Guam, the metropolis of Micronesia, is an American military outpost bristling with antennae, dishes and domes.  At the same time it’s a busy resort for Japan’s “office ladies” shopping till they drop in slick shopping malls, frolicking on manicured beaches.  Yet in sleepy villages around the coast where Magellan dropped anchor in the 16th century, you’ll find Chamorro villagers preparing for fiestas, their pre-Christian traditions alive if heavily overlain by centuries of Spanish – and now American – rule. 

For many the great attractions of Guam are waiting in the silent depths.  Australian diving entrepreneur John Bent is attempting to salvage one of the 17th century Spanish galleons, laden with Mexican silver, which floundered on the reef separating the island from the abyss of the Marianas Trench.  Others seek out the legacies of World War Two, above or below the waterline.

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How much more to swallow?  The bottle is still half full of the sour, grey sludge. Rain beats down on the thatch overhead, feet scuff the loose coral underfoot.

Fill the coconut-shell cup, raise it, close the eyes… ugh.   Lips slowly going numb.

The mysteries of Pohnpei, Micronesian island of rain-drenched forests, dense mangroves and long-abandoned stone cities, only deepen through a glass of paralysing sakau.  This extract from an Indian pepper bush tastes like a bitter thickshake; the way Pohnpeians knock back the stuff at roadside bars belies the elaborate rituals they associate with sakau.

The Germans built a belltower and a naval cemetery; the Spaniards left a crumbling city wall.  Japanese colonists bequeathed a taste for sashimi, cubed tuna; Americans, who still pull the strings in the newly-independent Federated States of Micronesia, built most of the modern infrastructure and introduced nickels and dimes, baseball and yellow school buses.

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Too small to mint its own currency,  Nauru has become a tax haven, attracting money launderers.

Nauru is a tiny equatorial Micronesian nation whose prosperity (no longer assured) relied until recently on phosphate rock, that is, ossified bird droppings, a resource now almost depleted. Inside the reef, a lush equatorial coastline belies the moonscape of the heavily-mined interior. Nauru's few visitors can fish for marlin, yellowfin tuna, skipjack, barracuda and more.

More recently, Nauru became a "dumping ground" or resettlement place for some of Australia's unwanted refugees. But many Nauruans question whether this is an appropriate role for an independent nation.

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These low-lying coral atolls span three thousand kilometres of ocean, home to barely eighty thousand souls. Sir Arthur Grimble, author of A Pattern of Islands, wrote eloquently of his experiences as a colonial officer in the Gilbert Islands a century ago. Even in spite of the upheaval of global war then independence, daily life has changed little in Grimble’s former colony.

“Television (we have none)... we do work but we have not become slaves to it.” With these well-chosen words the 78,000 Micronesians of Kiribati (Kirr-i-bas) - known to our parents’ generation as Gilbert Islanders - present themselves to the world.

It’s the kind of place where everybody comes out to the airport when a flight is due; where the departing traveller, formally rubber-stamped out of the country is turned loose for the next hour, free to wander out the gate and disappear.

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Megalithic temples are not normally associated with tiny islands in the Pacific Ocean.  Yet on Pohnpei (formerly Ponape) not only are there tangible remains of four distinct episodes of colonisation but the monumental ruins found on Pohnpei, a rain-drenched Micronesian island whose tropical forests and coastal mangroves partly conceal the ruined city of Nan Madol, a veritable Venice of the Pacific.

Before the colonists – German, Spanish, Japanese and American – arrived, the semi-mythical Saudeleurs were lords of all they surveyed.  Legends tell how they built Nan Madol, the Places in Between, to rise up out of the seas from Sounahleng, the reef of heaven.  More prosaic analyses confirm that the 92 man-made islets were occupied as early as 200 BC by a regal elite, but shed little light on the means by which the twenty-ton basalt slabs were shifted into place. 

Pohnpeians are often loath to visit this haunted place where stark dead tree trunks, sinuous palms and papaya push aside the black stones...

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