Majuro Atoll

Majuro is long and thin — a 30-kilometre crescent of land ringing a lagoon, with the ocean on the outside and a sheltered waterway on the inside. Almost all the country's infrastructure is compressed onto this narrow strip: the international airport terminal sits at one end, the parliament building and government offices are mid-atoll, and the longest stretch of usable beachfront is at the opposite end from the airport. The effect is of a city that never had room to sprawl, so it grew vertically instead, with modest two- and three-storey buildings the norm.

The Laura Beach area, on the ocean side at the western end of the atoll, is the closest thing Majuro has to a resort zone. The beach is a long curve of pale sand shelving gently into the ocean, protected on the left by a rocky point that makes the water here calmer than the open ocean side of the atoll. Snorkellers wade out over shallow reef to find parrotfish, surgeonfish and the occasional turtle grazing the coral. The reef is not pristine — crown-of-thorns outbreaks have damaged sections — but the water is clear and the marine life is active and varied.

On the lagoon side, the Delap Beach area is the social centre: modest hotels, the bowling alley that serves as the closest thing to a community gathering space, and the fish market where the daily catch arrives by boat each morning. Vendors sell fresh yellowfin tuna, wahoo and local specialties that visitors are encouraged to try even if the names are unfamiliar. The lagoon itself is calm and shallow near the shore, deepening to 30 or 40 metres further out, and it was in this lagoon that the Japanese naval base operated before and during the Second World War.

The Second World War wreckage in Majuro lagoon is less famous than Bikini's but is more accessible to recreational divers and snorkellers. An intact Japanese Zero fighter sits on the lagoon floor at around 12 metres, still painted in its wartime green camouflage, and other wreckage — landing craft, anchor chains, debris fields — is scattered across the bottom. The water is warm year-round at 27–29 degrees Celsius and dive visibility is good though not exceptional, typically 20 to 30 metres.

For a capital city of a sovereign nation, Majuro has a striking absence of the usual urban pressures. There is no traffic congestion, no advertising hoardings, no industrial pollution visible on the atoll itself. The main road, called the Ring Road, is a single lane each direction for most of its length and the fastest way to get anywhere is still by bicycle. What the city lacks in urban sophistication it partly recovers in a genuinely relaxed pace and a local population that is accustomed to but not dependent on visitors.

The most accessible Pacific atoll capital, offering lagoon and ocean diving with WWII wreckage within minutes of the runway.

Laura Beach provides the most reliable calm-water beach experience in the Ratak Chain.

The daily fish market and lagoon-side Delap area give an authentic picture of contemporary Marshallese coastal life.