What Is It?

So I’ve started a new thing.  It’s not a blog.  It’s not a sales pitch.  It’s just an irreverent, opinionated, and (occasionally) useful email about travel to sandy places that I send out to my readers.  You won’t get it all that often – unlike a magazine or something, the content will drive the schedule, not the other way around. But I hope it will make your next trip or move abroad a little better.

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What's In It?

It will vary but among the short items you'll receive...

• Island To Consider Visiting
• Cool New Spot
• New Travel Gadget
• While Abroad Tip
• New Travel Resource
• Why We Travel - In One Sentence

What's Not In It?

• Ads

Why Not Just Post It Online?

Because the content is perishable- in other words, it changes and goes out of date.

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"The male answer to Eat, Pray, Love!"
-BookPage

"Sincerely funny."
-Kirkus Reviews

"Hilarious and brilliantly written."
-AJ Jacobs, editor at large, Esquire

"A must read!"
-New York Post

"Witty and immensely entertaining!"
-Passport Magazine

"Hilarious!"
-Zero To Travel

"Charming and ferociously entertaining."
        -Peter Mountford, author of A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

"Hilarious and insightful."
    -Go World Travel

"An absolute waste of time."
-Professional Networking Association of America (PNAA)

Burnt out and facing a quarter-life crisis, Alex Sheshunoff quit his Internet job in New York City and bought a one-way ticket to the South Pacific island of Yap, bringing with him only a few t-shirts and the hundred books he was most embarrassed not to have read.  

While out there, he'd meet a girl on a full-moon kayak ride, write his own book and answer some important questions:

1. How much, per pound, should you expect to pay a priest to fly you to the island of Pig?

2. If you could have just one movie on a remote Pacific island, what would it definitely not be?

3. How do respectfully, yet effectively, woo a woman with Pringles?

4. Is a free, one-hour class from Home Depot on “Flowerbox Construction” sufficient training to build a house?

5. How do you diaper a baby monkey?

This new, award-winning memoir from Penguin Random House will will surprise you, make you laugh out loud, take you to the unforgettable islands of Palau, Yap and Pig, and either inspire you to move to your own island - perhaps one with only two letters in its name - or convince you that staying home was the best choice all along.  Either way, you'll find out what happens when you simply give it all up and buy a one-way ticket to the South Pacific.

Answers: 1.) $1.16 2.) Gas Attack Training Made Simple 3.) Rehydrate, heat, and serve. Voilà.  4.) No 5.) Carefully.

I’d come in search of capital-P, Paradise. Not a unique mission, but I needed to know if Paul Gauguin’s Paradise still existed – the one with the flowering trees glistening with recent rain, the beautiful women carrying baskets of fruit, the smiling tigers. And if it did still exist, why didn’t people just move there? Was it lack of ambition or too much ambition that kept them away? Or was life simply too hard – or too easy – on a place like Pig? I didn’t know. But I had a hunch that an ideal life is not something you just back into. An ideal life would require making some arrangements.

For me, those arrangements finished here, in a small cabin of the aptly named Microspirit, with me trying to tie on a thu. According to custom, I was supposed to wrap eight feet of blue cloth in such a way that it covered the right places without making me look like a prom-night carnation. I failed in both respects. Flamboyant hoops of extra material draped off my hips, yet I could feel cool air in increasingly funny places. Unsure what else to do, I crammed the extra bits inside an inner loop - sufficiently loosening the outer loop to send the cottony contraption sliding down to my ankles.

Then genius struck: a safety pin. In a humbling moment of desperation akin to looking for a misplaced wallet in the freezer, I scoured under my cabin’s metal bed: perhaps a safety pin had just fallen down there. I was in luck. Sort of. Along with a few Raman noodles, some dust, and a Pop-Tart wrapper, I found a paperclip. Not perfect, but with hope and a little pluck, I managed to bend the paperclip in such a way that it nicely accessorized, if not actually fastened, my loincloth.

Getting into a small boat is always a tricky proposition. Getting into a rocking boat in the open ocean: even harder.

Doing so on a rope ladder in a thu seemed at least unwise. Even if I somehow made it down, I worried there would hardly be room: the Nanospirit was loaded to the rim with elderly, topless women, and a wooden coffin. Baskets of fish and clothes and toothpaste filled the remaining pockets of space.

But this was my Pacific coming-out party. I wanted to wow them.

So thu and carton of smokes in hand, I stepped towards the ladder – but, seeing the boat so far below, hesitated again.

“Use the ladder,” a man said behind me. His tone was helpful, not sarcastic, as though I’d been considering making a leap. I turned. It was Chief Chuck from Chuuk. An enormous man, even by Pacific standards, Chief Chuck had a preference for snug, white thus.

“Watch,” he said and, just as a wave raised the dingy closer, Chief Chuck stepped in front of me and slid down the ladder, skipping every single rung. He landed on his side, rolled across a half-a-dozen baskets, and came to heavy stop against the side of the coffin. He waved for me to follow.

With one hand holding both the cigarettes and the other firmly holding my thu, I took a few steps down the ladder that now swung across the side of the ship. Then a few more steps down.

With twenty-five feet still to go, I discovered why the inventor of the paperclip, Walter Hunt, later built America’s first sewing machine: paperclips bend. My thu covered me in the same way that holding up a pair of jeans in front of a mirror covers you - it worked well enough, but not all angles were created equal.

While in the Pacific, I’d hoped to reduce the number of variables in my life to find out which were the most important – take away electricity and friends and see which I miss the most – but clothes were never supposed to be on the list. On my way down, I found myself fixating on the physicality of things: the handles on a woven basket, the sun reflecting off the dinghy’s small outboard engine, the scar on a woman’s ankle.

Before I slipped into a thu-induced stupor, gravity took over. That, frothing fear, and the basic instinct not to dangle nearly naked in front of twenty elderly women. I slid down the ladder. Effectively naked, I tumbled into the dingy, managing to hold on…only to my Lucky Strikes. Not exactly Fred Astaire, but Chief Chuck from Chuuk was hardly Ginger Rogers.

I had arrived.  And I was pretty sure I'd wowed them.