The Last Atolls

The journey begins in Nadi or Suva, Fiji — the central Pacific's main aviation hub — with an overnight covering the connection to Funafuti. Fiji Airways flies the route three times weekly. Funafuti's approach is one of aviation's most intimate arrivals: a strip of land so narrow you can see the ocean on both sides at once, the runway doubling as the main road when no aircraft are due.

Tuvalu is nine atolls and the lowest average elevation of any nation on Earth. Funafuti was a major Allied air base in WWII — bunkers and ammunition dumps now reclaimed by vegetation. The draws are elemental: an extraordinarily clear lagoon with some of the best snorkelling in the Pacific, the western-reef Conservation Area, and the simple fact of being in one of the most remote capitals in the world, where a Climate Change Commission negotiates the island's very survival as seas rise.

South Tarawa holds around 60,000 people on a strip of land that makes Manhattan look spacious. Its other identity is one of the Pacific's most significant war battlefields: the Battle of Tarawa (1943) lasted 76 hours. The Red Beach and Betio sites still hold tank hulks, gun emplacements, and bunkers. Beyond the battlefield, the I-Kiribati culture — maneaba meeting houses, traditional canoes, a calendar of communal life centred on the lagoon — is distinct from anything else in the Pacific.

The world's smallest island nation — a raised coral island eight kilometres across with a story unlike anything else in the Pacific. Phosphate from millions of years of seabird guano made Nauru briefly one of the richest countries per capita; the wealth was largely lost in failed ventures, and the phosphate has nearly run out. The interior, 'Topside', is a moonscape of mined-out coral pinnacles. The coast has recovered more gracefully — intact reef, calm western lagoon, and accessible Japanese WWII relics on the high ridge.

The flight from Nauru crosses 1,400 kilometres of open Pacific to Majuro — a longer, more relaxed, genuinely tropical atoll whose rim runs nearly 100 kilometres. The Marshallese hold one of the world's oldest navigation traditions; the Alele Museum holds the finest collection of stick charts on Earth. The islands' other defining context is nuclear: Bikini Atoll was the site of 23 weapons tests between 1946 and 1958, including the first hydrogen bomb. The peace memorial in Majuro addresses it plainly.

United Flight UA154 departs Majuro mid-morning and arrives in Pohnpei early afternoon, crossing the Date Line and the equator in a single flight. The Island Hopper has run since 1968, when Air Micronesia launched it with a 727 on coral runways coated in Teflon. Today's 737 carries island families with taped-up cargo, medical supplies, and a few travellers who ride the whole sixteen-hour run for the experience. An onboard mechanic steps off at every stop to inspect the aircraft.

Pohnpei is among the wettest islands in the Pacific — up to 10 metres of rain a year in its mountainous interior of largely unexplored rainforest. This is where the freshest sashimi in the western Pacific is landed, and where sakau — the Pohnpeian preparation of kava — is consumed in the nahs with a formality the phrase 'social lubricant' does not capture. And Nan Madol: ninety-two artificial islands of stacked basalt in the tidal lagoon, the ritual centre of the Saudeleur dynasty, approached by boat through the canals at dawn before the heat builds. UNESCO-listed in 2016, much of it still unexcavated.

The Island Hopper continues westbound to Chuuk and Guam, but the expedition turns east: a connecting flight from Pohnpei to Honolulu via Guam, or direct if scheduling allows. Honolulu serves as the arrival point for onward international departures. For those with time in Hawaii, the contrast between a 10,000-person Pacific microstate and Waikiki Beach is as complete as any in the world.