Twenty-one square kilometres, one sealed road of about nineteen kilometres round the outside, and a mined-out limestone plateau filling the middle. Three days is the whole country properly seen — the coastal strip where everyone lives, the phosphate works and the ridge above them, and the plateau that four generations of mining left behind. In practice Nauru Airlines decides how long you stay, because it is the only airline that comes and it comes a few times a week.
Yaren, the runway and the south coast
The aircraft lands on a strip that takes up a good part of the south coast, and the terminal is across the road from the government offices. Nauru has no constitutionally named capital; Yaren is where parliament and the ministries sit, which makes it the capital in every practical sense. Walk east from the airport along the coast road: Japanese defences from the 1942–45 occupation are still in the scrub and on the shoreline — pillboxes, gun mountings, the concrete cut into the coral — and nobody has tidied them into a site. Nauru was occupied in August 1942, the airstrip was built by forced labour, and in June 1943 the Japanese garrison deported 1,200 Nauruans to Chuuk, from which fewer than 800 returned in 1946. The 26th of October is Angam Day, marking the two occasions on which the population climbed back to 1,500 after being cut near to nothing, first by the 1920 influenza epidemic and then by the war. Finish at Moqua Well in the south-east, a freshwater pool in a cave under the plateau edge — the entrance is on family land and unsignposted, so you need someone local to take you to it, plus a torch and dry weather.
Aiwo, Command Ridge and the pinnacle field
Aiwo on the west coast is the industrial end: the phosphate plant, the power station, the desalination units and the cantilever running out over the reef. There is no harbour deep enough for a bulk carrier, so ships moor to buoys in open water and the loading arm swings the phosphate out to them — a piece of engineering that dictated the country's entire economy and is now worked at a fraction of its old rate. Behind it, the track up to Command Ridge reaches the island's high point at about 65 metres: a Japanese two-gun position, a bunker with rusted communications gear inside, and the only place you can see the shape of the whole island at once. From there the plateau runs north and east as a grey field of limestone pinnacles, most of them a few metres high and the tallest close to fifteen, left standing when the phosphate was dug out from between them. Topside is not open country: almost all of it is held under customary title by Nauruan families, so you walk into it with someone who can get the landowner's word rather than on your own initiative. Beyond the courtesy, the pinnacles are sharp, the pits between them are deep, and the areas still being worked for residual phosphate are closed.
Round the island — Buada, the north, Anibare
The ring road is about nineteen kilometres and a car does it in half an hour without stopping, which is not the point. Turn inland at Aiwo for Buada Lagoon, a brackish pond in the only depression the miners left alone, with palms, breadfruit and houses round the rim; the milkfish raised in it are a genuinely old practice here. North through Ewa and Anabar the coastal strip narrows to a few hundred metres between the plateau and the sea, and the reef flat runs out level at low tide. Anibare Bay on the east side is the one stretch of sand, backed by pinnacles that fell to the beach, and the water past the reef edge drops away fast — swim at the harbour instead. Anibare Harbour, cut into the reef with Japanese funding and opened in 2000, is the only sheltered boat access on the island; before it, canoes and skiffs were hauled up through gaps in the coral.
Good to know
There is no visa on arrival for most nationalities. You apply in advance to Nauru's immigration authorities with a confirmed booking at one of the island's few places to stay, a return ticket and a stated purpose, and the process is slow and email-based — start it well before you book anything non-refundable. Journalists are a separate matter: the non-refundable media visa application fee was raised from A$200 to A$8,000 in January 2014 and the effect on foreign reporting was the point. Nauru Airlines is the only carrier and Nauru International the only way in, with a few services a week to Brisbane and Nadi and a rotation that on some weeks takes in Tarawa, Majuro, Honiara, Pohnpei and Kosrae. That schedule, not your plan, decides how many nights you spend here — a missed or cancelled flight costs days rather than hours, and there is no alternative routing. The currency is the Australian dollar. Card acceptance is thin to non-existent outside the main hotel, banking is a single Bendigo Bank agency — the country had no bank at all between the collapse of the Bank of Nauru and that agency opening in 2015 — and ATMs cannot be relied on. Bring Australian dollars in cash for the whole stay and assume you will not be able to draw more. Accommodation is a handful of properties and they fill with contractors and officials, so book before applying for the visa, not after. There is no public transport worth planning around: a government bus circles the island on an approximate schedule, hotels rent cars and utilities, and hitching is normal. Australia has run an offshore immigration processing arrangement here since 2001, on and off; the facilities and the people connected to them are a sensitive subject, access is restricted, and photographing anything associated with them — or the phosphate works, or government buildings — will get you stopped. Ask first, every time. Land is the same conversation in another register: nearly all of Nauru, Topside included, is held under customary family title, and mined-out ground that looks like nobody's is somebody's — go up with a local who can square it with the landowner. It is hot and humid all year, wettest from about November to February, and Nauru sits close enough to the equator that cyclones are rare; drought is the real hazard, the island depends on desalination and rainwater catchment, and in a dry year water is rationed. Fresh food is almost entirely imported and expensive, shop stock is erratic, and the diet-related health statistics here are among the worst in the world for reasons that follow directly from that. Bring reef shoes for the coral, sun cover for a place with almost no shade on the plateau, and any medication you need, because the hospital is small and the pharmacy stock is what arrived on the last flight.
Shorter or longer?
On the weeks it runs, the same Nauru Airlines aircraft continues north to Tarawa, Majuro, Pohnpei and Kosrae before turning back. Buying the next leg rather than the return turns Nauru into the first stop of a two- or three-week Micronesian chain — but the rotation is weekly at best, so each island commits you to whatever the gap between services is, usually five to seven days.
When the schedule gives you a short turnaround, do Aiwo, Command Ridge and the ring road on one full day and Yaren and the wartime coast on the morning of departure. You lose Buada, the north coast and Moqua Well, and you see the mined ground from a car window rather than standing in it.