a conversation with the pitcairn hair

追加: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]All right, I must say, the whole day I have been probably more excited to talk to someone than I've been in probably like the past 15 years. I could probably talk to you for about as long as I could possibly want. And people probably watching this have no context on who you are or why I'm excited. So, if you guys don't know, this is John Slayer.

[00:00:18]Actually, John, can I show you a clip Yeah, go for it. that I don't know if you've seen before. Maybe you have. I'm just going to play it and Ooh. Oh, dude, this is the Adamstown hair. Pick hair. I find Pick hair.

[00:00:30]There it is.

[00:00:31]The guy you can see his hair in Adamstown in the small island down here.

[00:00:41]I have not seen this before. Do you realize how famous your hair is?

[00:00:45]>> [laughter] >> That That video has 15 million views, by the way. My hair is more famous than I am. Within the community itself, you are probably one of the first learned things in the game. How do you recognize Pitcairn Island? The guy with the hair.

[00:00:59]>> [laughter] >> That's completely news to me, man.

[00:01:01]That's brilliant.

[00:01:02]>> Yeah, so where do you even begin? So, obviously, I've introduced you. You're the trekker for Pitcairn Island, Adamstown, and Henderson, correct? That's right, yeah.

[00:01:12]>> Okay, so I I I honestly just want to hear like the whole story of how this came about, the logistics on how you got the camera there. And we'll get into I know you've done other coverage, too, but we'll start with Pitcairn because it is notably the most remote place in the world. And so, to be able to get a trekker there probably was one of the most difficult things. I would love to hear how you got this opportunity and then how you took the coverage.

[00:01:36]>> Yeah, just to give it a bit of context, my my dad is a marine biologist. So, when it comes to things to do with the ocean, playground as a kid was SeaWorld in South Africa.

[00:01:47]Um when I hit high school age, I was going out on coral reef research trips with my old man up the east coast of Africa.

[00:01:53]Um so, the ocean is my my zen place. And um uh no matter which tangents I've taken in life since then, and there there've been a few, I've always kept returning to the ocean. With that, I won't give you the fully detailed long history of it, but the opportunity came up to get out to the Pitcairn Islands because I'd taken up underwater videography and had been involved with an organization, the Pew Environment Group, that were at the time lobbying to create much bigger marine reserves, conserve the ocean. Um if you set aside these big areas, it goes a long way to towards improving the health of the oceans. And they'd gone to the to the Pitcairn Islands, which is the smallest democracy on the planet.

[00:02:40]Um and they'd seen the opportunity to basically invest in the community and say to them, "Hey, you might be the smallest democracy on the planet, but actually, you know, when it comes to a ratio of how much ocean you have allocated to each person here, you're off the charts. No one else comes close.

[00:02:59]Would you be interested in us helping you out to create a marine reserve, set aside your ocean legacy, and you become the owners of basically one of the most pristine ocean habitats on the planet.

[00:03:12]You get to look after it, and we'll sell it to the planet." Great. Perfect idea.

[00:03:18]We need some underwater footage to to to make this work. And of course, that's what I'd been doing to that point. Um again, there there's a long story to it, but I'd helped out with some other similar projects around the world, and um the Pew Environment Group invited me to head up there. I went along with a um documentary filmmaker called uh Stuart McPherson, who was also doing a documentary film about all the British Overseas Territories, of which Pitcairn is one. They coincided, the money came together, and yeah, then it became a question of, "Okay, how the hell do we get this stuff out there?"

[00:03:53]>> So, how did you get in contact with Google? I through the the underwater footage and so on, I got to connect with um a wonderful woman, my wife calls her my my kind of fairy godmother cuz she made some cool things happen for me.

[00:04:12]Um a lady by the name of Charlotte Vick and she was at the time uh closely connected to Sylvia Earle who is like the godmother god godmother of of marine research and marine conservation.

[00:04:26]Sylvia Earle had been at the launch of Google Earth. I don't know how much of this is anecdotal and how much is >> Yeah.

[00:04:33]but she was sat in the front row. They launched Google Earth. It was amazing, you know, you could zoom in on mountains and go to cities and all the rest of it.

[00:04:42]Brilliant. And she put up her hand at the end and said, "Uh great great, you know, you've done all the green, but what about the blue?" Of course, they looked at Google Earth and 70% of it was blue. Uh it was just a plane.

[00:04:56]There was no detail to it whatsoever. I said, "Aha.

[00:05:00]Maybe we should do something about that." Um and they they basically got the topography of the ocean which you can now see, you know, all the seamounts, all of that stuff going on. They added that into Google Earth as a result.

[00:05:13]But they didn't have any video footage and I'd left the military uh a few years before and spent all the money I saved basically diving around the world and videoing it.

[00:05:24]So, Charlotte was just like, "Oh oh my god, you've got all this video content. Let's throw it on Google Oceans." And um that was where the connection got made. And then of course, they introduced Street View and um I was going to these amazing remote uninhabited tropical islands which no one else was visiting and someone at Google um just kind of went, "Hang on a minute.

[00:05:51]What if we gave this guy a Street View camera and he's going to these uninhabited places that we're not going to capture anyway, he can put them on the map."

[00:05:59]>> that your first time in Pitcairn with the the Trekker coverage? It was, yeah.

[00:06:04]Yeah. So, yeah, 2013. Did you understand how remote it was or how hard it was to get to before you went? Or was it like, "Sounds cool. Let's try it."? I mean, everyone's heard about the HMS Bounty and the Mutiny on the Bounty and you've kind of heard about Pitcairn, but point to it on a map. I mean, yeah. How many people actually know where it is? So, in the back of my mind I'd heard about that and the story goes on. But, yeah, when it came to actually, okay, "You're going to visit Pitcairn. How do you get there?" I mean, yeah. Okay, first thing, look it up on a map and actually discover where it's at. Then everything else started falling out of that.

[00:06:39]>> Okay, so take me through the from start to finish from maybe starting in London to get to Pitcairn with the with the Trekker. When did you meet the Trekker for the first time? How did you travel with the Trekker cuz I'm assuming there's the lithium battery component that Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, obviously we've got these little handheld cameras which you can you can capture Street Views with. But back then it was, yeah, the the classic big green golf ball which you'd usually get on the top of a car, but they'd turned it into a backpack and that backpack uh they obviously had a bunch of them I guess uh cashed around the world. And the ones that I had the one that I had to pick up was from uh the crew at the Google offices in London. So, gosh, where would I have been living at the time? Uh somewhere in middle England. Uh I before the trip, probably a week before to make sure that I I get everything up and running and that there weren't any uh bits missing. Uh just check the kit over. I'd go a week before departing uh into London, pick up and it was two massive boxes.

[00:07:43]Um Uh I think all told it was about 50 kg when you when you included the boxes.

[00:07:49]Those were two big Pelican cases. Um you know, just about the largest ones you can get.

[00:07:55]Um and you'd separate the tower with the green ball into one case, the backpack itself with the batteries into another case. And um that's how it traveled. So, you know, before you've even started to getting any of your gear together, you've already got, you know, 40 40 kg plus uh of of two massive check-in bags.

[00:08:18]Um and [clears throat] then, yeah, London is just about diagonally through the planet from Pitcairn. So, then you got to think about how you're going to get it, you know, how many flight changes and all the rest of the cross to um to Pitcairn. So, uh yeah, that that was the start of it. Um uh lovely crew at the Google offices in London. Um you know, help you out as much as they can. Make sure it all works before you stop, pack it back down in, take it back home, get along with all the rest of your gear, then get yourself to London Heathrow. Uh the first flight you need is to Tahiti via Singapore, I think it was. And then Auckland, and then from Auckland into Tahiti. But on subsequent trips, we've gone the other direction. We had to get to uh it's Gambier Atoll, which is the furthest most eastern point of um French Polynesia. We needed to get there day that's There's then a supply ship which is based in New Zealand, which back then only circled out to Pitcairn once every 3 months.

[00:09:23]So, you had to meet it there and make sure you didn't miss that boat because that was the only way it it then runs a route from Gambier to Pitcairn cuz Pitcairn doesn't have any air facilities. You get there by boat only.

[00:09:35]Um and then it ran a a week turnaround. So, to take take supplies and so on into Pitcairn, wait there for a week to offload and then reload anything coming back and then it'd come back again. Um and then I think it did that rotation for about two or three weeks and then it went back to New Zealand.

[00:09:55]>> How long is the boat? Boat ride is 36 hours. So, you get on in in Gambier at all and then you sail pretty much um due east for 36 hours to get to Pitcairn. So, yeah, it's it's out there, man. It's um it was 3 days of solid traveling just just to get to Pitcairn. You get to Pitcairn no problems at all with the Trekker coverage at this point or I think the satellite coverage was all right cuz it was the GPS that really needed to connect and by 2013 the island actually had a pretty good um internet connection. So, you know, I could connect everything up. Granted, when I was staying at the house that I was staying at, we had a good connection. When you're up and about on the island back then, there wasn't any mobile phone reception or anything like that. So, we're basically just relying on the GPS picking up the the satellite and there were a few snags with that. Uh there were some really really cool captures which I was so excited about seeing. Um there's a place called Down Rope in Pitcairn which is just this path down a vertical cliff which is absolutely mental. Uh with um old Polynesian petroglyphs carved into the rocks on the cliffs at the bottom.

[00:11:11]Beautiful boulder-strewn beach. I mean, just a stunning location. I had I figured out getting this Google Trekker backpack all the way down this vertical path with no safety ropes or anything.

[00:11:23]>> Yeah. This beach all the rest of it sent it back to Google and everything else processed except for this this. So, you know, Wait, so you end up you end up actually going down and taking the footage and it never it never processed?

[00:11:36]Yeah, and you know what I think it was?

[00:11:38]You know, this basically it's it's sea level and the beach is, you know, maybe 20 m across and then just these vertical cliffs just rising for about 200 300 m. And I think, yeah, maybe it started well, but um and then, yeah, the tracker would have basically been dropping vertically for about first 60 m of of coverage. And what whatever the snag was, it it just it didn't process. And so I was going to >> It's sad that we don't get the coverage, but it's also sad that cuz that backpack I'm actually part of a tracker coverage in Costa Rica. So I've had the the newer backpack that is way lighter nowadays and I had to go up a couple of stairs and I was dying.

[00:12:26]So I'm curious, I mean, your physical endurance is is obviously you have history in like the army or something, right? Or Yeah, ex-Royal Marines, so yeah, we we used to carry the world on our backs, yeah. Yeah, so you're quite you're a little more experienced I would say than uh uh than myself, but still you're walking across Adamstown.

[00:12:45]Yeah.

[00:12:46]>> How heavy was the backpack at that point? So here's where the kicker comes.

[00:12:49]You mentioned lithium batteries earlier.

[00:12:52]So lithium batteries back then the tracker back then came with bricks. Like it was a big lithium ion battery. And the international airlines were just about okay with with getting that across. There was just no way around the domestic airline carrying them. So I had to axe that battery and basically I knew I was going to put in Cairns where, you know, there's not that many people and then Henderson there's just nobody. I didn't want to run out run out of battery power, so I just bought locally in Tahiti the biggest lead acid car battery I could find which weighed about somewhere between 20 and 30 kg. I just strapped that to the back of the backpack. That backpack weighed what, 20 kg on its own and then I strapped a brick of lead on the back of that just to power the thing. And that's that's how we got the captures.

[00:13:41]>> You walked Adamstown, which is elevation gain, with a 50 to 60 kg backpack.

[00:13:49]There was a lot of sweat that went into getting those captures. So, I'm glad my hair is famous for it.

[00:13:54]Yeah. And it it looks great, too, by the way. The hair it came out great. And some actually sometimes you were wearing a hat, so it must have been a little too sweaty cuz I'm curious, why did you take the hat off?

[00:14:05]>> It probably would have depended on the day. It probably would have depended on the >> Okay, so how many days did you did you walk?

[00:14:10]>> We were shooting for Stuart's documentary. We had other things going on as well. So, Trek View Street View stuff was one of a spectrum of things that we were doing out there. It would have been done over the duration like at the time that we were there. And uh yeah, the hat probably came out when the sun was shining and then disappeared.

[00:14:30]Trying to get a little bit more situation with Yeah, Pitcairn is exactly as as you've said. It's a volcanic peaks. It's only what, a mile and a half across and it's I think the the top of it is what, 450 m high. So, you you step off the boat and you're walking up a 30° slope uh just to get up to Adamstown, which is, you know, 100 m above the water. And then yeah, wherever you go some of it is flat, but most of it is either uphill or downhill. So, yeah, carrying that backpack about I was lucky that the locals were kind. They get around almost everywhere on on quad bikes. It's great fun. You can get your quad bike license. So, I've got mine somewhere around over here.

[00:15:14]>> What was your reasoning on walking and not doing the coverage on like the back of an ATV? The these were the early days of of of Street View If you're going too >> it would be Yeah, I I think back then they they hadn't the software hadn't hadn't evolved to the point where you could take the backpack version on different forms of transport. I did subsequent captures in 2015 in Indian Ocean and and so on and and they you know you basically had the option, okay, yeah, I captured this on an ATV and you know, but in 2013 it was um yeah, Yeah, you had to use your two legs.

[00:15:50]Yeah, it it was it was actually a great way to see the island, you know. Yeah, and it's super important to be able I don't think people I mean, I would love to know the number of how many people have viewed your imagery. Okay, so Adamstown itself is important because obviously it's the most remote place. I mean, the amount of people there are just curious to go look at that you've allowed people like that must be such a special thing that you have given people the access to view the world in such a remote place that 99.9% people are never going to be able to see with their own eyes. So, first of all, thank you for allowing me and everyone else to like have access and view such a special part of the world. And also, Henderson, the the North Island of Adamstown, it is at least for in my knowledge, every time I I know I'm on Henderson because of how much plastic is everywhere on that beach. It is sad. It is just a beach full of plastic. What was your experience there? Henderson, my first experience of it was we had so so again, this this is thanks to Stuart and of course to to Pew Environment Group.

[00:16:50]They shared the cost of actually I've described the the charter boat actually doing a week-long turnaround, basically going back and forth to Pitcairn and and French Polynesia. They pulled together their funds and said, right, instead of loading for 3 days, can you load for 1 and 1/2 days? We're going to take the boat overnight. We're going to go to Henderson for 1 and 1/2 days and then get back to Pitcairn in time so that you can load the boat up again. So, they paid the the charter costs for that which you know doesn't come cheap. Um but it was doable and they got us across to Henderson for I think it was about 36 hours that we were there.

[00:17:28]And so we woke up in the morning after an overnight transit just to Henderson being spread out in front of us.

[00:17:36]And genuinely I've seen a few places through my time in the military and traveling the world.

[00:17:44]Henderson has been the wildest place that I've ever visited. It just it it feels primeval. It feels like you're out there and you're untouched by man. There's not that many opportunities for that these days. So we got there and the fascinating thing about Henderson is there's four islands in the Pitcairn group. There's Oeno, Pitcairn, Henderson and Ducie. Oeno, Henderson and Ducie are coral atolls. They're all volcanic peaks that have sunk down and all that's left is is a ring of coral um from from where the mountain used to be. Pitcairn is the most recent of them and it's still that volcanic peak. So that volcano erupted after the the other three islands have had started up and become atolls. Now the thing about Pitcairn is it exploded and pushed up so much rock and weight over such a short period of time that it actually cantilevered the earth's crust over there. Henderson is the nearest island to it. It cantilevered Henderson 30 m up out the water.

[00:18:44]So if you if you look at Henderson it's just a flat plateau because it is a coral atoll but it's been raised 30 m up out of the water.

[00:18:54]Um which is why it's a ring of limestone cliffs with a very flat top which is all just covered in jungle. Um proper tropical island. You're 5,000 km from the nearest city.

[00:19:07]Um the nearest habitation is Adamstown which only has 50 people, and that's 160 km away. And yet, um you've got just enormous amounts of trash, plastic, which is has washed up on the beaches there. And um that actually resulted in the 2019 trip.

[00:19:27]>> Is this the trip that your boat overturned? That's the one, yeah. So, exactly as you noticed, this this the original Street Views of of Henderson Island, uh and particularly that that East Beach, the beach is just covered in plastic. The rest of the place is completely wild, untouched by man, but there's just plastic everywhere. One of the things about Henderson Island, it is a sliver of land out there. It's because it's been raised, it's a lot more land area than normal atolls would have.

[00:19:54]So, in terms of seabird nesting habitat, again, for the health of the oceans, seabirds play a big role in that, but they need a place to roost and a place to nest. And Henderson Island is just it's 35 sq km of pristine, untouched land in the middle of the ocean, which is perfect for seabirds to to get their rest and to breed.

[00:20:16]But, it's got rats on it. And rats are very detrimental. Um they were introduced by the Polynesians. It's the Polynesian rats. An effort was made to get rid of the rats. Um they're quite well documented. Get rid of the rats, the seabirds come back in droves, and it's really really helpful.

[00:20:32]I can't remember the exact date, but they tried this on Henderson, and it failed. They think maybe like two or three rats survived, and then they then bred geometric explosion of of population.

[00:20:44]Um they all came back. So, there were efforts underway, okay, we need to study this, we need to figure out how to get it done right. And um one of the researchers, uh a seabird researcher, who it might have been related to that or it was a different project, uh lady by the name of uh Jennifer Lavers, she was looking into the the island to go and do her research, and thought, "Oh, I'll just take a look at it on Google Maps." And zoomed in on Google Earth, saw there was street view, went in and was like, "Man, I'm I'm going to this place and yeah, I'm going to study the seabirds."

[00:21:17]"That is a lot of plastic on that beach.

[00:21:19]That's" And she actually the ball started rolling and um I'm not sure of the the the exact mechanics of it. It's been a while since I spoke to her and and heard the story, but that basically led into the British administrator basically took it on, "Okay, let's raise this expedition.

[00:21:37]We're going to go to this East Beach.

[00:21:39]We're going to take all the plastic off it." He did that. Robin Shackleton is his name. He got us out to Pitcairn in 2019 and this time we went we spent 3 weeks on Henderson Island, which >> 3 weeks on Henderson? Yeah, just just a gift from the gods and What a crazy experience. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. And we were basically we were based on the boat each night except for the night that uh yeah, the first time that we went to land on East Beach we had this big plan about motoring back and forth with uh with our little rigid inflatable boat over the reef at high tide and all the rest of it. Literally the first we dropped everyone off on the beach to go and do their first filming, you know, plastic everywhere, we'll get the before photos and we'll go back to the boat. Yeah, we'll get it all done.

[00:22:27]As we were motoring back out over the reef, a you know, irony of it, discarded nylon rope caught on the reef, caught in our propeller, stalled the boat dead in the surf zone, turned upside down in the surf, literally first return from the shore.

[00:22:44]Yeah, so we were upside down in the surf, lucky not to get dragged over the reef by the boat.

[00:22:50]Managed to right the boat, get it back to the beach, but by then, you know, got the rope out the propeller.

[00:22:56]And then it was just like, "Well, the tide's going down. Can't try this again. Night is approaching. Yeah, we we ended up stranded on on on you know, this uninhabited tropical island overnight. Managed to get out over the reef first thing at at high tide the next morning.

[00:23:15]Which which was lucky, but we then came up with an alternative plan. There's a much better landing on the northern side of the the island, but you know, our target was that East Beach, which really from the prevailing winds collects all the plastic. So, we then had to basically walk in and out um from the North Beach. So, I wasn't actually in the the plastic team, although we documented them. It was a team that basically worked 2 km beach.

[00:23:40]They worked from one side of it to the other over the course of 3 weeks picking up anything larger than plastic bottle top size of plastic and collected all of that over the over 3 weeks and they collected 6 tons of plastic bigger than a plastic bottle top from 2 km of beach on the most Oh my gosh. uninhabited island on the planet, which kind of gives you an idea of the scale of the plastic issue that we have in the ocean. 6 tons, yeah. And me and another ex-Royal Marine, our task was basically for for the benefit of the marine protected area, which by then by now had had been declared, was to document the underwater world around that island.

[00:24:23]So, it was both marine conservation related things, but we were basically had a 3-week live aboard dive trip to Henderson Island and the reefs there unreal. How many people can say that they did that? 3 weeks on Henderson. If you go to the Chagos and do any of the street views over there, I captured I or one of the people that I was traveling with captured all of those. I noticed the hat. You had a similar hat in one of the frames.

[00:24:53]Same hat.

[00:24:54]>> [laughter] >> Okay, I was wondering if it was the same hat. It looked like the same hat from Pitcairn, but Yeah. Wait, so that's that's a little Easter egg that you put in the game for us around Street View.

[00:25:02]The Pitcairn hat is the same hat and was it Nelson Island you went to?

[00:25:07]Uh yeah, so um in the in the Chagos, uh I forget how many islands we actually did. I think we did uh it was more than 10 islands. I think somewhere around about 15 islands that's about there. So, there is there's quite a lot of coverage out there, but yeah, equally uh there equally difficult to get to.

[00:25:27]Um quite a different flavor of island over there. They're all atoll islands and um we've actually got some some underwater Street Views out there as well. There was I don't know if you've ever heard of the Catlin Seaview Survey.

[00:25:43]And they basically had a um they engineered again, this is more than 10 years ago. So, it was pretty new stuff.

[00:25:51]I think you could you could probably emulate this a bit more easily these days, but back then they put a 360 camera on the front of an electric underwater scooter and basically were producing long they had a GPS buoy on the surface attached to the scooter and tied the two of them together and they were getting Street Views underwater. So, we've got some underwater Street View in in the Chagos Islands as well. I've seen underwater Street View, but I didn't know that you were a part of that, too.

[00:26:20]You're just the ocean guy, apparently on Street View. You know what I we should do? I'm going to send this video to Google so they'll feel more pressure.

[00:26:27]You know what I would love to do, John?

[00:26:29]I would love to do Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha. Tristan da Cunha. And it also doesn't have Street View right now.

[00:26:37]There's no tracker there at all. I'm sending this to Google, John. Would you go with me if I was able to convince Google to give us a camera?

[00:26:46]100%.

[00:26:47]>> I think that would be fun. And then honestly, if it you can't not do the tracker and you can't not be there.

[00:26:53]You're kind of like the guy.

[00:26:57]>> I'll even bring the hat.

[00:26:59]>> [laughter] >> Well, no, no, we we have to have your hair in it. Your hair is more That is well. Also, wait, let me show you this. We actually have a lot in common, John. Okay, so this is in Costa Rica, right? Yeah.

[00:27:11]Uh beautiful area.

[00:27:13]But this coverage right here, beautiful, right?

[00:27:16]There we go.

[00:27:18]There we go. [laughter] There's the hair.

[00:27:22]My hair and your hair are both on Street View forever. It's fantastic.

[00:27:28]They have a height limit on the trekker now. So, if you're over like 5 ft like 6, it's a little hard to be [laughter] a camera guy.

[00:27:35]But uh Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll I'll I'll I'll like crawl around the island if I need to. It's okay. I'm going to play a little game with you, too. I put together five locations that you covered and I want to see if you can guess where your coverage is. I Let's go. All right.

[00:27:52]Good luck. All right. Where is this?

[00:27:54]This is Pitcairn Island, definitely.

[00:27:56]Which side of Pitcairn Island is that?

[00:27:58]>> You can see You can see the hair if you also didn't know what island you're on.

[00:28:01]Yeah.

[00:28:03]That's [laughter] it.

[00:28:04]Now I know what my famous hair looks like.

[00:28:07]Fantastic.

[00:28:08]Um Did you know Wait, did you know that your hair was going to be in the coverage when you were taking it? Or did you I did not know. I've gotten a lot of comments asking what your hair care routine is, also, by the way, cuz people Let's go scuba diving for 3 hours and soak your hair in sea water and then let it dry naturally.

[00:28:31]Yeah, there we go. We've got it there.

[00:28:33]This is obviously one of the quad bike tracks on Pitcairn Island. Last time I was there was in 2023. So, 2 years out to try and identify which of the tracks it is. So, this will be either going down towards uh St. Peter's Pool, which is on the uh northwest corner, or this is going down to the east side of the island. Uh um I'm trying to figure out which one it is. I'm going to go with uh the east side of the island. Um wait, I'm looking if I'm looking out there and >> is looking northwest right now. Okay, that that that that changes my answer. I I I think this is northwest of of Adamstown and uh dropping down towards uh Peter's Pool on the northeastern side of Pitcairn Island.

[00:29:20]>> Put your your cursor over the map. You can zoom in on Pitcairn and make an official guess. If we get If we can find Pitcairn on the map.

[00:29:26]>> [laughter] >> I somewhere over here, I think.

[00:29:33]That is my official guess. Let's see.

[00:29:38]You got the road right.

[00:29:39]>> [laughter] >> You got the perfect score. Perfect score, right? 55 m away. Ooh, interesting. I think you've taken me to uh the Chagos Islands with this one.

[00:29:52]>> There's a lot of islands to choose from.

[00:29:56]And >> Is that your hat in the photo? That is the hat, yeah. British Indian Ocean Territory. I am going to try for Nelson's Island on this one if I can actually find it. Yeah, it's like two pixels on the screen. If If you want to just verbally say what you're guessing and then just guess, we'll we'll take your guess, too.

[00:30:15]Okay. Yeah, Nelson's Island is is what I was going to go for because it's I can see it's quite a narrow island. Most of these are atoll islands, but the interesting thing about uh Nelson Island is um it's on the top edge of the Great Chagos Bank, which is the largest living coral atoll on the planet.

[00:30:35]But even though it's very large, it actually has only six small islands spread around the outside of it, and it's about 100 mi across. So, if I can't see any islands on the horizon, then I'm opting for uh Finola's Island.

[00:30:47]>> All right, put a pin down, and then just make a guess. I can't see any any land.

[00:30:51]It's really tricky to pick out the uh I'll I'll go with that, and hope that I'm close.

[00:30:59]236 km away.

[00:31:01]>> [laughter] >> It's all blue.

[00:31:04]Okay, yeah. It's It's Nelson Island.

[00:31:07]Sweet.

[00:31:08]>> [laughter] >> Okay, yeah. I recognized that straight off the bat. The East Beach of Henderson Island. Straight away, you can see all the plastic. This is the edge of the old coral atoll that was raised 30 m into the air by that volcanic eruption which created Pitcairn. And this is the East Beach which collects all the prevailing wind. Just blows all of this trash onto So, in 2019, around about the end of June 2019, this was all just clear sand. And they actually um They had another trip back there.

[00:31:42]Was it last year?

[00:31:44]Where they went back to see how much uh plastic had accumulated again. And also to remove the 6 tons of plastic which we collected cuz our plan was to collect all of that plastic and then motor it over the reef in our small boat. But we wrecked the small boat on literally the first day that we were there.

[00:32:05]Uh as I've described cuz the rope wrapped around the propeller. So, we basically cashed it at the top of the beach. So, the beach was clear, but there were big orange bags which I think I've sent you photos of that as well.

[00:32:17]Just collected at the top of the beach, and uh they were sat there without a plan how to get them off until um yeah, I think it was last year they they sent another trip out. They collected all of that, and they measured how much plastic had returned to the beach after we cleared it in 2019. So, um I would say we are midway along the Let's see how we do. It's Pacific Ocean on the Chagos again, which It's crazy like looking at the map and thinking zooming in the water and just knowing like I've been here.

[00:32:52]Like my feet have been in this in the middle. Just how much blue there is there and you've been to that little speck of land in the middle of it all. So, I'm going to guess that this is somewhere around about there.

[00:33:10]Oh, 28 m.

[00:33:14]That's great. All right. Ah, okay. Yeah.

[00:33:18]I recognize this straight away. This is in Salomon Atoll of the Chagos Islands.

[00:33:26]And I think if I look straight down, yeah. That's a dead giveaway as well.

[00:33:30]We're on a boat.

[00:33:32]Uh, which is great. Um, so we actually did a track across the bottom edge of of the Salomon Atoll. Um, I really wanted to do this because I wanted to capture the the the shadow reefs along that southern edge. And there's also just some little specks of island along the southern edge of of Salomon Atoll, which are just stunningly beautiful and you can see them strung out along over here. So, I think we went from um >> [clears throat] >> Ile Takmaka, which is I think this one over here, and we motored all the way along the southern edge of the lagoon and then turned the corner around the bottom over here. And we finished up.

[00:34:13]You can just see this group of palm trees over here. Those are growing out on an old jetty. The tragic history of of the Chagos is that the local population was moved off to make a at the height of the Cold War to make a military base on Diego Garcia.

[00:34:29]And um it's it's caused no end of problems ever since Uh, not the least of which to the actual people that were moved off.

[00:34:37]But this jetty served what used to be a settlement which is now completely overgrown by by jungle and and palm trees. So we were motoring to this jetty over here where we finished the the the the transect.

[00:34:51]And let's let's see if I can actually find the the Chagos Islands this time around.

[00:34:57]It's pretty tough.

[00:34:58]>> [laughter] >> It's pretty tough.

[00:35:01]Uh you just Yeah, you can make a guess anywhere you think and we know you know where it is.

[00:35:05]>> [laughter] >> Yeah, so I'm going to guess it's going to be around about there I should think.

[00:35:14]Let's try that.

[00:35:16]Yeah, too too too far west but okay.

[00:35:18]Yeah, if I could have found that atoll that's that's where I would have >> [laughter] >> Yeah, up in the blue again. There you go. You can actually see the shape of the atoll.

[00:35:27]So that's that's Eleman atoll over there and this is Peros Banhos. There were two big settlements in this northern part of the atolls. One was on Ile de Coin down here.

[00:35:38]And it was on Ile Boddam over here.

[00:35:40]That's it. There we go. Close.

[00:35:43]Ah, here we go. Okay. Yeah, recognize it straight away as well. So if you ever visit Adamstown make sure that you go to the Pitcairn Museum which is the straight behind you over here. Pitcairn is Yeah, in history is famous for the mutiny on the Bounty.

[00:36:00]And this museum looks straight out over if you drop down onto the coast just in front of these buildings over here and a little bit to to your right you're going to be in Bounty Bay which is where they sailed HMS Bounty off after they'd mutinied and then they ran the boat aground and burned her in the shallows and you can still dive on the remains. And in fact that's one of the links that I sent you is um I did a little photosphere, which uh I posted on um uh in the water right next to basically where you can still see ballast bars and find little copper nails from uh from the wreck of the Bounty in the shallow.

[00:36:42]It's just off Bounty Bay. So, um yeah, this is this is the museum on Pitcairn Island in uh in Adamstown. So, let's uh let's find that in the Pacific again. If you get this right, it would be a perfect score in Adamstown and we'll see. So, no pressure. Also, you can see your shadow in this uh picture here. Oh, yeah, look at that. Look at that. Do I have the hats on there? Yeah, I think I've got that on.

[00:37:06]>> You have the hat on, yeah.

[00:37:07]>> [laughter] >> Oh, there you go. Pitcairn Island Museum. It's even got a little tab hopefully for me, so I'm going to put it there.

[00:37:16]7 [snorts] m. Boom! There you go.

[00:37:21]You're officially a Pitcairn pro, as we would say.

[00:37:26]Brilliant.

[00:37:26]>> [laughter] >> Oh, that was awesome. Good way to look back at some memories that, you know, experiences. And especially if it's covered as much as as you have it's it's cool that you have that attachment to it. Yeah, thank you for giving me your time and and talking to me. And you know, I'm glad that everyone has the opportunity to now see the person behind the Street View that has, like I said before, given us such a privilege really of access to the world. And I just wanted to thank you on behalf of me and the people watching cuz I think it's a it's a special thing. So, so thank you, John. This Thanks so much. What a what a great uh great thing to to be able to share and to obviously to an audience that that are really passionate about uh exploring the world. Uh and you know, one of the things I really get a kick out of when when doing those things is I know I'm one of the few people that actually gets the privilege of physically going there. So, to be able to put it in in a place where other people can just sit down in front of their computers and feel like they are part of the exploration, part of the adventure is is just brilliant. So, thank you. Love it.