Isolated Isles: Marshall Isles & Dutch Antilles

In this programme host Zay Harding travels to two beautiful archipelagos of isolated islands, one in the Pacific and the other in the Atlantic. First he explores the very rarely visited Marshall Islands, some of the world’s remotest islands of all, way out in the middle of the vast Pacific ocean. Subsequently, he heads on to the Atlantic coast of South America, to check out the fascinating former Dutch colonies of Curacao and Bonaire. Bizarrely, when he first flies in to the Marshall Islands, Zay has to pass through a US military airport on Kwajalein atoll, which is part of a high security ballistic missile test site. Swiftly ushered off the military base, Zay catches a boat to the adjacent island of Ebeye, to dive the wreck of a WWII battleship that sank here as a result of damaged sustained during the USA’s controversial post-war atomic bomb tests on nearby Bikini atoll. Attracted by the chance of working at the US military base on Kwajalein, thousands of Marshall Islanders have moved to the tiny island of Ebeye; now hugely overcrowded, it’s been given the unflattering nickname ‘the slum of the Pacific’. Zay watches the local baseball team playing in the only open space on Ebeye big enough for the game – the rubbish dump. Flying on to Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, Zay visits a project set up to preserve and promote traditional Marshallese canoe-building and navigational skills. Zay learns how local sailors have the ability to navigate towards far-flung islands by reading signs from the ocean swells. Marshallese sailing canoes are the fastest in the Pacific, and Zay joins in a dramatic impromptu race, battered by fierce Pacific winds. At Majuro dock, Zay meets up with WWII enthusiast Matt Holly, boarding a dive boat to cross 80 miles of open ocean to the small and extremely remote Mili atoll. Guns, planes, and other wreckage from the WWII Japanese base on Mili, bombed by the Americans, can still be seen s