The Deserted Island Project

29 January 2010 - After more than 1 year of inactivity, I am now back to work, restructuring the DIP website, aiming at a whole new way of planning this adventure: a community based forum where everyone will be free to post his comments, advices, professional help and non. Come on in! Sign up and post new threads!

08 October 2008 - D.I.P. Flyer first test in HK - Today I finally printed out a flyer for the deserted island project, and guess what, i've tested its impact on the masses, by distributing it in the streets of Hong Kong for 1 hour time. People thought I wanted to sell them something, but at last few of them stopped and curiously asked me lot of questions about my dream. Some were not directly interested but they said they will be spreading the news among their friends. The only problem is that this way of promoting my project it's way too expensive and out of budget, supposing that I pay around 0.25 HK$ per flyer and willing to give away 1 million copies, that would cost me over 50.000 US dollars! So if someone is willing to sponsor this initiative by flying with a helicopter over the main streets of Hong kong (but after all any other big metropolis will do) and throwing a million copies of my flyer on people, please do let me know. Actually, if you are willing to volunteer in my project, you could contribute by just posting a copy of my flyer onto any board at your university or workplace or library, anything, or eventually by just passing the voice to your contacts...well thank you very much in advance if you can help me out of this hard mission...Ok I have made 2 different designs, you can download them here: flyer1 ; flyer2 (all are in .doc format).

06 August 2008 - The deserted island project has today appeared on one of the largest italian portal about moving abroad. www.voglioviverecosi.com is a website entirely dedicated to Italians who are tired of living in their country and are looking for alternative life styles. It has well populated forum with users who can give some awesome tips and hints. There are numerous and well explanatory sections on how to invest and live oversea. Thanks to Alessandro who has kindly promoted my project!

Continue to older news...

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Help from you needed ! Apart for searching a partner, I am also looking for any kind professional support or non for the research in this project: any help, partial collaboration or useful information will be fully appreciated. Check out the forum or the dedicated areas to find out where and how you can contribute to this project...

How to get on the island:

I will collect here my ideas on how to reach the destination, how to get off from it, what are the costs and which way of transport can be used.

Sailing boat: The choice suggesting more freedom of movement, would be of buying a small sailing boat and share the expenses. Following this idea, there are couple of things that need to be researched, verified and discussed.

1) How much is the average cost of a sailing boat capable of a middle/long distance travel range?

2) Is it better to buy the sailing boat at the nearest port off the island (in this way paying it more but saving a lot of miles to travel and probably a lot of trouble) or is it more convenient to buy it somewhere else and travel all the way with it?

3) Is the sailing boat going to need any technical maintenance if we leave it anchored around the island for the whole period of permanence (considering that it could be up to a year or so) ?

4) How to get off the island in case the boat gets damaged ?

Asking for a passage: By paying or not, try to speak to the local boatmen and find out if there is anyone heading nearby the island who can give us a ride. Yet other questions are popping up:

1) How much would it cost to hire a person who can lead us to the island?

2) Can the person who would take us to the island be considered a threat for this experiment? He could inform the authorities? Or might be deciding to interfere with our plans? Will he be going to create any trouble knowing our location?

3) Who is going to pick us up? The same person who brought us there, or is it better to hire someone else for the pickup, setting the date in advance?

...more to come...

Researching the island:

It is currently unknown the total precise number of uninhabited islands around the whole planet earth. There are currently more than 100,000 islands which are said to be uninhabited. But actually, it would be very hard to find out some precise information: the main issue, is that I will have to exclude those which are located too far from the tropical climate zone (that is covering a round the year temperature allowing , which would (let's suppose) take at least 75,000 off 100,000. Let's than substract other 15.000 off for impossible living conditions, another 12,500 because are either too small or too big, another 6,250 perhaps because the natives wouldnt allow foreigners to live on their islands...and so on...

One of the most powerful tools that I use for my research is Google Earth. It gives me the opportunity to view and zoom to almost all the planet earth. It works very similarly to a satellite software. It's very useful not only to discover new little tiny islands, but also to check on their conditions and accessibility!

Places found:

Location: center of Indian ocean, nearby Diego Garcia island
General info: these small atolls are actually occupied by the british army. It seems that many of those small islands are uninhabited, as you can see from the pictures taken by the satellite with Google earth. Apart from few islands where you can clearly see signs of settlements, in the majority of them (for example the two in the picture) you can see absolutely no apparent signs of civilization.
Coordinates: 5'20'15.60 S / 72'16'12.06 E , [Photo at 2.66km of altitude]

Other places to search: Oceania (Kiribati , Micronesia , Polinesia, some of the australian coral islands, cook, Palau, )

Researching the partner/s:

The best for me, would be of course doing it with someone I love, or my ideal woman, just the two of us.
Alternatively, create a group of few fellows...friends, males and females, to give balance to the group. Not more than 5 or 6 persons in total, to avoid damage to the peaceful environment and also according to the type and size of the island. It must be a very strict selection of people as we couldn't afford to screw the trip once we get off. This task seems to be even more difficult than the one of finding the proper island where to settle.

I previously posted this idea of surviving in a desolated island, on some traveling forum, back in 2003 or 2004, but I got only response from 2 people: one was an american army guy (a jet pilot) who claimed to had participated to a war in middle east, he said he would have been available to join me, but he suddenly disappeared after two weeks we start to exchange emails about this project. Another one, a girl apparently living in Ireland, but of an unknown nationality, who also misteriously disappeared short after we got in touch.
I hope this kind of episodes will not take place anymore, and I would try to underline more my devotion and seriousness in this matter, for future online advertisements. Highlighting that simply curious people who are not really interested should stay away.

More to come...