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Armenia Asia

A Visit to Yerevan

After a few more days at home to frantically unpack, do laundry, and repack, I headed off to Armenia! Thanksgiving remains one of my favorite times of the year to travel, and so Alan and I reunited for a trip across Armenia and Georgia. This region has been on my list for ages and I was so excited to get a chance to explore it.

All the flight options landed at weird times, so we took a very badly timed one that left from Frankfurt at 9 pm and got to Yerevan at 3:55 am the next morning. Thankfully our hotel had an open room that they let us book for essentially a half night, so we were able to sleep and shower and change out of our airport clothes, which was especially important for me since I had also taken a 7.5 hour flight to Frankfurt. Which, incidentally, was delayed by 3 hours. By the time we got to our hotel in Yerevan, it had been a series of very long days and I was ready to pass out.

After sleeping, it was time to venture out into the city. Our first stop was the Armenian Genocide Memorial and Museum.

We never learned about the Armenian genocide in school. I mostly heard about it in the context of why Türkiye hasn’t been allowed in the EU – their continued refusal to acknowledge that the genocide happened has been a huge sticking point. But leading up to this trip, I read The Hundred-Year Walk, by Dawn Anahid MacKeen, which did a great job contextualizing it. Her grandfather lived through it and left a series of detailed journals, which she used to start her research, and then she also took her own journey in his footsteps across modern day Türkiye, Syria, and Armenia.

The museum was very well done, with a lot of information about the events leading up to the genocide as well as the international community’s response as the world looked on. The memorial was nice, although it was under construction. Weirdly, we were also there at the same time as a large group of people in suits, who seemed to be politicians going for some sort of PR opportunity. We never did figure out who they were or what was happening there.

From there, we took a taxi over to Mother Armenia, which is a giant statue of a woman that overlooks Yerevan. There’s another museum in the base of it, which seemed to be run by a Russian woman who was very confused that we didn’t speak Russian and quickly lost interest in us when it became clear we weren’t going to donate to the museum. Very little was in English, which was a shame because it did seem to focus on more modern skirmishes that Armenia has been having with its neighbors. There’s a lot going on between them and Azerbaijan, which I will get to in my next post.

Once we were done at the museum, we stumbled upon my favorite thing that we found in Armenia, which was Victory Park. It was founded in the 1950s while Armenia was still part of the USSR and you can certainly tell. Nowadays, it seems moderately haunted and the perfect location for some sort of horror movie. I loved everything about it.

We have Lightning McQueen at home

There was so much to love here. Off-brand characters that would trigger a cease and desist letter if Disney or Nickelodeon knew about them. The Mother Armenia statue lurking in the background. The half-built dinosaur park with massive animatronics in the background, which were moving and making screeching noises despite being in an area of the park that couldn’t receive visitors.

It’s honestly hard to describe how delighted I was here. Every corner we turned had something new and bizarre. This wasn’t the last Sovietesque theme park we came across in this region, but it was the best.

Once we were satisfied with our visit to the most unhinged theme park I’d ever seen, we worked our way down to the Cascades. It’s a large stairway complex that has great views of the city and altogether a good vibe – it functions as a sort of vertical Central Park for Yerevan, and it was the most people we saw out and about at any of the touristy sites.

We found a nice café for lunch and regrouped, since we had done the top three tourist sites in Yerevan. We ended up just walking through the city and soaking up the vibes. It’s a nice city, and I enjoyed our time there.

The day after was a very early morning, as it was our day trip down to Tatev Monastery – more on this in the next post. Then we were back in Yerevan on Sunday. We started off with Saint Gregory the Illuminator Cathedral, which is the largest Armenian orthodox church in the world. Armenia is very proud of their Christian history. They were the first country in the world to adopt Christianity as their official religion, back in the year of 301. I can tell you that this particular cathedral was very well-attended on this Sunday, so it seems like that Christian tradition is alive and well.

Once we were done visiting the cathedral, we found another haunted Soviet amusement park! Another day, another series of viscerally upsetting slightly-off brand rides. Ask and Yerevan shall provide.

From there, we headed to the History Museum of Armenia. Most of what it had to offer was ancient history, about the earliest civilizations that settled in the region. This is less interesting to me than the recent history, which I really would have loved a deeper dive on, but alas. Instead, we saw the oldest leather shoe that’s ever been found, which is 5,500 years old and was found in the Areni region.

After the museum, we had a splurgy late lunch with a fancy bottle of Armenian wine at Lavash, which was excellent. Definitely the best meal we ate in Armenia!

A few more images from our wanderings in Yerevan:

I really liked Yerevan. Georgia is obviously the tourist darling of this region, and for good reason, but I think Armenia is still a bit slept on. In my opinion, Yerevan is an underrated city and, as you’ll see in the next post, the southern part of the country is also quite nice. It also was an interesting cultural contrast to Georgia. I wish we had time to go to Azerbaijan as well to round out my understanding of the Caucasus region, but I would definitely recommend including Armenia if you’re going to be in this area! We spent four days there total and I felt like that was a great amount of time.

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North America United States

Celebration in New Orleans

Landing in New Orleans marked an exciting achievement: I had visited all 50 states! It’s been a fun project. Once I got down to the last ones, there were many that I had been either avoiding or ambivalent to for years that I found much more interesting than I’d expected. I’ll do a proper reflection soon.

Once I got down to my last 12 or so, I determined which one I was saving for last, and that was clearly Louisiana. New Orleans is a great city for a celebration. In fact, this weekend wasn’t just a celebration for the culmination of my goal – it was also my friend Angeli’s birthday!

Brb starting our girl band

We had a weekend full of food and drinks and sightseeing planned. New Orleans is a peak foodie city. There are tons of regional specialties, like po’ boys and gumbo and jambalaya and beignets, and we went to a pretty wide variety of restaurants, from incredibly fancy to hole in the wall. Some highlights were Jewel of the South, which was Angeli’s official birthday dinner and was more fine dining; Sun Chong, the Korean-Creole fusion restaurant with some inventive spins on the flavors, and of course, the beignets at Café du Monde, which were everything I had hoped for. In truth, though, we didn’t have a bad meal the entire time we were in the city.

It’s also got great nightlife. I loved the live music that was found at a lot of bars, especially on Frenchmen Street. We avoided Bourbon Street mostly, which seemed like a much more raucous vibe, but there are a lot of other options with good cocktails and more relaxed vibes.

Mostly, though, we walked around a lot. Explored the city. I will say, I was surprised at how small the French Quarter is relative to the total area of the city. In my mind, when I pictured New Orleans, it was most of the city, but there are a ton of other neighborhoods beyond it.

Something interesting we came across while we were there – the Keep IV Waste signs. We saw them everywhere. On buildings, on cars, on trash cans. As it turns out, there is an ongoing battle over waste management in New Orleans, and particularly in the French Quarter. From what I could glean based on a few articles I read, the county went through a search for a new waste management company and picked one, Henry Consulting. But before they could get started, there were some contractual issues to resolve. In the meantime, while Henry Consulting worked through all of that, the city put together an emergency contract for IV Waste to act as a stopgap. But IV Waste turned out to be amazing, making the city cleaner than it had ever been, and so when the emergency contract period was up, the city rallied behind IV Waste and asked the city to keep them in place over Henry Consulting. It’s a very interesting local drama. Do you know how good a waste management company has to be for citizens to go to bat for them like that?

In August of last year, it was the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I ended up watching a documentary about it, called When the Levees Broke, which was absolutely devastating but a very worthwhile watch. It left me with a lot of feelings, but the real takeaway from it was how incredibly resilient New Orleans is. I know people say that it isn’t what it used to be and that it probably never will be, but I think it’s incredible that it’s been rebuilt to the level that it is today. I remember when it happened, but I was young, and I wasn’t necessarily watching the news regularly and understanding the real effects on the people there. After seeing what happened to the city with fresh eyes, I am amazed at the city that stands there today.

We did venture out of New Orleans proper in order to visit the bayou. I was really excited for this tour! It was great to get out and see a bit more of Louisiana, and we got to see so many animals up close and personal.

It’s wild to get that close to alligators. I’ve grown up with a healthy amount of fear of them, since they are very much not native to anywhere I’ve ever lived, and so it’s not an animal that I was ever taught how to interact with safely. I don’t think I register as a snack for them now that I’m not a child, but as the original predator that hasn’t evolved in millions of years, they do still activate that primal instinct.

It was also strange to see all the alligator heads that you could buy at the gift shop. A little jarring, to be honest.

We also took a ghost tour of the city, which was interesting. The guide was great and very knowledgeable about the local history, telling us all kinds of dark stories about what had happened in the city over the years.

We also walked around the neighborhood of Treme, which is generally considered the oldest Black neighborhood in the United States. It was founded in the 1810s and has been a huge part of New Orleans’ cultural history. I found its colorful houses so charming!

We also walked in the downtown area, where there’s a nice walkway along the Mississippi River. No matter how many times I’ve crossed it, I’m always amazed by the scale of it. The transition between the French Quarter and the skyscrapers is strangely abrupt, going from one to the other in course of essentially a block.

In some ways, Louisiana was an interesting choice for my last state because it is so unique. The French influence isn’t as strong anywhere else in the United States, and Louisiana does still have a fundamentally different legal system than the other states in the union. There was something nice about that. Even after going to 49 other states, there are still new things to discover!

New Orleans was a great spot for a long weekend, and an even better one to finish off my goal of going to all fifty states! I will be thinking about the food we had there for a long time.

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North America United States

Viva Stark Vegas!

Welcome to Mississippi, the penultimate state on my journey to 50 states! Phil and I flew to the Golden Triangle Regional Airport, which was a bit of a stressful journey because it was in the midst of the government shutdown and this was the weekend where they started cutting the numbers of flights that airports were allowed to run in an attempt to keep everything from coming to a screeching halt. I had to switch to an earlier flight to Atlanta to get there, and my flight home got cancelled and switched to a route that took me through Charlotte, but I did successfully make it to Mississippi and back.

A funny thing happens when you tell people that you’re almost done going to all 50 states. They inevitably ask which ones, and then weigh in on what they thing of those. I got a lot of people telling me that a certain state would be “nicer than you expect,” including West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Unfortunately, no one said that for Mississippi. Instead, in Arkansas, a man I met at a bar winced and told me, “maybe you should just drive through Mississippi really fast and count it that way.”

….ominous.

Here’s what I will say. I don’t think Starkville is the nicest town in America, and probably not even the nicest one in Mississippi (which is probably Oxford, from what I’ve heard). But the experience of going to a football game at Mississippi State was awesome. It was everything I wanted in a proper, Southern, college football experience. The stadium is intense and loud. The fans bring in cowbells and are capable of producing an absolutely deafening noise. They were playing Georgia, who was pretty unfazed (and ultimately won), but I can imagine it could be pretty intimidating as an opposing team. I had a great time.

Fun fact, Mississippi State and Georgia both have bulldogs as their mascot!

After the game, we headed out of Mississippi and up to Memphis. Memphis, like Mississippi, has an interesting reputation. I’ve come across discussions online that make it sound like an active war zone. In fairness, it does have the highest crime rate in America, and while the next few positions are disputed across different lists based on how the various statistics are weighted, Memphis always seems to take the #1 spot. So I wasn’t sure what to expect when we got there.

I loved Memphis. As anyone could tell you, I love a misunderstood place. Personally, I didn’t feel unsafe there, even after Phil left and I was walking around downtown on my own. And I think the history and culture surrounding Memphis is top tier.

During my various travels across the South, I’ve been going to a lot of museums and monuments focused on Civil Rights. I think this one was the best one I’ve done. It was comprehensive, it felt as though all of the exhibits had been refreshed recently, and decidedly NOT fun fact, it is the site of MLK’s assassination. While that is a pretty bleak moment in history, they built a section where you could go into the hotel room and learn about the assassination, which was really well done.

Of course, the most important part of my impromptu walking tour of Memphis was the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid. You know I love a weird place, and this is one of the weirder ones out there. Depending on how you measure, it is the tenth-tallest pyramid in the world. It was built in 1991 as an arena, and used to host all kinds of events, including but not limited to basketball games, concerts, WWE, and high school graduations. After a attempt to turn it into an NBA arena ended in abject failure, it was taken over by Bass Pro Shops and developed into some sort of sporting goods fever dream. I didn’t go inside, but I was excited to see it in the context of the Memphis skyline.

I went to one other museum in Memphis, which was the Rock n’ Soul Museum. Memphis is inexorably linked with Elvis – I didn’t quite have enough time to do a proper tour of Graceland, although I certainly would have if I’d had one more day in Memphis. I spent a lot of time on the musical history when I visited Nashville, and it seemed only right to give Memphis similar consideration. My favorite part was the audio guide, which…. if you didn’t want to listen the explanations, you could go find a jukebox and have it play you some of the best and most significant music that was produced in Memphis, which was an awesome soundtrack to my visit.

One other quirky place to talk about in Memphis, which was the Peabody Hotel! Phil assured me that it was “the only place to stay in Memphis,” and as usual, was correct. The Peabody is historic. It opened in 1925 and it is best known for the tradition of the ducks.

The ducks were brought to the hotel sometime in the 1930s by the General Manager, after a hunting trip where he and some friends had taken along call ducks. When they got back, they left the ducks in the fountain, where they quickly became fixtures of the hotel. Later, a bellhop who had been a trainer at the circus decided to up the ante, and he trained the ducks to march into the hotel lobby in the morning and back up to the penthouse in the eventing, where they sleep. It’s so charming! It was very chaotic to go and watch in person, since it felt like the whole hotel was lining up to try to see the ducks, but I’m glad I got to see them.

All in all, a solid weekend. And the following weekend, I had a big celebration planned – I was heading to New Orleans for my 50th state!

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North America United States

The Road to 50 States

At the beginning of this year, I decided that this would be the year that I finished visiting all 50 states. I had started the year with Alabama, and then put the project on pause through the summer because I refuse to go to the south in the overwhelming heat of July or August. But as it turned to fall, it was time to tackle my last three: Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana!

I have been specifically saving Louisiana for last. Once I got to my last ten or so, I looked at what I had left and picked that as the one that I was the most interested in, and the one that felt most like a celebration. And it ended up working out perfectly, because one of my friends decided to celebrate her birthday in New Orleans this November! It gave me a deadline, and so I set out to visit Arkansas and Mississippi before that weekend.

And as luck would have it, this dovetailed really well with a different travel goal that my friend Phil was working on! He has been working on going to a football game at all of the SEC stadiums, and so we decided to join forces for these penultimate states.

We flew into the Northwest Arkansas airport in Bentonville. This region of Arkansas has a lot of investment in it, because this is where Walmart is headquartered. The airport was modern and beautiful, and I was pretty impressed with Fayetteville as well.

I found Fayetteville quite charming. There were cute local cafés and restaurants, and boutique shops, and I went to the farmer’s market as well when it was running. It was a nice town.

On Saturday morning, we made our way through the University of Arkansas campus to watch the game! They were playing Auburn. The weather was not great, raining intermittently, but the game itself was good. Not a good ending, if you were an Arkansas fan, but Phil and I didn’t care about the result and the game was interesting up until the end.

The next day, we drove down to Little Rock to see a bit more of the state. The timing wasn’t ideal, unfortunately – it was during the government shutdown, so some of the things that I was interested in doing in Little Rock were closed because they’re run by the National Park Service.

It was still raining, this time much harder than it had been at the game. Phil and I walked from our hotel over to the Bill Clinton Presidential Library, which we thought would be open but apparently that is also impacted by a government shutdown. So instead we walked around the grounds for a bit and headed back to the hotel in defeat.

All in all, Fayetteville was much cooler than Little Rock, but I also don’t know that it was a fair view of Little Rock with the weather and the closures of the few tourist attractions they do have. I was impressed with Northwest Arkansas, though. Definitely worth the trip, and it put me one step closer to my goal!

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North America United States

What Happens in Vegas

Sometimes, advertising works. Like when my mom came across packages to go see The Wizard of Oz at the Sphere and spun up an entire vision of staying in the Vegas resorts that she had always wanted to try and making a proper weekend of it. So we did!

Landing in Vegas is an intense sensory overload. It was an overwhelming experience even at the airport, with the slot machines starting as soon as I got off the plane. My parents had me stop at a liquor store in the airport so that we could get wine, because of course there’s a whole liquor store adjacent to baggage claim. Then I got a ride to the hotel from the craziest taxi queue I’ve ever seen, with people wall-to-wall and five or six different lanes of where the cars could pull up.

We started in the Bellagio! While they’re famous for their fountain, they also have an indoor botanical garden that is apparently redecorated every season, and that was pretty spectacular. They have Chihuly glass on the ceilings and a sprawling mall with designer stores around every corner. I spent a lot of time thinking about just how much money was flowing through the casinos when walking around Vegas and taking in all the things that gambling has built.

I did a tiny bit of gambling myself, taking $50 to the roulette wheel and then doubling it and immediately cashing out. It was a little terrifying how fast each turn of the wheel went. We also went to a Cirque du Soleil show at the Bellagio, which had been on my bucket list for ages! It was such a cool experience – the performers’ level of talent was spectacular.

Something that I was deeply impressed about in Vegas was the level of food and drinks that we had while we were there. On the strip, everyone staying there is a captive audience, trapped in these endless indoor malls where they’re essentially herded from their rooms to the casino and back again, with restaurant offerings basically steps from the slot machines. So they could easily be phoning it in with mediocre offerings, and yet they’re not. I had some incredible meals, and not a single one was bad.

We headed to the Venetian for the second part of the trip! There is something deeply uncanny about the Venetian. They’ve nailed the architecture so well, except you’re also aware that you’re walking around inside a mall with a fake ceiling that’s designed to look like the sky. The strangest moment was when we were getting gelato and the “sun” set. The street lamps turned on and the blue skies faded to black and we were still sitting inside the entire time.

The lobby looks more like Vatican City but close enough to Venice I guess

The uncanny valley feeling of being a mall that is also Venice was also kind of amazing, though. Of the two, the Bellagio and the Venetian, I preferred the Venetian – the theming made it really fun to walk around and explore the different areas, and we felt as though the rooms were more modern as well. It still routed you through the casino, obviously, but it also felt as though you could get away from that a bit.

The room also had a view of the Sphere, which I loved! It’s so cool to see all the designs that they put on it. Especially its little smiley face. And the next day, we had the event we came to Vegas for: The Wizard of Oz!

It was so much fun. I think the idea of doing a movie like that in such an immersive theater was really cool, and the “4D” effects were impressive. In particular, the tornado sequence was incredible. It actually felt as though we were in a windstorm. The parts that felt a little clumsy were the integration of the older pieces of the movie with the new remastered and extended set design, but it wasn’t that noticeable and I think doing this with any newer movie would make that irrelevant. We were trying to come up with other movies that would be fun in this particular setting. Star Wars would be up there, and my personal preference would be Jurassic Park!

All in all, a good weekend. I am glad I’ve done a proper trip to Vegas and stayed at the famous hotels that I’ve always heard about, but I don’t think I would need to go back anytime soon. It’s great people watching, and I had a lot of fun, but it’s a place that’s best in small doses in my opinion.

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Fiji Oceania

Relaxing in Fiji

Between leaving Taipei and landing in Nadi, I took ten flights across five countries and a US territory. It was a great trip across some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, but it was also a lot of places that have little to no tourist infrastructure. So it was nice landing in Nadi and having more development all around.

The first night, we went out for dinner and drinks, and tried kava, which is a cultural tradition in Fiji. I thought it was slightly better than everyone had told me it was, but I wouldn’t necessarily seek it out again.

The next day, I went exploring with a few friends! We took a cab out to the Sri Siva Subramaniya Temple, which is the largest Hindu temple in the Pacific. It was beautiful. They were in the process of repainting it, which was interesting to see. The difference in color of the new painting compared to the section that had faded was very stark. We weren’t allowed to take pictures of the interior, but I would definitely recommend a visit if you’re in Nadi.

They had us borrow extra garments to ensure our knees were covered, which did lead to one of my favorite signs of the trip asking us to maintain a “descent” dress code. From the temple, we walked into town to go to the local handicraft market and get lunch. There isn’t a lot to do for tourists in Nadi, as most people who come to Fiji are coming for the resorts and the beaches, but it was enough to keep us occupied for the day.

After our time in the town, it was time for a hotel splurge! I was staying at the Crowne Plaza in Nadi. I had paid a little extra to have pool access from my room, which was an amazing experience.

It was so relaxing to spend a couple days sleeping in, swimming in the pool, and walking along the beach. I completely understand why Fiji is so popular as a vacation destination – I could see myself doing this exact same stopover if I end up transiting through Fiji in the future!

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Kiribati Oceania

Long Walks in Kiribati

Fun fact, Kiribati is actually pronounced Kiribass, in case you’re like me and have been pronouncing it incorrectly for your whole life. It is also the only country in the world to span all the hemispheres, but it does have its own unified time zone. If you’ve ever looked up the international date line and wondered why it gets so squiggly, it’s mostly because of Kiribati.

Spotted napping

After breakfast at a very nice café in Tarawa, we headed out to our hotel, which was a collection of the traditional-style villas. It was pretty relaxing to be in the villa, under the mosquito netting, with the breeze coming in through the windows. But after a short rest, we headed back out to explore a little more of Kiribati!

We were walking to a beach near the broken bridge, and it ended up being a very long walk. It ended up being about six miles round trip. To be honest, it was a longer and hotter walk than I was hoping for, especially coming off a long hot walk in Nauru the day before, but it was cool to see the villages and a lot of the local kids joined us at the beach. Kiribati is beautiful. So many lush palm trees and the water was such a nice shade of turquoise!

Another Pacific country, another spectacular island sunset!

An interesting aspect of our hotel was that it was separated from the island with the airport by the water. On the way there, they had us take a tiny boat across, because it was high tide. On the way out, however, it was low tide. So we all walked across with our luggage. I was glad I had packed light.

Kiribati was pleasant, although I might have enjoyed it more if the weather had been a touch cooler while we were there! Our next stop was Fiji, and it was a nice change of pace to be somewhere with a bit more infrastructure.

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Nauru Oceania

Nauru: Walking Around an Entire Country

Two more flights and we landed in Nauru! Nauru is the world’s third smallest country, and it has a rather curious history. For a long time, it was rich in resources. It had phosphate deposits, and it was temporarily wealthy as the phosphate was systematically mined away. But at some point, the phosphate ran out, and the process of mining it had damaged Nauru’s environment so thoroughly that by the mid 60s, they thought it would be uninhabitable by 1990.

It isn’t uninhabitable, but it also isn’t doing great either. Its environment is still pretty wrecked, so the Nauruans can’t turn to agriculture either. They’ve acted as a tax haven, and tried to be more like Oceania’s answer to Switzerland or the Cayman Islands, and they’ve also offered land to Australia for an immigration detention center. The detention center has been used on and off since 2001, occasionally coming under fire for human rights issues. It is an interesting question – what can a country do if they don’t have any resources or pathways to make money? How does the country sustain itself?

Side note, loving their tourism slogan of “A Pleasant Surprise.” There’s something very charming about that. I love seeing the tourism campaigns from the places that really need tourism campaigns – my favorites, of course, are Nebraska’s “Honestly, it’s not for everyone,” and Lithuania’s “G-Spot of Europe” (“no one knows where it is, but when you find it, it’s amazing”). But Nauru, with its remote location and lack of tourist infrastructure, is a hard sell. “A Pleasant Surprise” is probably fair because most people will have low expectations going into their trip there.

Our next day, we did the quintessential Nauru tourist thing (which is a bit of an oxymoron) and we walked around the entire country! It’s a little over 18 km or 11 miles walking along the road that hugs the coast.

One annoying quirk of the timing of our trip – this big walk happened on a Sunday. Which meant that a lot of things were closed. The majority of restaurants were closed. There were little shops similar to a bodega-style convenience store that could at least sell us water or a cold drink or a snack on the way. But no other shops, no alcohol sales, and generally a lot fewer people out and about. Not quite as conducive to getting an experience of Nauru.

The convenience store shops all had great names, too. It reminded me of the shop names in West Africa, which were medleys of seemingly-random adjectives and nouns. We did find an arcade that was open, and Lucy and I played a couple quick games of air hockey as a fun break! It was nice to have some time in the air conditioning, since it had gotten pretty hot outside during our walk.

As we got closer to the airport, it started to get a little more built up. Thankfully, we finally found a working ATM. The one at the airport hadn’t worked and they didn’t have any cash exchange. Then the one at our hotel didn’t work either. I didn’t need a lot, I just wanted to have some Australian dollars in cash for Nauru and Kiribati because you can’t always assume that they’ll be able to take credit cards in this region.

You can see the ruins of the phosphate mining equipment in the distance

The airport itself was a bit of a wild experience – it’s rare that you can be that close to a runway. Most of the time, the airport is fenced off with barbed wire and with tons of fields surrounding it. This one just had a normal chain link fence and an intensely aggressive warning about not standing too close when planes take off and land.

We took a break near the airport so that we could watch the sunset from a beach! And one of the women on my trip had managed to find a local who was willing to sell us some beer and some ice, so we had a really nice time.

Once the sun set, though, it was time to finish up our walk. We powered through the rest of it in the dark, and made it back to the hotel for a last dinner in Nauru. We had officially made it around the whole country!

And that’s a wrap on Nauru! Walking around the whole country was a lot of fun, although I think more than the one day would get pretty boring if you’re here for tourism. We headed out very early the next morning for a quick flight to Kiribati.

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Marshall Islands Oceania

Welcome to the Marshall Islands

My friend Emmy’s aunt worked in the Marshall Islands for a couple years. When she told her aunt that I was planning a visit, her aunt responded, “Why? There’s absolutely nothing for tourists there.” My dad responded in a similar fashion. “Didn’t the US test nuclear weapons there?”

First of all, yes, the US did indeed test nuclear weapons there. 67 tests over about a decade and a half, in the Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll. Radiation levels remain high in some areas of the islands and it has had other environmental ripple effects across the country. And Emmy’s aunt is right, there aren’t many tourist sites in the Marshall Islands, but that has never stopped me before.

The journey from Micronesia to the Marshall Islands was a series of three flights on the United Island Hopper. It felt like a long day – each flight individually was not really long enough to settle in or nap, but then we would land, the lights would turn on, customers would get on and off, they would make us get our bags out of the overhead bin to check them, and we would have the whole safety video spiel again. We had one other stop in Micronesia, Pohnpei, where at least they let us get off, stretch our legs, and get snacks if we wanted. Our first stop in the Marshall Islands was a military base. We weren’t allowed to take pictures or get off the plane at that one. Finally, we made it Majuro!

While we were in the Marshall Islands, Wander rented out a private island! We had two big villas, one for the men and one for the women, where we all slept, but most of the time we spent by the beach or in on the docks. We cooked our own food as well. This meant that we got to do one of my favorite things to do in any country, which was go to the local grocery store.

Making a grilled cheese

One of the things that most surprised me about this region was the lack of fresh produce. When I think about tropical destinations, I typically imagine pineapples and mangoes and all of those classical fruits, and so I expected some of that while we were here. But apparently, the Marshall Islands (and broadly across the whole region) have very salty soil, and so produce doesn’t grow well here. All of it has to be imported. The produce section of the grocery store was inordinately expensive for pretty bad quality. It’s a big problem across the region – they have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and other related health issues because of the difficulty of getting healthy food on these islands.

We didn’t spend the whole time on our private island, though. We also headed out to Arno Atoll for a beach day. It’s an atoll one over from where the capital, Majuro, is located.

This isn’t my best picture but look at this incredible shade of turquoise!

It was gorgeous – it had some of the bluest water I’ve ever seen as we pulled up, and the beach itself was deserted. We didn’t see any other tourists, and only a couple locals. The only sad part is that there was quite a bit of trash nearby, just steps from where the sand began.

One of the cool things about being so far away from major population centers was how clear the stars were each night. As long as it wasn’t cloudy, we could see a large part of the Milky Way each night. One of the guys in the group, Matt, had recently gotten interested in astronomy, and he was excited to share his knowledge (and amazing photos) with the rest of us.

One of the days we were in the Marshall Islands, we threw a party on our dock, and danced and sang late into the night. It was so much fun!

I can see why Emmy’s aunt asked about what I would be doing here – there did not seem to be much tourist infrastructure or areas that would be particularly interesting for a visitor. And given how remote it is, it’s understandable that most people wouldn’t think the tradeoffs are worth it to get here. It’s not really a place I would say that you should go out of your way to visit, given that there are plenty of nice beaches that aren’t quite so remote in this region. Still, I always find it interesting to go to the places that most people don’t. The people were friendly and the beaches were great, and it was a very enjoyable part of this trip.

I had a lovely time in the Marshall Islands. When I think back on it, I think about eating grilled cheese and singing on the dock and drinking beer in the ocean. It was a nice, relaxing few days, and then we were back on a plane and headed to our next destination: Nauru!

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Micronesia Oceania

Paradise in Micronesia

When you imagine a tropical paradise, you’re imagining Micronesia. It had some of the most picture perfect beaches and reefs I’ve ever seen. After a red eye, a stop in Guam, and a second flight that was too short to properly nap, it was amazing to get to our beautiful hotel right next to the beach.

A quick note about the naming conventions – Micronesia can refer to either the country, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), as I’m doing here, or it can refer to one of the subregions of the Pacific islands. There are three main regions. (1) Melanesia, which includes Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Fiji; (2) Micronesia, which includes Palau, the Mariana Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Nauru; and (3) Polynesia, which includes New Zealand, Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu, Hawaii, and Easter Island. We were primarily in traveling across the region of Micronesia across this whole trip, but when I say Micronesia in this post, I am referring to the country and not the region.

I will say my first impression of Micronesia, from our drive from the airport to the hotel, was that there was less infrastructure than in Palau or Guam. The roads were in poorer condition and there were broken down cars all over the island. It’s the kind of place that has the natural beauty to be a top tier tourist destination but definitely not the development needed to support that at this time.

After lunch and a nap, I woke up in time to enjoy the afternoon and sunset on the beach with the group! The next morning, we headed out for a full day of snorkeling, exploring the reefs, and spending time on the beaches of Micronesia.

Sitting in the shade and still getting sunburned

My GoPro is not as good at pictures as it is at video, so I’ve opted to just screenshot from the videos I got in an attempt to show how amazing the snorkeling was. I will also say I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of my GoPro pictures and video! I was traveling with people who had much newer GoPros – I bought mine back when I went to Belize and the Galapagos, in 2021, and it had clearer video than some of the newer models.

Micronesia has some fantastic wreck dives, and there’s even a few wrecks you can see from snorkeling depth. In particular, we went to one that was a Japanese war plane that had crashed, which was really cool – it’s at such a shallow depth that you can see it clearly even from the surface.

We saw turtles and even a few sharks, although I didn’t get good videos of any of those on this particular trip. There was one area where they thought we might be able to see dolphins but unfortunately that didn’t pan out. That is one of the species that I haven’t managed to swim with yet!

After an amazing day on the boat, we had another nice sunset back at our hotel. We were lucky to have perfect weather during our time in Micronesia – it sounds like the Wander Expeditions group that went a few weeks before us ended up getting rain and grey skies, which didn’t give it the same “paradise” vibes that we got to enjoy.

All in all, I had great time in Micronesia. The remote nature of it and lack of tourist infrastructure makes sense for why it isn’t a huge destination for many travelers (outside of divers, who definitely have it on their radar), but I found it worth the trip.

The next day, we had our longest travel day of the whole trip! Outside of the two times I had to fly over the Pacific Ocean, that is. More on that next time.