The eternal, fanciful allure of the South Pacific

AS A DISTRACTING sidebar to much grimmer stories, newspapers around the world have been publishing tales of tourists stranded in palm-fringed places, unable to catch a flight home. A 19-year-old Briton trapped on a tropical island after a stint volunteering for a charity told the BBC, “I think people assume, ‘You’re in Fiji, you’re on the beach sipping cocktails, it’s just a holiday.’ Everything is in lockdown and we spend our days looking for ways to get home.” Some hapless travellers have been told by their governments that the only way to get back to their families is to charter a private jet at their own expense.

That is exactly what some much richer people have been doing, albeit heading in the opposite direction. Scrutineers of flight-tracking websites report an increase in private jets leaving America, in particular, for the vast, remote South Pacific. They include two Gulfstream jets that left Los Angeles earlier this month and landed in Tonga. The Polynesian kingdom is supposedly closed to air traffic. In Fiji, the rumour that Nicole Kidman was holed up on Wakaya Island, where Keith Richards once fell head first out of a coconut tree, proved unfounded. But others have gone to ground there. Agents report a rise in superyacht charters, too, by billionaires and their families looking for “remote” locations in which to self-...

Read More