Kosrae

The flight from Pohnpei to Kosrae takes forty-five minutes in a prop plane where the flight attendant is also the person who loaded the luggage and probably knows your name. Kosrae appears through the window as something almost implausible — a single high island, the remnant of a volcanic peak, wrapped so thoroughly in jungle that even from the air there is no visible break in the green. The coastline is fringed by mangrove on three sides. The reef surrounds it like a ring. I pressed my face against the window on the approach and thought: this is what the Pacific must have looked like before people started being interested in it.

Kosrae is the easternmost state of the Federated States of Micronesia and, depending on how you count, has somewhere between six and eight thousand inhabitants. It receives around 5,000 millimeters of rain annually. It has no traffic light, one main road that circles most of the island but not all of it, and approximately zero tourist infrastructure in the way that phrase is usually meant. What it does have — what it has in abundance that stops conversation when dive guides in Chuuk and Pohnpei mention it — is the reef. Kosrae’s reef system, particularly along the southern and western shores, is among the most pristine soft coral ecosystems in Micronesia. The colors hit you on the first dive like color hits you after a long period in grayscale. Pink sea fans the height of trees. Orange and purple tunicates on every surface. Staghorn corals that go on until you lose sight of them in the blue. I surfaced after the first dive and sat on the boat for a while not quite knowing what to do with what I’d seen.

The island’s interior rises steeply to Finkol peak at 629 meters. Hiking trails exist but calling them maintained would be generous — they are paths cut through jungle that is continuously trying to close them again, and progress is measured in sweat per meter. The reward is the view from the ridgeline: the entire island’s reef visible below like a green-edged blue circle, the neighboring atolls of Pingelap and Mwoakilloa barely distinguishable on the horizon if the weather is clear. I went up with a local guide who moved through the forest with the comfort of someone walking through his own house, pointing out edible plants and the nests of seabirds and a tree fern cluster where, he said, people sometimes heard unusual things. He didn’t elaborate on what things. I didn’t press.

In Tofol, the small capital, there is a market on weekday mornings, a couple of guesthouses run by families who cook for their guests, and a quiet that thickens in the afternoon heat until even the dogs seem reluctant to move. The guesthouses serve local food — rice, taro, fish brought by fishermen that morning, occasionally a whole crab that nobody photographs because nobody warned you to expect it. I spent evenings on the porch talking to my host family, or trying to — their English was better than my Kosraean by several orders of magnitude — and watching the kind of sunset that happens when there is nothing on the horizon between you and it.

When to go: December through April brings the best diving conditions and the most reliable inter-island flights. Kosrae can feel genuinely cut off in rough weather; flights cancel without ceremony. Bring everything you might need for an extra few days, because the island has a way of keeping you.