Jaco Island has no houses, no jetty and no residents — and nobody, not even the fishermen who ferry you over, is allowed to sleep on it. The Fataluku people on the facing shore call the island Totina and hold it tei, forbidden ground: the place where the spirits of their ancestors stay. In the Timorese creation story the country is a crocodile that lay down and turned to land; Jaco is its head. That belief, older than any park boundary, is why 8 square kilometres of coral limestone at Timor-Leste's eastern tip still carry unbroken forest, reefs long closed to fishing and beaches nobody has built on. A channel only 600 metres wide separates it from the mainland; the wooded ridge climbs barely 100 metres. Since 2007 it has also lain inside Nino Konis Santana National Park, the country's first — but the older rule is the one that has held.
You cross from Valu Sere beach in an open fishing boat, a fifteen-minute run for about ten dollars return, onto sand so white the shallows above it turn milk-turquoise. The reef starts a few metres out and falls away into blue; parrotfish are around your ankles before the mask is on, and sea turtles are so common that nobody bothers to point them out. Nothing waits on the island — no water, no food, no shade but the forest — so you carry the day in, the rubbish out, and leave before dusk. Visitors sleep across the water instead, under the pandanus at Valu, where saltwater crocodiles are a real presence. In late February and March that shore fills with lamps after dark, when families wade in to scoop up meci, the reef worms that rise from the coral to spawn. Out in the deep strait beyond, pygmy blue whales pass south between October and December.