Anibare Bay was cut by a landslide. An arc-shaped block of Nauru's eastern flank broke away and rotated out into the Pacific, sliding to roughly 1,100 metres below the surface and leaving this two-kilometre crescent of pale sand and black, jagged rock. Nauru is 21 square kilometres of raised coral — the world's smallest island country, and one of the least-visited places on Earth — and the bay is the only part of it that still looks like a classic Pacific shoreline. Inland the ground climbs to Topside, the plateau a century of phosphate mining stripped back to bare stone: four-fifths of the island is now a field of sun-bleached limestone pinnacles up to 15 metres tall, the stumps miners left as they scooped the phosphate from the hollows between them. That rock briefly made Nauruans among the richest people on earth. It is finished now.
The beach is usually empty. Anibare opens straight onto the ocean with no lagoon to soften it: the swimming happens in pools inside the reef flat, and the surf breaks hard beyond. Above its southern end stand the cliffs of the Anibare escarpment — 35 hectares too steep to mine, the richest patch of native vegetation left on the island and the stronghold of the Nauru reed warbler, a bird found nowhere else. At dusk black noddies come in off the sea to roost there, and Nauruans meet them with recorded calls played through loudspeakers and long-handled nets; the noddy is the national dish. One 19-kilometre road rings the whole country in about half an hour, past the airport runway and the harbour blasted into the reef in 2000. Today king tides wash over that road: with the interior mined out, the thin coastal strip where everyone lives is the part of Nauru now under pressure from the sea.