Direction Island

Beaches & CovesCocos Islands

Fragile nature — stay on the trail, leave no trace.

An uninhabited coral islet in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands with a 300-metre white beach and a tidal channel that carries swimmers into the lagoon.

September·Peaking now

Aug–Nov

The dry season: rain falls to its yearly low — October the driest month near 79 mm — runoff clears and The Rip drifts glass-blue over the reef. The sea sits around 26.5–27.5°C, the Thursday–Saturday ferry runs reliably, and Cossies Beach is at its finest.

Year-round The Rip runs on the tide, not the calendar; reef sharks, trevally and resident green turtles work the channel in every month.

Direction Island is an uninhabited coral islet in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, with 300 metres of white beach and no way to arrive except by boat. There is no airstrip and nobody lives here. The ferry comes across the lagoon and ties up at a stilted jetty, the water under it clear enough to lay the shadows of the pylons on the sand. The reason to come is a current. The flooding tide drives the open ocean through the gap between this island and the next one, and you get in at the top of it and let go. It sweeps you over the drop-off, past blacktip reef sharks holding into the flow, schooling trevally and the occasional turtle, and spills you out into the shallow lagoon. Swimming back up it is not an option; you walk back along the sand and do it again. Behind the beach, thatched pondok shelters stand in the shade, each one first-come and free, with a wood-fired barbecue nearby. Nothing at all is sold on the island. The green turtles grazing the seagrass are not passing through: they are a breeding stock of their own, here in every month of the year. A track leads off the sand into a dense stand of coconut palms, cool and quiet a few steps back from the glare. It passes what is left of a telegraph cable station and a slipway from the years when flying boats used the lagoon. The station is why anyone ever fought over this island. In 1914 the German raider Emden put fifty men ashore to destroy it, and HMAS Sydney caught the Emden offshore and shot it to a wreck. The landing party was still on the beach. Rather than surrender they seized a 97-tonne schooner lying in the lagoon and sailed her to Sumatra, crossed to Arabia by steamer, and pushed overland through the desert to Constantinople the following year. Three of them did not make it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Swim The Rip with the flood, never against it — the current pours from the ocean into the lagoon and is far too strong to fight, so wear fins and let it carry you.
The tide sets the speed of the drift — a high flood runs fast and hard, while slacker water nearer low tide gives you time to look down and actually see the reef.
Do not panic at the sharks — the blacktips and whitetips cruising The Rip are small reef species that keep to the channel floor and pay passing snorkellers no attention.
Nothing is sold on the island — no shop, no cafe, no drinking water and no lifeguard, so carry your own food, water and reef-safe sunscreen for the whole day.

Things to do

1
Drift-snorkel The Rip channel
The flooding tide drives the open ocean through the gap between Direction Island and neighbouring Prison Island, and you ride it in. Slip in at the top of the channel and the current sweeps you over the drop-off, past blacktip reef sharks holding into the flow, schooling trevally and the occasional turtle, before spilling you out into the shallow lagoon. Swimming back up it is not an option.
2
Claim a pondok on Cossies Beach
Thatched pondok shelters stand back in the shade behind the sand, each one first-come and free, with a wood-fired barbecue nearby. The water off the beach lies flat and clear over talcum-white shallows. Once the drift-snorkellers have washed out of the channel, this is where the whole ferry crowd scatters, to swim, to eat and to do very little at all until the boat back.
3
Walk the heritage trail through the coconut palms
A track leads off the beach into a dense stand of coconut palms, cool and quiet a few steps back from the glare of the sand. It doubles as the island's heritage trail. It passes what is left of the telegraph cable station that a German landing party from the raider Emden came ashore to destroy in 1914, and a slipway from the later years when flying boats used the lagoon.
4
Cross the lagoon on the ferry from West Island
The island has no airstrip and no residents, so every visit begins with a boat. The ferry runs out across the lagoon from West Island or Home Island and ties up at a stilted jetty. The water beneath it is clear enough to throw the shadows of the pylons down onto the sand, and you wade the last stretch ashore.