Day 13 Christmas Island

Today we landed at Christmas Island. The locals spell it Kiritimati. Unfortunately, they have no "s" in their alphabet so "ti" is pronounced as an "s". So translating this would be phonetically written as Kirismas, which is because Captain Cook landed here on Dec 24, 1777 and he named it Christmas Island.
Don't get too excited because although the island has a rugged beauty to it it is a very flat piece of coral. In fact it is the largest purely coral formation in the world. It sits on the international date line and is the first place on earth to enter into the new year each year. The island has more than a 100 inner lakes. It is very shallow so we had to take tenders in to see the island.
What we saw was a relatively poor people who seem to subsist mainly on their connection to the ocean and its bounty.
I suppose it is fitting that we stopped here because you may remember in the 1950's and early 60's the island was used to test nuclear bombs. My father being heavily involved in the development of nuclear technology. Unfortunately, the powers in place at the time of the testing did not bother to remove the residents or give them any protection. They should we wary of global warming for is appears that a small rise in the ocean level would put this tiny island under water.
We have included a picture of one of their boats which we found interesting since they still use the outrigger feature that is a holdover from their canoes of long ago.

Chris - No Christmas card at Christmas Island - Well, until I saw the Island I thought I might find inspiration or signage I could use for our card next year.....no. No signage, one store (for locals called Fair Price), not much of anything. There was a welcoming serenade from the locals and I did find some pretty shells, a lot of them were shades of purple and pink. We thought we might be able to snorkel in the lagoon as the island is shaped like a crab with a lagoon in the middle, but it has a very rough coastline with sharp coral and seashells....it didn't look very inviting. I'm glad we can say we've been to Christmas Island as few get to go...and we now know why.
Once again trouble loading pictures . Will do it in a seperate post.