Our world is becoming smaller and smaller and travel becoming more and more affordable. And thank goodness for that, however not much else has changed. I have recently returned from a holiday to South Africa. The flight was long, the airplane seats hard and narrow and the inflight meals less than palatable…. however, within hours of my arrival in Johannesburg, my pain and suffering, not to mention my swollen ankles, were forgotten. I was about to embark on a BIG adventure.

In September 2018 I returned to India, the land of my birth. It had been almost 36 years since I had set foot on her soil. Even though I was born the south, I had a burning desire to see the north again.

I convinced my girlfriend Jane to come along.

A few months ago, I came across a ‘great deal’ advertised in the travel section in the Sunday Paper. The deal offered a week in Vanuatu (flight and accommodation) at a very reasonable price. I love those deals, so I booked!

I wanted to share with you some of the high lights from the last few months… in particular, my recent travels to the idyllic French Polynesia.

What I really wanted was to find the ‘human face of Kokoda’, if she had one. Was she just a dirt track in the Papua New Guinea jungle that happened to have ‘war history’, a dirt track, that one nation revered and another sort to forget, or was she more than that?