Flying into Nauru you can almost, depending on which side of the plane you are sitting on, see the entire country. I managed to capture about half of it in this image. Although the edge of the island may look like a beach, there is precious little sand there. It is a jagged limestone platform, and the surf is strong, so there are precious few places to swim without risking scrapes, bruises or worse. Then there is the green coastal belt, rich, overgrown, teeming. Almost all the people in Nauru live on this fringe and the population is pretty dense all the way around (that's 12 miles). And if this was all of the island you ever saw, you'd never get the impression that something was wrong here. But as you can see by the gray patches on the left of the picture above, the green of the coastal belt stops rather abruptly. The rest of the island is an impassable wasteland studded with ancient limestone pinnacles.



This is the key element in everything that has happened to Nauru. This giant cantilever once loaded thousand and thousands of tons of phosphate into enormous tankers offshore (tied to some of the deepest deep water moorings in the world). This is the old one, which has been out of commission for decades. There are two others nearby and I'm told they still work, even if they are clearly idle now. The cantilevers are the island's only real landmarks. They will have to be refurbished, I think, if Nauru is to begin secondary mining. This plan to pull phosphate out of the remaining low-grade deposits is the keystone, as far as I understand it so far, in Nauru's return to solvency and basic services. I do not know enough to judge the wisdom or practicality of this plan.

I'm going to be storming the government offices for interviews tomorrow. I have already set up a couple. But the bigger challenge will be connecting with regular Nauruans, who either ignore me or don't seem to like me much.

On the plus side, the hotel rents bootleg DVDs shot with handicams in theaters. It's not a great idea to walk around at night--not because of crime but because many Nauruans train their dogs to attack, which seems an odd choice on an island with 10,000 people and almost no crime. But the power is usually on at night, so with my computer I can catch up on a couple of movies I've missed. Outside of occasional nausea when the filmmaker shifts in his seat.