839 Circumambulating with Nicos; South Pacific Islands

0:00Last year, Niko's Haji Coast has left his island home on Cyprus for a few months to see how people lived in several countries of East Asia. But the nearly 18,000 islands of Indonesia threw a wrench into his way of thinking on how you can get to know a place and its people. I realized I could never truly explore the world because the Indonesian islands are an infinite microcosm. Coming up, Niko's brings us a philosopher's perspective for the journeys of our lives. James Grant Peterkins' studies took him from Scotland to live on the remote Polynesian outpost of Easter Island. He reminds us there's upwards of 20,000 islands scattered across the South seas. The geopolitics of the Pacific for really the first time, certainly since World War 2 has suddenly become extremely important again. Come along for the next hour as we find out what an adventure across the world can show us. It's travel with Rick Steves.

1:01You might have missed the recent news about one of the smallest countries in the world. The South Pacific island nation that you would have seen listed as No Room has just changed how you spell and say their name. The people of the Republic of Nau Arrow, that's N-A-O-E-R-O, want the rest of us to know how they pronounce and spell their island home. So in just a bit, we'll get inspired to explore the far flung islands of the South Pacific with Polynesian culture and history expert James Grant Peterkin. But first, let's pay a long overdue visit with Niko's Haji Kostis. An early midlife crisis sent Niko's out on his own personal ought to see across the world, to learn and observe and experience life in as many ways as it would present itself. He joins us now on travel with Rick Steves to encourage us to let our travels open up new views of the world. After years as a media executive, Niko's Haji Kostis abandoned the business world instead of sights on a larger and more fulfilling goal, to explore our planet as if it was one

2:04single destination. Starting from New York and traveling for six years, he visited six continents in 70 countries delving deep into their peoples, cultures and natural wonders. But life transforming journey inspired his first book. It was called Destination Earth, a new philosophy of travel by a world traveler. While many travelers today concern themselves with destination solely for bucket list fulfillment or amusement or relaxation, Niko's proposes a more meaningful way of viewing travel, and its relation to life. Niko's has sent settled in Cyprus with his partner Jane and writes philosophical essays, collected in his recent books, conversing with Kaffavi and the Eternal Rag Picker. I sat down with Niko's a few years ago to talk about the transformational power of travel and found him to be one of the most fascinating minds I've come across. So we've invited him back to catch up on his recent writing, travels and life in Cyprus. Niko's thanks for being here and welcome back. Oh, thank you so much for inviting me and for your superfluous introduction.

3:09Superfluous, that's my middle name. Okay, speaking of names, your last name is Haji Kostis. And yes, I travel a lot through Christendom and Islam. And when you travel, you run across this word Haji or Haji. And I always think of it, it's relating to the Muslim idea that you should make that pilgrimage trip to Mecca. And when somebody comes back and if their dad did that, he's known as a Haji, right? Yes. And it applies also to Christians. And when I guess one of my ancestors visited the Holy Land, which is Jerusalem, and he got the Haji. And since we were under the Ottomans, it was customary also for the Christians to get the Haji. I love this. When I think of the Haji, I always, my Muslim friends tell me that one of the pillars of Islam is to make the Haji, to do the pilgrimage, but they say that a progressive approach to Islam interpretation would be that Muhammad didn't necessarily want you just to go to Mecca.

4:11Muhammad wanted you to get out of your neighborhood and see the world. Exactly. So that's the fundamental reason to go on a pilgrimage is to broaden your perspective through travel. And I just think that that must be an inspiration for you. Muhammad would like your approach. Yes, that's the best introduction to my, to both of my new books, actually, that we're published in two years ago. The one conversing with Gavav, he has a subtitle, Reflections on the Journey of Our Life. So it connects with the Epic pilgrimage in a sense. I see life as a journey. And the real journey that you and I do and all travelers do are connected to the bigger journey of our life. And there are many analogies and I bring forth all these analogies in my books. I know three of your books. And that's a thread through all of them. And it is this whole idea that we gain a certain enlightenment through our travels or are we broaden our perspective?

5:11We get to know our neighbors. I love how Muhammad said, don't tell me how educated you are. Tell me how much you've traveled. And from a Muhammad's perspective, you're pretty well educated because you've traveled about. What did a long trip? You traveled for six years. What did that do to your mind? Well, it expanded my mind. It transformed the way I see the world, the way I view societies and other people. I'm not the same person anymore. So you talk about the transformative effect of travel. And I think I have been transformed. And some of these elements of my new self, I hope, trickle through the ideas in my books. So you wrote a book called Destination Earth. And the whole idea was to see the world as a single destination. What do you mean by seeing the world as a single destination? Well, we usually visit a very specific place, let's say the Dolomites in Northern Italy

6:13or we visit Central Europe. And we have this idea of exploring a region. But nobody ever thought of exploring the whole planet in the same way as one explores a region. And that was my idea. My idea was instead of creating an itinerary to explore France, I created an itinerary to explore the whole world as if it were one singular country. So you've got ideas that apply are applicable to the whole world. Not where do you stand for the sunset? But how do you understand different concepts? This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with philosophy writer Niko Haji Kostis. These compiled dozens of essays into his latest work, The Eternal Rag Picker. Essays on the Human Condition. We have links to our previous interviews with Niko's in this week's show notes. That's at ricksteves.com. And you can learn more about all of Niko's writings and his books on his website.

7:13And that's niko's hajikostis.com. I'll spell you that word. H-A-D-J-I-C-O-S-T-I-S. Niko's hajikostis.com. Niko's you like to write about infinite microcosms. Tell us what infinite microcosm is. Okay, that's an interesting idea. It can be found in my book The Eternal Rag Picker. I had a very transformative experience in Indonesia. I arrived in Indonesia after 20, half years of traveling west worlds around the world. And like Shulzverne in the 80 days, I started from Europe and I moved through the Pacific. So when I reached Indonesia, I was very proud. Pride came in. I traveled almost half the world. I traveled almost around half the world. And then I realized that Indonesia has 18,000 islands, 1000 of which are inhabited.

8:16And I was going to visit like four or five. And then I did my maths and I realized that I needed 20 lifetimes just to explore the human-habited islands of Indonesia. And I had a big collapse and I wrote a piece called Defeat that I was defeated. I realized I could never truly explore the world because the Indonesian islands are an infinite microcosm. It's a microcosm because it's all these little islands that are very small, but they are infinite because it's an interesting thing. It's like those little tricks on your eye where the closer you go with the microscope, the more you see and the more you are used. Exactly. And I used the microscope analogy to introduce the concept. I say that there is another infinity, the infinity of the small, the infinity inherent in what seems to be finite. This is the infinity of the limitless degrees of magnification with which a microscope

9:20can explore what appears contained and measurable. As it turns out, with every new degree of magnification, a microscope discovers new world. And in the same way, with every new visit of Indonesia, you discover new aspects of Indonesia. So it's infinite. Indonesia is infinite. I'll have what he's having. Another example is our big cities. I use this example, London. I've studied in London. I visited London, I don't know, 20 times. And still there are more museums to see, more places to discover, more beauties interacting with people. And he goes to a lot of Americans are stressed out by that because they can't see at all. And I remind them, it's a blessing not to see at all. It gives you an excuse to come back. You can never exhaust London of what it has to offer. Going to Paris is the work of a lifetime. And the whole world is your playground with that attitude. In your destination Earth philosophy book, you talk about connections are forever.

10:22This is a fundamental appreciation if you're going to be doing a lot of traveling, which you've done. Tell us about, quote, connections are forever. Yes. We think that when we meet someone, when we travel, and we have a meaningful interaction with him, that when we depart and we probably not going to visit again, I can't tell you, let's say Papua New Guinea, that our connection with this person dissipates or vanishes. But this is untrue because that interaction molded our being and his being and stays with us. So every interaction we have becomes part of who we are. And when you have this philosophy and I go a little bit deeper into that, then you stop seeing these casual interactions as being casual and they become more interesting and more meaningful. So don't be defeat us about the meeting. If you're going to say goodbye in 10 minutes and never see that person again, you're not wasting time. You're knitting the world together.

11:24Exactly. I love it. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Nikos Hodgicoastus. This newest book is The Eternal Rag Picker, essays on the human condition. I would like to add something on the connections of forever. This is also an interesting concept. The idea that, let's say, we fight with somebody and we start hating him. Okay? Then this is a connection of hatred that we create, that we will carry with us for the rest of our lives. So when you are mindful of that, then you try to avoid it. You try to avoid creating a negative connection because then you know you will carry this negative connection for many, many years. Wow. My default was to think the positive, but there's a negative other side of the coin. So what you hate will contribute to the gross hatred in the world. Yes. And what you love will continue to contribute to the gross love of our world.

12:24And that makes us more responsible as travelers. We try to be our best selves so that we become loved and we become a positive element in the other people's life too. Sometimes we say, ah, I did not like this country because people were not very kind with me, but where you kind with them, did you show your best self? When they were impolite, where you polite, what was your response to that? So our response is central also in creating this relationship that would last forever. Nikos Haji Kostis is a world traveler and writer and something of a modern day Greek philosopher. You'll find his writing on Substak and in his latest book, The Eternal Rag Picker, essays on the human condition. There's more with Nikos in just a minute, including his advice for connecting with strangers in our travels. And a bit later, we're heading for the South Pacific on Travel with Rick Steves.

13:31Nikos Haji Kostis calls travel the ultimate university offering the most condensed, wide-ranging and deepest courses in all fields of life. He's our guest right now on Travel with Rick Steves from his home on the west coast of the island of Cyprus. In your destination Earthbook, you have a philosophy of travel that approaches the world as a single destination. When we think about what is common to travel anywhere, you have a philosophy that you like Nikos called, Circumambulating. Circumambulating, what do we mean? Okay, I take the term from Jung. He uses it in his psychological theory. I take the term and use it in travel and in life in general. The idea is that you revisit a place or an idea or a concept many, many times and each time you revisit it, you see it from a new angle and you obtain a different understanding of the same thing.

14:31So if you read, for example, the miserables when you are young in high school, you will not understand all the delicate meanings of Victor Hugo. But when you are 30, you will read another book. And when you read it, when you are 60, you will read another book. So by revisiting ideas, books, but also countries, you circulate them, you go around them and you go deeper. Maybe it's like when I'm getting my fingerprint done for whatever purpose. I have to roll my finger a little bit so it gets all the angles on the little lines on my finger. Yes, exactly. Yes, it's time you go deeper and you have a more complete picture. That's a good example action. And that's one reason why I'm astounded at how I can go back to Europe for the rest of my life and it's like going to new places even though I've been there many times because of circumambulating. I'm thankful for that. Another concept that you have is leaping into the unknown.

15:31Yes. Well, that's to encourage people to leave their little point and leap into the unknown. That means travel and get out of their comfort zones. I think you talk a lot about that. There you go. Culture shock. Don't avoid culture shocks. Culture shock as a constructive thing. Yes, exactly. You know, one concept, Nico, that I've been dealing with lately, I've sort of, if I was going to add an SAT or eternal reg picker book, I would write an essay about what I call Chrono-Centrism. And we know about ethnocentrism that's thinking we are culturally the norm in our way of eating or laughing or joking or whatever is the norm when it's not. That's one of many. Chrono-Centrism is looking at the world thinking this year is the norm and trying to inflict this year's perspectives on things that happened 200 years ago or 2000 years ago. And my goal is to help people appreciate the value of a printing press 500 years ago when

16:35it was big news. And Gutenberg became one of the most influential people of the millennium. We need to not look at things only through the eyeballs from our age, but try to appreciate it back in a different period. And to achieve that, you need to study history. And many people who visit places, they don't know anything about their history, so they can't really appreciate what they are seeing because they are seeing it through the modern eyes. But if you know history, then you understand you go deeper. For example, let's say China, you can't visit China without knowing the history of China or at least the basics of history. So you can appreciate what you see. When the ancient Romans developed a sailboat that could tack and sail into the wind, that was a revolutionary thing. All of a sudden they could do shipping on the Mediterranean. Yeah. I mean, that's fundamental. And a lot of us just assume, oh yeah, you can tack back and forth. But that had to be a threshold.

17:37This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with author Nico's Hajikostis. He's joining us from his home in Cyprus right now. His first book was Destination Earth. And it's about his six year journey around the world. In 2017, when the Independent Press Award, and it develops what he calls a new philosophy of world travel. His latest book is the Eternal Rag Picker. Essays on the Human Condition. And it's a collection of Essays exploring the human condition. Nico shares his observations about the world in a series of Tuesday letters published on his sub-stack. You can find out more about Nico's on his website, neco'shajikostis.com. And that's built HADJICOSTIS. Nico's, when we think about travel, we want to have transformational travel. We wanted to help change us in a good way. And I think a fundamental ingredient of that is meeting people. When you're on the road, how do you approach people?

18:37How do you not waste a moment by not connecting with the person who's standing next to you? Do you have any tricks for that? I love this question because I work a lot on that, and I work a lot advising people how to do that. There's many travelers as shy and they are afraid to approach the locals. But also some locals, let's say the Japanese are afraid when they see a foreigner. So we just go and speak to them. And Jane, my partner, she's amazing. She can open any conversation with anybody at any moment. And you simply interact. You ask questions. You can ask a basic question. What is this? Can you explain to me, you show a building? Why are there so many people in this shop at this time of the day? And then you start from these simple questions and people become engaged. And you have to become engaged. Otherwise you will miss the depth of the soul of a country.

19:40And this is fundamental. It's one of the most very important travel skills. It applies whether you're traveling on a road trip across the United States or south of the border in Mexico or if you're going to Burma or Norway. You just got to assume you are interesting. You are interesting and Americans have the advantage in that we're more comfortable being casual and informal. So you're nervous. The person across from you on the train is nervous. If you can break the ice, you're doing everybody a favor. Let me give you two small examples, short examples, from our trip last year in Japan. We were traveling for a month. We are in Tokyo, in one of these beautiful department stores. We are trying to buy some sushi from a sushi chef. And there are different types of tunas. And I see a local coming who seems very experienced and he's buying things. And I ask him, he speaks a little bit of English. I say, what is the difference between these two now? Why is this three times more expensive than this? And he explains to us, he asks about us, he's curious.

20:43And then he pays for all our shopping. We need to be an extrovert. That's how we make serendipity happen. Be an extrovert. Yes. You know, to be a good conversationalist is not necessarily to be interesting, but it's to be interested. Exactly. And you find somebody who's evangelical about tuna and he's going to spend $50 just letting you taste it because he's evangelical about it. And you're from far away and it's a blessing for him to have this opportunity to share. Yes. And I gave the example of Japan because people say it's difficult to connect with the Japanese. They're very close. But if you can't do it in Japan, you can do it much more easily in China or in Argentina or in Greece where people are more open. You know, and because it seems to me there's a lot of people that would listen to you. And I like listening to you because you're to me a global version of what I aspire to be. I've made Europe, my piece. Well, you're a global version. No, haven't you been to Iran and all over the place. But I focus on Europe because that's for me, as I said, the waiting pool for rural

21:43exploration. I'm just trying to teach Americans to venture beyond Orlando, you know, but what I really think is important is for us to remember that a lot of people may think they'd be afraid to do what you do traveling around the world in a foot loose and fancy freeway. There's a lot of fear in America these days about going out. What is your tape? We used to say bone voyage. Now we say have a safe trip, you know. And a lot of people don't go places because they think it's dangerous. There's no reason to take serious risk in your travels. I've never done that. But generally people are just needlessly afraid of something. What would you say to travelers? Well, I have a whole chapter in my first book, Destination Earth about the various qualities of the world at large. And one of them is that the world is safe. The world is no different from your surroundings where you live. This is the normal world. The wars and the robbers and killers are the most extreme rarity on earth.

22:47It's one in a thousand or in ten thousand that you will be robbed or be attacked or... 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. And realistically, 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 approached that you espouse. We are making travel a force for peace. 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

23:50visited Iran once in their life that 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-styled and no people before you bomb them. And when you know people, but sometimes you got to bomb people, you know, I'm not, I'm not, you know, you can't demonize 93 million Iranians with a history of 3000 years. There you go. But most Americans, nobody around, they learned in the hostage crisis. And that was just a media festival. So that's a whole nother 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 Hajikostis.

24:53He's a world traveler and something of a master chess player, parrot trainer, festival organizer and durian connoisseur. He writes on how we can enhance the journey of our lives on Substack and his books include the Eternal Rag Picker and Destination Earth. His website, Nikos Hajikostis.com. You know, in your book, the Eternal Rag Picker, 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 Busy-ness. 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. 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.

25:57Tell me about your take on busy-ness 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 the 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. Then 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.

27:01You 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 busy-ness is a choice. We don't know there's an option. When I grew up, my parents said there is a work ethic. There's 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. My friends in Spain certainly have a different work ethic. And the people, my friends who are now living in another country, they realize 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

28:02leisure. It's a no thing, but we forgot about it. And it's almost subversive now because busy-ness is advertised on TV. The successful people are not the idle nobility. They're the people with Bluetooth headsets, multitasking. That's what success is now. Yes, but throughout history it was the opposite. I know. They came to have the leisure. They came to have the irony. The Lord's had to stay at home in the red books. Well, that's the trick for us traveling is to be in the moment. And a lot of times in my travels has a tour guide and a writer or writing guidebooks. I'll say, OK, we've done all the due diligence of understanding the jato and the bodicelli and 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. 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.

29:04And 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 live 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. 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 odd ball. Oh, you've traveled. Wow. Nico, I love the idea that you attack the world, aspiring to see it as a single destination.

30:04Well, 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 and 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. Nico's Hadji Kostis, thank you so much for joining us and happy travels. I'll look forward to our next conversation. Thank you so much for inviting me.

31:15We have links to Nico's Hadji Kostis in the notes we post for this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. A thousand years ago, the people and one of the most remote pieces of land on earth, what we now call Easter Island, positioned to their giant head statues or Moai to invoke the gods so that they would provide them with security and prosperity. Well, ten 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 ricksteves with an overview on the islands and cultures that are scattered across the world's largest and deepest ocean in the legendary South Pacific. 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.

32:19He lived and worked on Easter Island for twenty 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 ricksteves to share some of his favorite stories to understand the South Pacific's cultural and historical value. James, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me. You're from Scotland. What grew 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.

33:20And that's where I decided to focus on Easter Island and the Rappanoi language which has spoken there. You wrote in your book These Islands, Possessed in a Luring 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 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. I 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

34:24feeling 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. 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 in 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 in 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 or 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? Well, 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

35:25of 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're therefore disappointed when they find much more basic facilities and things like that than they would find in Waikiki or anywhere like that. So I think the first thing is to understand how the rich variety that you get in the South Pacific, and also the fact that you've got these fascinating outsiders that have come into this part of the world, and they too have left their own legacy there as well. 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

36:2820 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 are either preparing for a trip to, in this case, the South Pacific or to perhaps read while they're in the region. 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 site, seeing enables 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 BC. The, imagine this, the original islanders left Taiwan and canoes and eventually, it must have taken centuries and centuries, they populated the entire South Pacific.

37:29Give us a little insight into that incredible, incredible story. Yes, so this is a, 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, 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 and 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.

38:31Exactly, 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 pollinations as we know them today. 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?

39:33Do 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 and the North, Easter Island and New Zealand, so 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. By the way, this is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Cultural History in James Grant, Peter Kent. His book is The Travel Enrichment Series, South Pacific. It's 12 stories to enlighten your journey. There's one 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

40:38confronted with climate change, and they're confronted with the influence of China. Let's start off right away. How is the influence of China crept into this world, and what's the feeling if you're a Polynesian person? Well, 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. In the last 20, 30 years, China has been making a dedicated effort to bring some of these small island nations, who have important votes at places like the United Nations, to bring them onto their side. 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've, you know, that they lose something of their sovereignty as a result. It's a complex political situation that countries like Australia and New Zealand and the US

41:39have now slightly woken up to and realized that they had forgotten really about the South Pacific or the Pacific Islands for a long time. 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 re-opened embassies and things like that in on Pacific islands, or they've established new ones, because they now realize that 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 spectre 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 they will come when their home islands will no longer be inhabitable. What's the reality for these islanders when it comes to climate change?

42:40Well, the issue is that many of these islands are only a few feet above sea level now, so they're incredibly low. They are 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 more... It's interesting, James, because it'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. I never think of idyllic, self-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.

43:46Some people would say that's because reporting is so much better, but the damage either flooding or 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 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

44:47and the natural wonder but the cultural wonder as well? So I think the most important or if one's able to is to to to take in several islands in one trip because then you can really start to compare cultures, history and and start to appreciate some of these nuance 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 and then I would say really get in and try and explore those 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

45:53the real rewards are to be had. So the outer islands generally you'd have to fly into the main island and then would you take up a boat connection generate to the outer islands? So you can normally fly to them doesn't 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. 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 main 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

46:56series 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 ship? 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 particularly if you pick small ships that are able to get into smaller ports the 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's 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. Our South Pacific guest James Grant Peterkin is scheduled to be a featured speaker on several upcoming Oceania and region cruises the parting van Coover Miami and Barcelona. His website lists his speaking schedule and has links to

47:57his 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 the dimension of your South Pacific book that really is cultural insights via these stories that that humanize these communities. What's this 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 nilial characters that I that I really admired. People that I enjoyed you know learning more about and subsequently then you know teaching and talking about their lives. I suppose I mean because I lived spent so many years

49:01living 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 but I think you know I grew up reading the books of Thore Hydele 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 in French Polynesia in the very heart of the Pacific but I think it was stories like that that made me realize that that the South Pacific really appealed to 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 it does require a bit of an adventure of spirit to really to really get out there and see it. And you'll be well rewarded if

50:03you 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 and sharing your passion for this part of the world. Thank you Rick. I'm going to. Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Katten, Kaz Murrahal and Donna Bardzley, Ed Rick Steves, Europe and Edmunds, Washington. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gersoff, website uploads are by Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Courts. 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

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