Jungle Islands: My South Sea Adventure (Adventure Travel)

Jungle Islands: My South Sea Adventure (Adventure Travel)

From School Library JournalGrade 4-9-Encounters with sharks, giant centipedes, crocodiles, falling coconuts, and native peoples are detailed in this fascinating travelogue by Coffey and Goering, who kayaked through the Solomon Islands. Interesting sidebars answer questions about customs, school, transportation, and unusual animals of the region. Striking full- and double-page captioned color photographs accompany the text. Each chapter also includes a hand-drawn map that will enable readers to travel along with the adventurers. This is a book that will be great to read just for fun and it will serve as a terrific accompaniment to geography and social studies lessons.Diane Olivo-Posner, Long Beach Public Library, CACopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.An adventure by kayak through the Solomon Islands, in the South Pacific Ocean and the third book in Annick Press' award-winning Adventure Travel series.The Solomon Islands in the South Pacific Ocean are full of sharks, malaria, giant centipedes and crocodiles, and are also the home to lush jungle, beautiful cockatoos, waist-high orchids, and tropical butterflies.Maria Coffey and husband Dag love to kayak. Their adventure begins in Honiara, the capital city of the Solomon Islands, where Maria and Dag first encounter Pidgin English and men with mouths stained red from chewing betel nuts and lime. They snorkel incredible reefs alive with the rich blues, greens and reds of hundreds of fish, coral and clamshells -- and the odd lagoon shark! During their travels, they visit Skull Island, which houses the heads of dead chiefs; they learn to cook traditional food like taro and cassava roots; they witness the incredible, huge leatherback turtles burying their eggs in the sand and making decoy nest holes to fool the local monitor lizards. They even get lost among small, remote, uncharted islands. Yet everywhere Maria and Dag go, the locals welcome them with generosity and kindness.Ever wonder about giant fruit bats, what a bathroom in the jungle looks like or what are the top ten uses for coconuts? Sidebars recount fascinating cultural facts and information from around the Islands. Maps are dispersed throughout the text with spectacular photography, enabling the reader to follow the kayak along its journey. An index is included for easy reference.ReviewA most interesting read! Highly Recommended. (Gail Hamilton Canadian Materials 2001-03-16)About the AuthorMaria Coffey and Dag Goering are a husband-and-wife team who have traveled the world together, Maria writing about their adventures and Dag photographing them. Maria is the author of the popular Annick titles A Seal in the Family and A Cat in a Kayak.Debora Pearson is the author of the Mighty Wheels series. She co-authored the first two books in Annick's Adventure Travel series: 52 Days by Camel: My Sahara Adventure (1998) and By Truck to the North (1998). She was also the editor of the acclaimed The TV Book (1996). Debora lives in Toronto.