Happy Wanderer

PAUL Theroux is arguably the best-known living travel writer.

His books contain a fair amount of history, and that is especially the case with The Happy Isles Of Oceania: Paddling The Pacific.

It tells of trips he made from Australia to Easter Island, taking in the Solomons, Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii and other island groups.

I put off reading Happy Isles because it was travel in a part of the world I was not particularly interested in.

Happy island-hopping

But Theroux made me interested, even though the book contains much of his usual mix of carping - his complaints include a tirade directed at a taxi driver who wants payment for waiting time - and intellectual snobbery.

The bottom line is Theroux is a good writer, and his stories of paddling across the Pacific, while stopping off to camp at numerous islands, rarely tire.