Atauro Island is a steep, dry volcanic island 25 kilometres north of Dili, in Timor-Leste, whose fringing reefs fall straight into a deep strait swept by current and carry the richest fish counts ever measured, and it is reached by the Saturday ferry or a boat from the capital, snorkelled off the sand where the shelf vanishes into blue and sailed from with the fishermen when the blue whales pass. The reef is a wall a few strokes from the guesthouses, the shelf shallow enough to stand on and then the floor gone, with the coral and the fish of the Coral Triangle at their densest, protected by the island's villages under tara bandu, the customary law that means prohibition by hanging, since the ban is announced by a marker hung where it applies and breaking it answers to the village; from mid-October to late November pygmy blue whales move south through the strait between Dili and Atauro on their way from the Banda Sea to the feeding grounds off Australia, and the boats that carry visitors out are the same open boats the men fish from. The dry season thins the plankton and opens the visibility on the walls past thirty metres.
The islanders speak Wetarese, a language that belongs not to Timor but to Wetar across the strait to the north, and between 1980 and 1984 the Indonesian military held around 4,000 East Timorese on the island, most of them women, children and the elderly, to cut the resistance off from its support. The path to Manucoco, the summit at just under a thousand metres, climbs dry slopes of uplifted coral limestone, reef walked on rather than swum over, and on Saturday morning the market at Beloi times itself to the ferry, the stalls running from the pier along the beach with fish, fruit and the island's embroidered dolls. Atauro is an island with the world's richest reef at its feet, and the villages made the rules that keep it.