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Pacific Adventure - Part 2
On the Road ... er, the WingAs you can imagine, getting from a tiny island in the middle of the Caribbean to a group of tiny islands half-way around the world in the Pacific is no easy task. The map below shows the route that my Pacific adventure took.
Leaving St. Thomas, Virgin Islands on Delta's early morning flight, I arrived in Atlanta around mid-day and connected with another Delta flight that departed an hour later for Honolulu, Hawaii, with a stop in San Francisco. We arrived in Honolulu shortly before midnight local time, after total flight time of 12-hours. I stayed at an airport hotel that evening and boarded Continental Micronesia's "island hopper" flight early the next morning, headed for Majuro, the capital of the Republic of the Marshall Islands. At Majuro, I would be attending the APIPA Conference and meeting with the public auditors of the Pacific islands. Enroute to Majuro, we made a quick stop at Johnston Island, an American military base under the control of the Defense Nuclear Agency, to drop off some military personnel and refuel. As you can see in the picture below, Johnston Island is little more than a runway with some military housing and support facilities. The island, however, is surrounded by a beautiful coral reef and crystal clear azure waters.
Arriving on MajuroAfter a total travel time of about 6 hours from Honolulu, and losing an entire day by crossing the international dateline, we arrived in Majuro in the early afternoon local time. I was met at the airport by a small shuttle bus from the conference hotel, the recently-opened Outrigger Marshall Islands Resort. As you can see in the next two photos, this hotel is a high-quality seaside resort, and offers all of the comforts a traveler from the United States would expect to find, including comfortable air conditioned rooms, a very fine restaurant with a wide variety of dishes, laundry and coin-operated laundromat services, a large patio and pool, a small beach, conference facilities, and even -- of a sort -- cable TV. [Because of some problems with the local cable TV service, while I was there the hotel aired taped movies and older broadcasts from such cable standards as ESPN, Discovery, and CNN.] The hotel was staffed almost exclusively by Marshallese employees, and everyone was very friendly, courteous, and eager to please, even if some did seem somewhat hesitant in their new roles as "ambassadors of good will" to visitors to their island. In fact, everyone I met during my week on Majuro was friendly and exhibited a happy and carefree attitude that, I suspect, is typical of the residents of the Pacific islands.
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1996-2009 Arnold E.
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