Aranuka

Aranuka sits close enough to Abemama that boats regularly run between the two, and locals on both islands talk about them almost as a pair, though the personalities are noticeably different once you spend time in each. Where Abemama carries some literary weight from its Robert Louis Stevenson connection, Aranuka felt to me like the plainer, quieter of the two — a genuinely large lagoon relative to the size of the land around it, good coconut crab habitat in the bush interior, and a rhythm of life built almost entirely around fishing and copra rather than anything aimed at outside attention.

I arrived by a short boat hop from Abemama and spent my first afternoon simply walking the lagoon shore, which curves gently enough that from certain points you can see almost the entire circumference of the atoll’s inner water in one look — something that isn’t possible on most of Kiribati’s larger islands. A group of teenagers were spearfishing near the shallows using homemade goggles and hand-carved spears, working with an ease that made clear this wasn’t a special activity for them, just an ordinary Tuesday. They handed me a spear at one point, more out of amusement at how badly I’d do than any expectation I’d succeed, and I did in fact do badly, missing three fish in a row while they laughed without much cruelty.

The bush interior of Aranuka is known locally for coconut crabs, the enormous land-dwelling crustaceans found across parts of the Pacific, and a man who ran a small informal operation gathering them for sale to Tarawa took me out one night with a headlamp to see how it’s done — slow, careful work in dense undergrowth, listening more than looking, since the crabs’ movement through dry leaves is often the first sign of where one is hiding. We found four in about two hours, which he said was a good but not exceptional night.

When to go: April through October for calmer boat travel. The short crossing from Abemama is the easiest way in; there’s no formal lodging, so arrange a homestay through Abemama or Tarawa contacts before you travel.