tuvalu

tuvalu? what is tuvalu? i have been asked this question many times, when i told someone about my travel plans to the south pacific.

tuvalu is a country - not well known, but outstanding in several ways.

with a land area of only 26 square kilometers divided between nine islands, it is the fourth smallest country in the world (only nauru, monaco and the vatican are smaller). 11.000 people live here, which makes it the second least populated country (again, only the vatican has less people), and with its highest point being only 4.6 meters above sea level, it is also the second lowest-lying country. so the rise of the sea level caused by climate change is indeed a big issue here - predictions are that tuvalu might disaperar within the next 70 years.

currently, there is only on way to travel to tuvalu (unless you have your own boat or plane): twice a week, there is a commercial flight from fiji to funafuti, the main atoll and capital of tuvalu. and the only way to leave, is taking the same flight back to fiji. so only about 1.000 foreigners per year visit tuvalu - most of them being ngo workers or fishermen working on big american or chinese fish trawlers that stop here occasionally for some days (greetings to david, raymund and lenzi). only a quarter of all visitors are tourists - which also makes tuvalu one of the least visited countries.

but apart from these outstandig facts, these tiny palm tree covered coral sand piles have not much more to offer (unless you come on the right day, but i will talk about this later in another post): no tourist attractions and almost no unique activities. so why come here?

for me, i just could not imagine living at the edge of the world. so i wanted to find out what it is like.

not unexpectedly, everything is very limited here - what you can do, where you can go, what grows, what you can eat, what you can buy. almost everything has to be imported. it is so different from living in a place where most things the world has to offer can be found just around the corner.

speaking of where to go: as tuvalu also has the shortest paved road system in the world. my plan was to walk all of it - including the airport's runway which is part of the islands road system. well, about 15km* could be walked in a few hours. but i decided to do it on "island pace". so it finally took me two days.

 

* according to wikipedia and other sources the paved road system was 8km in 2011 but it seems that more roads have been paved recently. because when i check the distances i walked on google maps, it adds up to about 15km - which still is the shortest paved road system as according to the cia world factbook, the 2nd ranked country (nauru) in 2002 already had 24km of paved roads .