Nanumea

The palms lean hard against the trade wind and the reef breaks white on every side — Nanumea feels like the last solid ground before the ocean simply decides there is no more. Rusted metal hides in the undergrowth, the remnants of a war that reached even here. In 1943 a B-24 crash-landed fifty yards off the beach, and the reef has been absorbing it ever since. The light hits different at the northern edge of Tuvalu, sharper and more direct, bouncing off water so clear you can trace the reef edge from the shore.

Nanumea is Tuvalu's northernmost inhabited atoll, a chain of small islets enclosing a calm lagoon roughly five kilometres across. During the Second World War, the atoll served as an Allied staging point; the US Navy Seabees built an airfield in 1943, and B-24 Liberators flew missions from its runway. In September 1943 a Japanese air attack struck the atoll, and a B-24 crash-landed fifty yards off the beach during wartime operations. Wartime remnants — rusted metal, concrete footings, scattered debris — can still be found in the undergrowth across the island, unmarked and unexplained by any signage, while landing craft wreckage lies in the lagoon. Beyond the wreck, Nanumea's lagoon offers calm, clear water for paddling and snorkelling, while the community maintains traditions of toddy-tapping (harvesting sweet sap from coconut palms at dawn) and communal fishing. The voyage from Funafuti passes other atolls in sequence, each one smaller and more remote, before arriving at the country's northern extreme.