Jaco Island is an uninhabited island of white sand and dead coral off the eastern tip of Timor-Leste, in the Lautém district, separated from the mainland by a narrow channel, which the ancestral law of the Fataluku people keeps free of houses, so that visitors may swim and walk there but never spend the night, and it is reached by the boats of the fishermen drawn up on the sand at Valu beach. The island is sacred, lulik, the home of ancestral spirits, and was not merely uninhabited but closed, with only certain families allowed to set foot on it for ceremonies; the taboo kept its reef untouched, and wading in from the white sand the coral is on the swimmer at once, parrotfish and staghorn in water barely deep enough to swim, before the shelf tips away into the blue of the Ombai-Wetar strait, one of the deepest channels in the region. Jaco is not built on coral but is coral, a lifted reef, and walking its edge the white sand meets black, knife-sharp fossil coral at the waterline, with the forested cape of the mainland and the mountains of the Nino Konis Santana national park across the channel.
The day ends with the boat ride back, since nobody stays on the island, and a tent or a simple hut under the pandanus trees on Valu beach, where the fishermen's families cook the catch. Pygmy blue whales move south through the deep corridor offshore between October and December on their way to Australia, sometimes seen from the boats, and a few nights after the March full moon the meci, reef worms, rise from the coral off the Tutuala shore and the Fataluku wade in with lamps and baskets to scoop them up. The Timorese tell that a boy once saved a stranded crocodile, and when the animal grew old it lay down in the sea and became the island of Timor for him. Jaco is an island that its people keep empty, and that is why the reef is full.