Oceania
Volcanoes and coral reefs, trekking and diving, euphoria-inducing mud drinks and French-inspired gourmet cuisine. Oceania offers everything from modern cities with world-class architecture to medieval villages, where tribesmen wear nothing but a "koteka", or penis gourd, and follow thousand-year-old traditions. Skyscrapers tower in Auckland and Sydney, and coconut palms sway on the remote Pacific islands. In Oceania you can visit some of the world's smallest states and the country that is itself a whole continent.
The geography of Oceania
The continental region of Oceania consists of three island regions in the Pacific Ocean (Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia) and the countries of New Zealand and Australia. The latter is so large that it is both a state and a separate continent.
Australia
Australia is also the sixth-largest country in the world, and you will need to allow plenty of time if you want to see it all. Urban life in Sydney and Melbourne, kangaroos and aborigine cave paintings in Mutawintji National Park, the pleasure of hand-feeding the dolphins off Brisbane and the joy of coming right up close to the life of sea turtles at the fascinating Great Barrier Reef.
The Pacific islands
The Pacific islands hold many maritime adventures – from the sight and sound of the humpback whales that rear their calves in the warm waters off the islands of Tonga, to diving among enormous shipwrecks from the Second World War around the Marshall Islands, the Solomon Islands and Micronesia, to a holiday lounging in the sun by the lagoons of Kiribati and Tuvalu. It is also worth going exploring in Samoa, where the great writer and adventurer Robert Louis Stevenson was laid to rest, or follow in the wake of Captain Cook among the islands – the legendary English captain undertook no fewer than three voyages of discovery to Oceania.
New Zealand
Apart from the masses of coral reefs to snorkel around in, Oceania is also rich in volcanoes, many of them still particularly active. That also applies in New Zealand, whose fantastic scenery received lots of superb publicity when the director chose to use both the North Island and the South Island as locations for the fantasy drama about the ring and Hobbits in the film version of The Lord of the Rings. For example, experience Tongariro National Park, which served as the backdrop for Mordor, the land of evil, in The Lord of the Rings, and which the Maori chief Te Heuheu Tukino IV gave to the state of New Zealand in 1877. The park is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List and is dominated by the three large volcanoes, Mount Ruapehu, Mount Ngauruhoe and Mount Tongariro, which all belch forth sulphur.
Papua New Guinea
You really must not omit Papua New Guinea – a veritable laboratory of ancient indigenous cultures, tribal traditions and religions and still one of the world's most mysterious countries. More than 700 different languages are spoken in this country of roughly the same number of tribes. Life around the medieval villages by the Sepik and Fly rivers provides a rare opportunity to view a thoroughly unfamiliar world.
You can read much more about the individual destinations in Oceania here.