Flying Fish Cove

Flying Fish Cove is the administrative centre and primary harbour of Christmas Island, home to roughly two thousand residents and the point through which virtually all visitors arrive by sea or air. The settlement clusters along the northeastern shore where the volcanic plateau meets a shallow reef-bounded embayment, creating a sheltered anchorage that has been the island's focal point since the first European ships used it as a stopover in the seventeenth century.

The beach at the cove is the most accessible on the island, a gentle crescent of sand and coral rubble that shelves shallowly enough for safe swimming at all tides, making it popular with both residents and the modest number of tourists who visit Christmas Island each year. Behind the beach a line of banyan trees and casuarinas provides shade, and beyond that the settlement's modest concrete houses and community buildings rise steeply up the hillside toward the forested plateau above.

The cove takes its name from the abundant flying fish that historically schooled in these waters, a resource that sustained the island's small Chinese fishing community throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the island was still privately owned by the Clunies-Ross family. Today the harbour serves the small boats of the local fishing fleet and the supply vessels that maintain the island's connection to mainland Australia, a journey of more than two thousand six hundred kilometres by sea.

From the headland at the northern end of the beach the view sweeps across the reef flat to the open ocean, with the island's famous cliffs visible along the western skyline and the blue-grey mass of the Indonesian island of Java visible on clear mornings from the higher vantage points above the settlement. The reef flat is exposed at low tide, revealing a carpet of coral and sea grass that supports a dense population of reef fish, parrotfish and sea cucumbers that can be snorkelled directly from shore.

Christmas Island's position in the eastern Indian Ocean places it roughly equidistant between Australia, Indonesia and the African mainland, a mid-ocean isolation that has produced one of the most distinctive endemic biotas on Earth. The island was volcanically formed during the Cretaceous period and subsequently uplifted, leaving a ring of limestone cliffs around a central plateau that reaches three hundred and sixty-one metres at Murray Hill, the island's highest point.

The settlement's compact layout and the steepness of the surrounding terrain mean that most of the island's natural forest lies within easy walking distance of the cove, with several marked walking tracks ascending directly from the edge of town into the national park rainforest. The Coastal Track, a well-maintained path that runs from the cove toward the airport along the northeastern shore, passes through a complete cross-section of the island's habitats from shoreline vegetation through coconut plantations and into mature rainforest within twenty minutes of leaving the beach.

It is the practical gateway to one of the world's most isolated inhabited territories, where Australian governance meets Indian Ocean biodiversity in a setting unlike anywhere else on the continent.

The shallow reef and clear water provide accessible snorkelling directly off the beach, with a completeness of marine life that rewards even brief exploration.

The walking tracks ascending from the cove offer the most convenient access to the island's endemic rainforest and the robber crab populations that inhabit it.