I’ve always dreamed of finding a nice, isolated, tropical island with nobody living on it and establish a residence there. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life there, but it would be nice to try a year of complete solitude.
Naturally, I have some questions about this.
Is it even possible, in this day and age, to find an uninhabted island? A real island that a human being could sustain himself on, not a 10 foot across plot of sand with a single coconut tree.
Is there anything illegal about this? Can an American citizen legally just “up and leave” the country on a boat to an unspecificed destination for an unspecified period ot time?
What should I bring along to help me survive (besides the obvious food and drink)?
Under US law, you can leave the US at any time. But you might find that any habitable island has already been claimed by some other country, so you might want to check up on that country’s immigration laws. And if the island is actually owned by a private individual, they might want to eject you from their island as a trespasser.
There’s a lot of islands in the Pacific too small to sustain a permanent population. A good number of them also belong to the US.
I don’t remember the names of them, but I think Johnston Atoll may be one of them.
Some of them do have weather stations or are wildlife refuges, though. Moving in may be legally problematic since they’re considered gov’t property of the various nations that claim them.
Uninhabited doesn’t mean no one has ever lived there, just that no one is living there now. So there are many thousands of islands worldwide that are uninhabited.
There are plenty of uninhabited islands in Panama, from a few acres up to several hundred. I don’t know what you mean by “sustain yourself,” but you could certainly camp there and meet much of your needs by fishing. You could also gather coconuts. Construct a cistern and you could probably enough rainfall to have drinking water during the dry season. You would of course have to get some kind of extended visa from Panama to stay there for any length of time legally.
Many of these islands are either government property or private property. Some islands that are government property may also have land claims by locals who may not actually reside there. You would probably have to get some kind of permission from somebody to stay there, but it might be possible to work something out.
I don’t think you would be able to have complete solitude, since there is a fair bit of small boat traffic by locals in most of the island areas. But you might be able to get away with only an occasional curious visitor.
