A Beginner's Guide to Paradise: A True Story for Dreamers, Drifters, and Other Fugitives from the Ordinary

Alex Sheshunoff headed up a mid-tier startup during the dot-com boom. He tired of this and decided to head out to a tropical paradise. He bounced around a few remote Pacific islands. He finds his future wife and builds a house. The book details his adventures.

He chose to first go to Yap, an island in Micronesia. This is well off the beaten path. But he one-upped himself and went off to the island of Pig. This gets even more remote. I had trouble finding any details of this online. Had to go down to some details to find it existed as part of Ulithi atoll. But even here, it was shown as an uninhabited island. There was another island there that did seem similar to the island. Was that it? There were a few people there. Men lived in a men hut. He talked with a chief to determine if he could come to the island (and gifted some cigarettes.) The island had a dress code of nothing more than a grass skirt - for everybody.  Somehow it was very traditional, yet addicted to cigarettes. Talk about the wrong bit of modernity.

Guam was perhaps the most "modern" island that he visited. The others ranged from off the beaten path to really off the beaten path. The book covers a great deal of time in Palau. It was there that he met his eventual wife. Later he decided he wanted to build a house on a remote island. This required some negotiations with the residents. (Foreigners are not allowed to own land, but must get permission from the landowners to build there. The land is "controlled" by all the family.) The author recruited some friends and worked on building a house. The last chunk of the book details this experience. (As a quick denomont, he later mentioned that the house was mostly destroyed in a storm.)

After the island experience, he moved back to the US where they raised a family and lived a more "normal" Ameircan life.