It was the year 2012. At that time, I had already been living in Australia for two years and was thinking about where to go on vacation. I thought it would be interesting to travel somewhere as far as possible from the center of Europe, where I come from, and take advantage of my current location on Australia’s east coast. On the internet, I found a site with a tool where I marked my hometown of Pardubice in the Czech Republic and drew a straight line through the globe. The point it showed me on the other side of our planet lay in the middle of the endless waters of the Pacific Ocean. So I looked for the nearest land. And that turned out to be the Cook Islands — a Pacific paradise in the heart of the ocean.
From Brisbane, I first flew to Auckland in New Zealand and then several more hours to the capital, Avarua, on the island of Rarotonga. Suddenly, I found myself nearly 20,000 kilometers from my native soil. At a local market, I bought a wooden figurine of the local Māori god named Tangaroa. In local mythology, he is the lord of the sea and fertility.
One evening at the hotel, together with a German and a Japanese guy, we were drinking beer. And on that hot tropical night under a sky full of stars, the idea was born — I would take this figurine with me and photograph it everywhere I travel.
Over the past thirteen years, Tangaroa has traveled tens of thousands of kilometers with me. We sailed on an ocean liner to New Caledonia and Vanuatu. He crossed Australia with me from east to west. From Bali and Borneo all the way to Hong Kong. He kept me company in the Philippines and Japan. He looked at me reproachfully when I was smoking massive joints in Jamaica, cheered with me at the FC St. Pauli stadium in Hamburg. We even followed Bohemians football club beyond the Arctic Circle in Norway and into sub-Saharan Africa.
I’m certain that no object — and probably no person — originally from the Cook Islands has traveled more than this loyal companion of mine.
HERE you can find some photos from our travels
Tangaroa on the road