[April 2020] This site has been re-built after a long time offline.
Long ago in January 1999, still in the days before I had a digital camera, before social media, before the turn of the millennium, and when I still had hair, I went on a solo journey to visit some remote islands of the Pacific. Somewhat on a whim, for a 24 year old final-year university student, this island hopping was a great personal adventure.
The journey took me to four islands: Nauru, Pohnpei (in the Federated States of Micronesia), Guam and Rota (in the Mariana Islands). The photos of the trip were taken on an old Konica point-and-shoot 35mm film camera, and before I became a better photographer (in particular, my composition wasn’t always great back then). I didn’t take nearly as many photos as I would now, not least because I was trying to save precious film and minimise the cost of developing the film after the trip was finished. But my camera had a reasonably good lens, and even now I’m still pleased with the quality of many of the images.
Arising from that trip was my first website that, back in its day, did quite well. It was built on an old HTML editor that no longer exists, used Comic Sans font (how embarrassing) with a tropical palm tree and crab theme (how clichéd). Its “guest book” (back in the days when people were prepared to leave a comment – even including their email address – just because they visited your website) attracted quite a long list of entries. For a while, my website was top of the search engine results for the islands I visited. However, my Internet fortune depleted over time, the website degraded, and it became non-functional and then I broke it, leaving it offline for quite some time.
This re-build of the website has been constructed during the 2020 pandemic. It’s armchair travel revisiting a trip from that was already from an earlier time. Until travel becomes possible again, we always have old photos.