Tuvalu:2 Days in the World's Least-Visited Country

We went in December, on our honeymoon - the only honeymooners in the country. Tuvalu does that: a couple of flights a week from Fiji, and once you land you are there until the next one leaves, whether that suits you or not. One hotel, one restaurant, cash for everything. Once we stopped fighting how the place works, it became the point.

The best day very nearly did not happen. We tried to arrange a boat to the empty islets on a Sunday, and nothing was moving - no boat, for any money, because the day belongs to church. The workaround came from a local tip: find someone who does not keep the same Sunday. A Jehovah's Witness couple took us across, soaking, on two plastic chairs in an open boat, and on the far side was a string of islands with nobody on any of them. Our footprints were the only ones; the two boatmen waded in and held the boat against the wind like living anchors.

The rest of what stays is small and exact. The police gently stopping our evening stroll for devotion time, the fifteen minutes when the whole island pauses to pray. The prison with barely a fence and, when we looked in, one inmate. The runway at sunset, when a third of the country becomes its living room. The best meal we ate was the one our guesthouse host cooked. The guide is those three days with the near-misses removed - the boat arranged on day one instead of Sunday morning, and every step timed.