Kiritimati (Christmas Island)

IslandsLine Islands,Kiribati

The coral atoll with more dry land than any other, seventy percent of Kiribati, waded for bonefish and the first inhabited land into each day.

September·Peaking now

May–Oct

The dry, calm half of the year: the trades ease to their lightest around May, skies clear through August, and rain thins to almost nothing by September. The lagoon flats fish at their clearest, and the June sooty-tern colony fills North West Point.

Year-round The lagoon, the wadeable flats and the resident frigatebirds and boobies hold the atoll every day of the year; what comes and goes is the terns' twice-yearly colonies and the wintering Alaskan shorebirds.

Kiritimati, Christmas Island, is a coral atoll in the Line Islands of Kiribati, in the central Pacific, with more dry land than any other atoll on Earth, seventy percent of the country's land in one ring of coral around a lagoon, and it is waded for bonefish by anglers who cross the world for its flats, counted among the great seabird islands, and the first inhabited land on the planet into each new day. The atoll lies east of the 180th meridian but keeps its clocks fourteen hours ahead of Greenwich, because in 1995 Kiribati moved the date line east so that the whole country would share a day, and the calendar turns over here before anywhere else; the lagoon drains at low water into a hard sand plain that can be walked for hours, sight-casting to bonefish that tail in inches of water and to giant trevally hunting the reef edge, the sport that brings most of the visitors on the weekly flight from Honolulu. The interior is a half-million coconut palms planted in 1917 by a French priest, never fully harvested and gone half-wild across the grass flats. The island was the site of British and American hydrogen bomb tests in 1957 and 1962, for which nobody was evacuated, the men being told to sit facing away and cover their eyes with their hands. Its sooty tern colony was once the largest on the planet, around seven million birds, and the colonies at North West Point still fill, empty and fill again roughly twice a year, since the equator gives the birds no seasons to keep time by; the small islets inside the lagoon, Motu Tabu among them, are closed to casual visitors and reached only with a permit and a guide, and from September Pacific golden plovers and bristle-thighed curlews arrive from Alaska to work the salt flats until April. The villages are named London, Paris, Poland and Banana. Kiritimati is an atoll with a continent's worth of land, and the day begins on it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The flats answer to the moon, not the calendar — the gentler neap tides flood slowly enough to wade for hours, while a big spring tide pushes the fish off the sand fast.
You need no permit to be surrounded by birds — frigatebirds and boobies hang over the causeways and the lagoon shore all year, well outside the restricted zones.
Equatorial sun and a constant trade wind burn you quietly — there is almost no shade out on the flats, and the breeze hides how fast you are cooking.

Things to do

1
Wade the lagoon flats for bonefish and giant trevally
At low water the lagoon drains into a hard sand plain you can walk for hours, sight-casting to bonefish that tail in inches of water and to giant trevally hunting the reef edge. Local guides run skiffs out at first light and read fish by the wake they push across the shallows. These flats see a fraction of the traffic the Caribbean does, and the fish behave accordingly.
2
Boat out to Motu Tabu and the lagoon bird islets
The small islets inside the lagoon are closed to casual visitors and can only be reached with a permit and a guide. That restriction is why the seabird colonies there are still so dense. Great frigatebirds, red-tailed tropicbirds and boobies nest almost within arm's reach, and the noise reaches you before the boat touches sand. Eighteen seabird species breed across the atoll; this is where you meet them at eye level.
3
Cross the grass flats of an abandoned coconut plantation
The half-million coconut palms that the French priest Emmanuel Rougier planted in 1917 were never fully harvested, and they have gone half-wild across the interior. The result is wide grass flats studded with coconut trunks, running for kilometres between lagoon and open ocean. Walk them in the early cool, with the trade wind steady and the horizon flat in every direction, and the sheer amount of land this one atoll encloses finally registers.
4
Start the day where the calendar does
Kiribati keeps its clocks fourteen hours ahead of Greenwich, so the date turns over here before it turns anywhere else. That makes an early start feel like a small ceremony. Low light runs through the coconut groves, blackened old trunks and long grass go gold, frigatebirds are already up, and there is an hour of cool before the equatorial heat closes in.