understandably) a bath. His mistake was to reach through someone’s open window to steal a bottle of shampoo. He was seen, caught, and arrested. He has plead guilty to immigration charges, which comes with a mandatory 15 month jail term, and says he is not guilty of burglary, the other crime he’s been charged with. Burglary carries a sentence of 3 years, and the sentences are consecutive, meaning the poor guy would spend more than 4 years locked up only to be sent back to the mainland regardless. Sort of a Jean Valjean situation, it appeared; just substitute Prell for a loaf of bread.

Apparently, illegal immigrants are treated this harshly because if they were not (the fear goes) HK, over night, would have more people flooding its borders than it could possibly tolerate. In between sessions we talked to the defendant’s legal aid solicitor, a haughty Liverpudlian who talks exactly (and even looks a little) like Paul McCartney (“Well, your lordship, that’s a rahther serious charge now, isn’t it?”).

Afterward, the prosecutor, a 36-year old Hong Kong Chinese woman wearing a black robe and a white wig like Rumpole of the Bailey, invited us back to her office for a tour of the supreme court. All of this was an interesting glimpse into the HK judicial system.

This afternoon, we paid a visit to Gunnar Moberg, the just-arrived CEO of the just-created Skandia Asia Pacific Ltd., a subsidiary of the company I used to work for. Skandia is venturing forth into the Asian long-term savings market and Mr. Moberg explained to us, among other things, what doing business with the PRC is like. Skandia’s negotiating a business license there. Encouragingly, he said that 5 years ago, when he first went to Beijing to open negotiations, he was meeting with government officials who were uniformly mid-60-year old, party line men who barely spoke English and hadn’t much of a clue regarding financial markets. Now, though, the officials holding these very same positions are 35-year old women with MBAs who speak perfect English. He thinks people will be surprised as how quickly things change for the better and open up in China. I hope he’s right.

Until next time,

Cheers,

Jeremy

And writing about it.

From internet cafes in China and Cambodia, to a shipboard laptop on a Cook Islands schooner, I committed my notes and stories and observations to paper. At the time (and for all I know, still) Yahoo! had a strict cap on the number of recipients an email could have. And so, from March to June of that fair year, the most important 100 people in my life at that time received about a dozen “dispatches” — this is what I called them, and each was headed that way: “Dispatch from XYZ”; for some reason, I was assiduous about headlining them thus, but they’ve all been rechristened more interestingly now, for the retelling.

Anyway, at the end of the trip, I compiled the dispatches, along with The Wall Street Journal article I’d written in New Zealand about some Burmese comedians in Mandalay, into a single PDF:

E-mail dispatches by Jeremy Hildreth
To his friends, relatives, and colleagues
From several locales of Asia and the South Pacific
During the author’s travels through those regions
In the first half of the year 2002
Containing descriptions, impressions and reflections
Of dubious import and interest
But collected here
For your amusement
As originally composed
Typos and all.

In that form, the dispatches have been languishing on my hard drive ever since, for I then got caught up in writing a book proposal about Pukapuka (one of my stops on the journey), trying hard to get an article about the trip published in The Atlantic Monthly (to impress a girl I once met on Nantucket, if you must know), living the Oxford life, and then, somewhat later, becoming a branding consultant and place brand expert.

Which brings us up to date, then.

Now, on their 8th anniversary (if Spinal Tap released a 17th anniversary edition, I can have an 8th), I’ve decided to begin republishing the dispatches on my web site to give them the airing and wide readership they sort of, somewhat, in some places deserve.

Well, let me clarify: I like to act like the writing’s mediocre, but in fact I’m extremely fond of this sub-body of work of mine. It’s fluid, fresh-eyed and from the hip — maybe more so than anything I’ve mustered since — and it got better as the trip wore on. Kurt Loder of MTV News, one of the lucky 100 who got the dispatches in real time, was kind enough to declare: “Whoa. Think you may be singlehandedly extending the Golden Age of travel writing.” (Kurt, if you’re reading this, I’m still grateful for that remark. And if you don’t believe you said it, I can show you the e-mail.)

To my eye today, this is the travel writing of a talented, exuberant beginner. Like the splendid debut album of band with more and better in store, it has unique and unrepeatable charms. It’s cliche to say it, but I really do sincerely hope you enjoy reading these postcards from the East half as much as I enjoyed writing them. (And thanks, Mom.)

The original dispatches were image-less ASCII text emails; I had to paint scenes using my words alone, which was a fine challenge, a superb exercise with some pleasing results (the description of the jetty on the Irrawaddy at dusk, or the recounting of the Phnom Penh prison tour — there are some stellar turns of phrase within). But on the trip, I also took some of the best photographs I’ve ever taken, all shot with an Olympus 35mm “ZLR” loaded for bear (or temple monkey) with Kodak Gold 200; I used up something like 30 rolls, and had them processed by a phenomenal boutique lab in Providence, Rhode Island who printed them on matte paper with white borders…just glorious. This time around — call it a brand refresh — I’ve put in a few photos.

Oh, one last thing: Before I left on the trip, I read voraciously (a lot of Paul Theroux and Somerset Maugham — that sort of thing). One book I remember was Justin Wintle’s 1988 travelogue, “Heat Treatment: The Oriental adventures of an amorous hypochondriac.” The book was okay, but the title was great, and it inspired me (and still makes me chuckle).

Back then, however, I had no inkling of the amorous potentials of travel and I was certainly no hypochondriac. Indeed, I knew nothing of the world, or how to take it in, from direct experience. I was 26. My passport was only two years old. I’d been to about four countries in my life.

But I had time. And the youthful me sensed — and the older me knows it for sure — that when you have time, it’s time to hit the road.

And in those dispatches — these dispatches, I should say, which you are about to read, dusted off and enlivened with photographs — mark the beginning of a vital personal journey as a professional and as a human being. They show me tasting the world, and engaged in the process of getting to know places, for the first time in my life. They show me, I hope, becoming both more myself and more worldly.

Indeed, these dispatches, and the storybook-worthy odyssey that spawned them, contain many of the seeds of my current life. And I treasure them for that.

1. In Hong Kong, a shampoo Jean Valjean
2. Macau confidential: “Happy! Happy! Happy! Haw! Haw! Haw!”
3. My first encounter with Communist China: And I’d thought Wal-Marts in America were cheap!
4. Outskirts of Bangkok: The monk, the BMW and the Death Railway
5. Burmese days: The road to Mandalay is paved by 8-year olds
6. Exploring L’Indochine: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Tomb Raiders
7. Singapore: One oppressively nice place
8. Sojourn in Sydney: Surf’s up! Wombats ho!
9. Van Dieman’s Land: The Alcatraz of Empire
10. The Cook Islands, where life imitates Gauguin
11. The South Seas by cargo ship: Have corpse, will travel
12. Suwarrow Atoll: “The only place in the world where there are no women”
13. The gentle giants of Manihiki’s pearl-crossed lagoon
14. The summing up: Around half the world in 88 days

Source: GERTIL

Day 7

Leaving my hotel about ten o’clock on Friday, One Last Bar is where I went first. Here I met a UN adviser named Scott who advised me that the next bar to go to was a Brazilian place down by the beach called Exotica. I took a taxi (it’s just outside of central Dili, the club, so the fare was US$2 rather than the standard $1 in-town fare), and as I was getting out I was accosted by kids trying to sell me trinkets covered with flashing LEDs. They were aggressive rather than malicious, but they were RIGHT THERE IN MY FACE and I gently pushed them and their blinking lights aside and went into the nightclub.

Watching the locals and internationals dance, I became aware of two things. One: the lovely way in which people from around the world, military and civilian, charitable and profit-seeking, have come together to help the Timorese build a country from scratch; there’s a wonderful feeling of camaraderie in Timor. I imagine it exists in other places, but I’d never seen anything like it before. Two: I noticed how Latinized the Timorese are in some ways. Sure, this was Brazilian music they were dancing to, but that didn’t create it, it only highlighted something that goes beyond dancing and into language, machismo and other areas of culture and demeanour.

And then I noticed a third thing: my mobile phone was gone. It must have slipped out of my pocket when I was getting out of the taxi, distracted by those kids! Well, I wasn’t going to let it ruin my evening.

At the bar I struck up a conversation with Arturo, a guy from Angola working for a French oil concern who’d come to Timor on behalf of his employer to assess the prospects, petroleum-wise. At some point we decided to move on to the next cool spot up the road, aptly named the Cool Spot. Here I ran into more people I knew and didn’t know.

There was Sean, whom I’d met a few days before at our round table and who publishes Discover Dili (Timor’s answer to Time Out, only it comes out annually), and his girlfriend Sierra, and a friend of his from Ubud, Bali, here on holiday. Sometime later, we clambered into a white van driven by a local friend of Sean’s named Christian. It was about 3am, but there’s one more stop to make: Aaj’s, a ‘post-funking’ (Sierra’s term) watering hole and former brothel downtown.

Slumped on the floor of the van along with several others, I was introduced to Liam, an Irish civil engineer who’d come to build bridges. Liam began telling me about his work in Timor and about the affection he was developing for the Timorese. Basically, he said, they don’t know what they’re doing yet (and why would they?) but they’re earnest and helpful and – this wasn’t the last time I’d hear this – there’s something particularly but un-definably rewarding about helping them. “But wouldn’t that be true in other places that are being reconstructed?” I asked. No, he insisted, actually it isn’t. “But where else have you been?” I asked. I was expecting to reveal his naivety but instead Liam rattled off the names of a dozen of the world’s trouble spots in which he had laboured. Possible further evidence, I noted to myself, that there is something special about the Timorese.

At Aaj’s there was billiards and the Macarena and the Ketchup Song and despite Sierra’s caution about men sometimes bringing guns with them into this establishment, I noticed nothing more odd than unpretentious people having a good time until the very, very, very wee hours.
________

In the afternoon, I went to a huge family barbecue on the beach where I sampled terrific grilled beef and sticky, almost crunchy rice made in a bamboo mould. I wasn’t feeling talkative or social, but I enjoyed watching the locals enjoying themselves, kids splashing after blow-up balls in the breaking surf, and Jesus Christ, arms outstretched, taking it all in from his perch on the hill.

In the evening I dined alone on cheap and delicious mie goreng (Indonesian pad Thai-like stuff) in the leafy, haunted courtyard of the legendary Hotel Turismo. Haunted, I mean, by its storied past. Until the advent of the Hotel Timor where I was holed up, the Turismo, dating from Portuguese times, was the international hotel. Every account of the 1999 referendum mentions it, sometimes at considerable length. But the Turismo’s legend predates those tense and turbulent times, and its war stories hark back to even earlier tense and turbulent times. Here’s a sample, from Australian journalist and fervent Timor champion Jill Jolliffe, writing in 1975:

At the Hotel Turismo, a Portuguese poet shouted his poems to the night air and Rita the monkey chattered in the splaying branches of the mango tree. Falantil soldiers who looked like black Abbie Hoffmans drank the copious quantities of “Laurentina” beer bequeathed by the Portuguese and juggled grenades across white linen table cloths.

Imagining in situ goings on such as these made my mie goreng and locally produced Lion beer taste even better. Then, walking home to my new international hotel, I turned in early, for the next day I’d need to rise before dawn for an expensively chartered boat trip to nearby Atauru Island.

Day 8

Somehow in my South Pacific travels I’d missed having a go in an outrigger canoe. Now was my chance as this was the available mode of conveyance for reaching the snorkelling spot a hundred or so metres from shore, just inside the reef.

Setsuko, an adventuresome 20-something Japanese woman also staying the night on Atauru, was joining me. As we left the house, I in my trunks and she in her two-piece bikini, Barry, the owner of the eco lodge we were staying at, hailed us. “You’d better cover up until you’re out in the boat,” he told Setsuko. “They’re very modest here and you’ll attract unwanted attention. Probably they’ll just stare, but they’ve been known to throw rocks”.