Though I have never been formally trained as a journalist, I try to be objective in what I write.  I present the facts as they are spoken to me, I take good notes, and I try to select photographs that do justice to the feature of these islands I am trying to highlight.  I don’t like to insert myself as forcefully into the narration as this chapter does, but at the end of the day, the apart project is not just about these isolated islands, but rather about my experiences with them.  The people I speak to are the people that I naturally gravitate towards, or that gravitate towards me. The places I visit and photograph are those that I find or am shown. This project could never offer an exhaustive look at these islands and their cultures, even if I had years of my time to spend on each one.  Rather, it is a snapshot in time of the people, places, and cultural oddities that this curious, 30-something-year-old American can find as he pokes around remote regions of the world, camera in hand.

In my many long days and nights at sea in the Australs, one of my sources of entertainment was reading a lovely book called An Island to Oneself, written by a New Zealander named Tom Neale who gave up conventional life in the 1960s to move to the uninhabited atoll of Suwarrow in the Cook Islands.  It was a fascinating read, though not a life I would wish for myself; I crave human interaction far too much. For that reason, when I found myself celebrating my 33rd birthday on the island of Raivavae, traveling alone in the South Seas with no birthday cake available to me, I opted to give myself an odd birthday present: I decided to spend a single night in my tent on an uninhabited motu off the coast of Raivavae, and experience for one night what it means to literally have an island all to myself.