Kiritimati (Christmas Island)

IslandsLine Islands,Kiribati

The coral atoll with more dry land than any other, seventy percent of Kiribati, waded for bonefish and the first inhabited land into each day.

September·Peaking now

May–Oct

The dry, calm half of the year: the trades ease to their lightest around May, skies clear through August, and rain thins to almost nothing by September. The lagoon flats fish at their clearest, and the June sooty-tern colony fills North West Point.

Year-round The lagoon, the wadeable flats and the resident frigatebirds and boobies hold the atoll every day of the year; what comes and goes is the terns' twice-yearly colonies and the wintering Alaskan shorebirds.

Kiritimati is a coral atoll in Kiribati with more dry land than any other atoll on Earth: seven-tenths of the country sits in this one ring around a lagoon. It also keeps a date that geography says it should not. It lies east of the 180th meridian, but its clocks run fourteen hours ahead of Greenwich: in 1995 Kiribati pushed the date line east so its far islands would stop working a day behind the capital. The new day reaches you here before it reaches anywhere else people live. At low water the lagoon drains into a hard sand plain you can walk for hours, casting to bonefish that tail in inches of water and to giant trevally hunting the reef edge. That runs on its own clock too: a slow tide lets you wade all morning, a big one pushes the fish off the sand fast. The interior is a plantation that was never finished. A French priest put in half a million coconut palms in 1917, nobody harvested them all, and they have gone half-wild into grass flats studded with trunks that run for kilometres between lagoon and ocean. Eighteen seabird species breed here. The islets in the lagoon are closed without a permit and a guide, and that is why frigatebirds, tropicbirds and boobies still nest on them almost within arm's reach; you hear the colony before the boat touches sand. From September, plovers, curlews and tattlers arrive from Alaska and work the salt flats until April. Britain fired hydrogen bombs here in 1957 and 1958, and the United States twenty-two more in 1962. Nobody was evacuated for any of them; the men on the ground were told to sit facing away, cover their eyes and wait for the flash. Sooty terns breed twice a year here, because the equator gives them no seasons to keep time by. The colony was once about seven million birds. One El Niño, in 1982, emptied it, and it has come back only in the hundreds of thousands.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The flats answer to the moon, not the calendar — the gentler neap tides flood slowly enough to wade for hours, while a big spring tide pushes the fish off the sand fast.
You need no permit to be surrounded by birds — frigatebirds and boobies hang over the causeways and the lagoon shore all year, well outside the restricted zones.
Equatorial sun and a constant trade wind burn you quietly — there is almost no shade out on the flats, and the breeze hides how fast you are cooking.

Things to do

1
Wade the lagoon flats for bonefish and giant trevally
At low water the lagoon drains into a hard sand plain you can walk for hours, sight-casting to bonefish that tail in inches of water and to giant trevally hunting the reef edge. Local guides run skiffs out at first light and read fish by the wake they push across the shallows. These flats see a fraction of the traffic the Caribbean does, and the fish behave accordingly.
2
Boat out to Motu Tabu and the lagoon bird islets
The small islets inside the lagoon are closed to casual visitors and can only be reached with a permit and a guide. That restriction is why the seabird colonies there are still so dense. Great frigatebirds, red-tailed tropicbirds and boobies nest almost within arm's reach, and the noise reaches you before the boat touches sand. Eighteen seabird species breed across the atoll; this is where you meet them at eye level.
3
Cross the grass flats of an abandoned coconut plantation
The half-million coconut palms that the French priest Emmanuel Rougier planted in 1917 were never fully harvested, and they have gone half-wild across the interior. The result is wide grass flats studded with coconut trunks, running for kilometres between lagoon and open ocean. Walk them in the early cool, with the trade wind steady and the horizon flat in every direction, and the sheer amount of land this one atoll encloses finally registers.
4
Start the day where the calendar does
Kiribati keeps its clocks fourteen hours ahead of Greenwich, so the date turns over here before it turns anywhere else. That makes an early start feel like a small ceremony. Low light runs through the coconut groves, blackened old trunks and long grass go gold, frigatebirds are already up, and there is an hour of cool before the equatorial heat closes in.