Arno Atoll

Arno is the atoll across the water from the capital: twenty kilometres east of Majuro, a ring of a hundred and thirty-three islets around not one lagoon but three, the largest of the Marshalls' outer atolls that a traveller can reach in a morning — one to three hours by boat from the Majuro wharf, or ten minutes by the small plane to the strips at Tinak and Ine. It is what Majuro was before it became a town: villages of thatch and cinder-block under the palms — Arno Arno, the largest, with the field station and the school; Ine on the south, where a family will take a guest; Tinak; Longar on the north-east point, where the surf breaks and the deep water off the reef holds the marlin and the tuna the fishermen go out for — and a life that runs on copra, fish, breadfruit and the tide, with the toddy cut from the palms at dawn. The outrigger canoes, the finest sailing craft the Pacific ever built, are made again here and taught to the young by the canoe school of Majuro. The Marshall Islands are twenty-nine atolls and a thousand two hundred islands scattered over a sea the size of Mexico, in free association with the United States since 1986; their memory holds Bikini and Enewetak, where the sixty-seven nuclear tests of 1946 to 1958 were made and the concrete dome of Runit stands over the waste, and Ebeye, where the displaced live in a crowd beside the missile range at Kwajalein; the sea rises against them all, and the Guide names this in dignity.

The traveller flies to Majuro — from Honolulu or Guam on the island-hopper, the flight that stops at every atoll — sleeps a night in the town, and arranges the crossing to Arno with a family or through the tourism office: the boat with the tide, a stay of two or three nights in a village on Arno Arno or Ine, with the meals of the house, the reef at low tide, the lagoon by canoe or by boat to the islets and the sandbanks, the surf and the fishing at Longar for those who ask, the church on Sunday, and the singing. Back on Majuro, the Alele museum, the canoe school and the sunset from Laura at the western end complete the picture; the traveller with a week takes the island-hopper on to Kwajalein and beyond.

The Guide's honesty: Arno is a village atoll and not a resort — the guest sleeps on a mat or a mattress in a family's house, washes from a bucket, eats what there is, and is treated as kin; the boat crossing is open water and the traveller goes on a calm morning with a life jacket and a captain who knows the tide; the flights to the Marshalls are few and expensive, and a missed one is days; the customs are the family's and the pastor's, and Sunday is kept; the country's history with the bomb and its future with the sea are its own to tell, and the traveller listens; and the lagoon at Arno Arno at first light, flat and green with the canoes going out and the palms of the far islets a line on the water, is the Marshalls as they were and, on this atoll, still are.