Fun fact, Kiribati is actually pronounced Kiribass, in case you’re like me and have been pronouncing it incorrectly for your whole life. It is also the only country in the world to span all the hemispheres, but it does have its own unified time zone. If you’ve ever looked up the international date line and wondered why it gets so squiggly, it’s mostly because of Kiribati.
After breakfast at a very nice café in Tarawa, we headed out to our hotel, which was a collection of the traditional-style villas. It was pretty relaxing to be in the villa, under the mosquito netting, with the breeze coming in through the windows. But after a short rest, we headed back out to explore a little more of Kiribati!
We were walking to a beach near the broken bridge, and it ended up being a very long walk. It ended up being about six miles round trip. To be honest, it was a longer and hotter walk than I was hoping for, especially coming off a long hot walk in Nauru the day before, but it was cool to see the villages and a lot of the local kids joined us at the beach. Kiribati is beautiful. So many lush palm trees and the water was such a nice shade of turquoise!
Another Pacific country, another spectacular island sunset!
An interesting aspect of our hotel was that it was separated from the island with the airport by the water. On the way there, they had us take a tiny boat across, because it was high tide. On the way out, however, it was low tide. So we all walked across with our luggage. I was glad I had packed light.
Kiribati was pleasant, although I might have enjoyed it more if the weather had been a touch cooler while we were there! Our next stop was Fiji, and it was a nice change of pace to be somewhere with a bit more infrastructure.