In the spring of 1990 I was a new M.S. student working with Dr. Paul Cox. I had come to work with Cox because I was interested in conducting research in Pacific Island cultural and biological systems studying evolution of traditional medicinal practices among closely related communities 'isolated' by water. My understanding of the Pacific was, and still is, limited. Dr. Cox had recently developed some excellent research relationships with scholars in Thailand and encouraged me to explore research questions that I could address there. Near the beginning of the year, Dr. Cox told me that he was going to Samoa for about a month and that when he returned, he expected me to have a clear set of research questions that I could address in Thailand. He left. I went to work in the library trying to focus on ethnobotany in Thailand. For several days I dutifully returned home with piles of books that my wife and I explored, trying to learn more about Thailand. My mind quickly drifted back to the Pacific Islands and I began to haunt Pacific regions of the library. Rather than bring home the books that were not about Thailand, I began to pile them up in my office. After about a week of searching I came across a book (and to this day I do not remember the source) that listed Island archipelagos of the Pacific in a table showing the highest altitude in each archipelago, land area, and a few other details. This table served as the basis for some basic decisions that I made that in retrospect may not all have made much sense. I knew that higher islands had greater botanical diversity and I wanted to work in a community where people had access to lots of plants, so I arranged the list in order from highest island group to lowest. I then began from the highest and worked my way down asking several questions: 1) Has ethnobotanical research been done in this place before? (I wanted to be the first! and planned to use other locations as comparative sites.), 2) Does the archipelago have one culture or several? (I wanted to work with one community that would not require sorting out relationships with an adjacent group.) and 3) Is the archipelago distant from other islands? (The more isolated the better since isolation presumably would increase local dependence and distinction.) As I worked my way down the list eliminating one archipelago after another or placing them on a "maybe" list, I was soon left with one really prominent, isolated island "group": Rotuma. There were then two weeks to go before Dr. Cox returned and I had to decide what to do. Get my act together and prepare some sort of proposal for work in Thailand, or go for it and prepare a project concept for a place I had not even heard of a few days before. I went for the later.