Pacific Islands Adventure

The Pacific is not a place you pass through; it is a third of the planet. For seven weeks in July and August 2025 we flew it end to end — fourteen island nations, twenty-three flights, 23,070 miles, from Honolulu to Singapore the long way. This is the complete flight log of our Pacific island tour: every carrier, aircraft and block time, because piecing the flights together was the hardest part of the whole trip.

The run: Honolulu first, then the western Pacific cluster — Palau, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati and Nauru — before the long southern arc through Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tuvalu and Tonga, a breather in Sydney via Auckland, and finally Papua New Guinea on the way out to Singapore. We crossed the International Date Line once, the equator twice, and never left one ocean.

Palau (4 nights, Palau Pacific Resort): the best diving of our lives. Blue Corner with a reef hook while grey reef sharks held station in the current, and the Iro Maru — a Japanese fleet oiler upright on the bottom since 1944. Palau declared the world's first shark sanctuary in 2009, and immigration stamps the Palau Pledge, written by the country's schoolchildren, into your passport.

Micronesia (2 nights, Mangrove Bay, Pohnpei): Nan Madol, the only ancient city ever built on a coral reef — a hundred artificial islets of stacked basalt raised by the Saudeleur dynasty, now a silent UNESCO ruin in the mangroves. Pohnpei's interior catches over seven metres of rain a year.

Marshall Islands (5 nights, Bikendrik Island): we arrived on United's legendary Island Hopper — flight UA 155, three ocean-sprint legs via Kosrae and Kwajalein, flown with a mechanic and spare parts on board — then spent five nights on a private islet in Majuro's lagoon with a shipwreck to snorkel off the beach.

Kiribati (3 nights, Motel Utirerei, Tarawa): the only country in all four hemispheres, 33 atolls scattered across an area bigger than India, and the first place on Earth to see each new year. Rusting guns from the 1943 Battle of Tarawa still sit on the reef at Betio. Say it 'KIRR-ih-bass.'

Nauru (2 nights, Ewa Lodge): the world's smallest republic — twenty-one square kilometres, one ring road, no official capital city, and by most counts the least-visited country on the planet. Phosphate briefly made it one of the richest nations on Earth per person; the mined-out interior tells the rest of the story.

Fiji (a night in Nadi, then 6 nights on Turtle Island): the reward week, on the private island where The Blue Lagoon was filmed — fourteen bures, impossible water, and 'bula' several hundred times a day. Fiji is also the switchboard of the South Pacific: we cleared Nadi airport six times on this trip.

Solomon Islands (2 nights, Heritage Park, Honiara): Guadalcanal, where Iron Bottom Sound holds some fifty WWII warships and hundreds of aircraft. Vanuatu (2 nights, Tamanu on the Beach, Port Vila): land diving on Pentecost gave the world bungee jumping, Mount Yasur has erupted for centuries, and 110 languages share 300,000 people.

Samoa (3 nights, Taumeasina Island Resort): landed at 1 a.m. because that's when the plane goes; paid back in daylight by the To Sua Ocean Trench and fa'a Samoa. In 2011 Samoa skipped 30 December entirely and hopped west across the date line — American Samoa, eighty miles away, is now a full calendar day behind.

Tuvalu (2 nights, Funafuti Lagoon Hotel): three aircraft in one day, ending on an ATR 72 onto Funafuti's single runway — which, between flights, is the national town square: volleyball, motorbikes, evening strolls on the centreline. A few thousand visitors a year, and the .tv domain funds a meaningful slice of the government.

Tonga (2 nights, Tanoa International Dateline Hotel): the single best hour of the trip — in the water, eye to eye with humpback mothers and calves, in one of the only countries on Earth that permits it. Tonga is the Pacific's last kingdom and was never colonized.

Then the long way down: a 787 to Auckland, Qantas across the Tasman, five nights at Capella Sydney to reset — and Papua New Guinea to finish: a light aircraft over the Owen Stanley Range to Tufi, where drowned volcanic fjords meet reef, in the most linguistically diverse country on Earth (about 840 living languages).

Forty-nine days after Honolulu, an Air Niugini 767 lifted out of Port Moresby, crossed the equator a second time, and traded the Pacific for Singapore. If the itinerary looks unhinged, that's because it is. It is also the trip we talk about most — and the one we'd tell you to steal, flight numbers and all.