Tabuaeran

Tabuaeran — most outsiders still know it by its older name, Fanning Island — sits far out in the Line Islands, closer to Hawaii in distance and feel than to Tarawa, and it carries one of the more improbable footnotes in global communications history. In 1902 it became a relay station on the first transpacific telegraph cable, linking North America to Australia and New Zealand through a chain of small islands including this one. The cable station is long gone, but a few overgrown foundations remain near the main settlement, and the idea that a message from London to Sydney once physically passed through this speck of coral in the middle of the Pacific still strikes me as one of the odder facts I picked up traveling through Kiribati.

The lagoon here is genuinely enormous — one of the largest in the country — and startlingly clear, fed by a deep natural channel that lets ocean water flush through constantly, which locals told me is part of why the fishing and the coral inside the lagoon stay in such good condition compared to more enclosed atolls elsewhere in Kiribati. I spent two days on a borrowed boat working the lagoon’s edges with a family who fish it daily, watching them read current lines invisible to me and pull in reef fish with a consistency that made clear how well they understood this particular body of water.

Tabuaeran also occasionally receives cruise ship day visits, which gives it a strange, split identity — for a few hours every so often, a beach near the main village becomes a temporary market of shell jewelry and woven goods, and then the ship leaves and the island returns to what it actually is most of the time: quiet copra plantations, a handful of villages along the lagoon, and enormous numbers of seabirds using the more remote parts of the atoll as nesting ground, undisturbed by nearly anyone.

When to go: April through October for calmer conditions; there are occasional direct flights from Kiritimati, which is the more practical gateway than routing through Tarawa. Basic guesthouse accommodation exists near the main village — arrange it ahead of time, as options are limited.