South Pacific Websites Offer Photos, Maps, Guides

Vancouver, Canada, October 28, 2005 — South Pacific guidebook writer David Stanley has created three travel websites to display his photos, maps, and guides. Each of Stanley's sites currently outranks all competitors on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

http://www.pacific-pictures.com is a 23-page collection of 207 travel photos from 15 Pacific island destinations. Aside from the country pages, Pacific-Pictures.com has theme pages on beaches, buildings, cities, landscapes, people, ships, sightseeing, and trees and plants. A few of Stanley's photos originally appeared in Moon Handbooks South Pacific, while the rest are published here for the first time.

http://www.mapsouthpacific.com describes and maps 16 countries and territories in Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. Each political entity has its own country map, and individual island maps are being added on a regular basis. All maps are accompanied by introductions to their areas.

A separate section of MapSouthPacific.com exhibits 84 antique engravings of the western Pacific by French chronicler Domeny de Rienzi (1789-1843). Each de Rienzi print is presented as a captioned thumbnail, which clicks through to a popup of the engraving.

http://www.southpacific.org has been online since 1999. It provides answers to FAQs, weather and events pages, music and film catalogs, resources, and excepts from Stanley's four travel guides. SouthPacific.org covers Tahiti and French Polynesia, Pitcairn, Easter Island, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tonga, American Samoa, independent Samoa, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, Tuvalu, Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands.

The ease of navigation and fast loading format makes visiting these sites trouble free. According to Stanley, "the websites were originally intended to promote my guidebooks, but they've taken on a life of their own. Unlike printed books which are unchangeable between editions, online information can be updated as often as necessary." Prospective Pacific travelers need search no further.

About David Stanley
David Stanley's travel guides are widely known around the South Pacific. His opus magnum, Moon Handbooks South Pacific, was first published in 1979 and is now in its 8th edition. Moon Handbooks Tahiti covers French Polynesia, Easter Island, and the Cook Islands, while Moon Handbooks Tonga-Samoa is devoted to Tonga, Niue, and the Samoas. The 7th edition of Moon Handbooks Fiji was published in September, 2004. All four guidebooks are published by Avalon Travel Publishing of Emeryville, California, and copies can be ordered through http://www.southpacific.org