Anibare Bay

Anibare Bay is the one soft place on Nauru: a curve of white sand and coral pinnacles on the east coast of the smallest island republic in the world, twenty-one square kilometres of raised coral in the middle of the Pacific, twelve thousand people, and a road of nineteen kilometres around the edge that a car drives in half an hour and a runner runs at dawn. The bay is where the island swims in the afternoon, where the noddy birds come in and the pinnacles stand in the surf like the pinnacles inland, and where a small harbour was blasted out in 2000 with Japanese aid so that boats could land on this side; the interior, Topside, is the phosphate — a hundred years of mining, from 1906 to the last of it, took the plateau down to a moonscape of coral pinnacles that covers four-fifths of the island, made Nauru for a decade in the 1970s one of the richest countries per head on Earth, and left it with a fortune spent and a landscape that the secondary mining scrapes still; the green is Buada Lagoon, the one lake in a hollow of the interior; the highest point is Command Ridge, sixty-five metres, with the Japanese guns of the occupation of 1942 to 1945, when the people were deported to Chuuk and a third of them died there; Yaren is the airport and the government, with the road closing when a plane lands; Aiwo is the port and the cantilevers that loaded the ships; and Menen has the hotel and, since 2001, the Australian offshore processing centre for people seeking asylum, which the Guide names because it is there.

The traveller who comes — on the Nauru Airlines flights from Brisbane and Nadi, few and expensive — stays two or three nights, drives or walks the ring road, sees the whole country by lunch, and gives the rest to its parts: Anibare Bay in the afternoon and again at dawn; Topside on foot among the pinnacles, which is the strangest landscape in the Pacific; Buada for the shade; Command Ridge for the guns and the view of the whole island in one glance; the Chinese restaurants and the fish; the parliament, the small museum, the game of Australian rules on the oval on Saturday; and the church on Sunday. There is nothing more, and that is the point of the visit.

The Guide's honesty: Nauru is not a holiday island and does not pretend to be — there are two hotels, the food comes by plane and boat, the water is scarce, the flights are few and expensive, and the country's story of the phosphate and the fortune is a hard one told plainly by its own people; the offshore processing centre is a fact of the island and of Australia's policy, and the traveller who asks about it hears the answers the Nauruans give; the traveller who comes here comes for the ends of the earth and for the honesty of a place that has been used by the world and is still here; the pinnacles of Topside at sunset, grey and endless, are a lesson written in stone; and Anibare Bay in the last light, with the pinnacles black in the surf and the noddies coming home, is the moment the island gives back.