Tokelau has no airport, and in January 2026 New Zealand cancelled the plan to build one, after roughly NZ$3 million had already gone into the design. That leaves the sea. The supply ship runs from Apia in Samoa, about 500 kilometres to the south, and the crossing takes 24 to 32 hours. Waiting at the end of it are three atolls — Atafu, Nukunonu and Fakaofo — thin rings of reef and palm-covered islets wrapped around still lagoons, holding barely ten square kilometres of land between them and rising nowhere more than five metres above the sea. No atoll has a harbour deep enough for the ship, so it stops outside the reef and everyone aboard climbs down into small aluminium boats that thread the reef passage to shore.
About 1,500 people live here, in villages of a few hundred set along coral-gravel lanes shaded by pandanus and coconut palms, where outrigger canoes rest under the trees and the lagoon stays flat and bath-warm enough to swim in daily. Life keeps the pace of the tide and the ship. It is not a place stranded in the past, though: Tokelau has run its electricity almost entirely on solar power since 2012, the first territory in the world to do so, and an undersea cable brought fast internet in 2022. Its whole ocean territory, some 319,000 square kilometres, has been a shark sanctuary since 2011, and green turtles still come ashore to nest on the islets between September and November. The catch is that you cannot currently go. Tokelau closed its borders to visitors in 2020 and, as of 2026, they remain shut, with the Apia Liaison Office saying the ban holds for the foreseeable future.