The Least Visited Country in the World 🇹🇻

Three days in Tuvalu with Kieran — the least visited country on earth, nine atolls, about 12,000 people, and two metres above the sea.

The frame is climate: Harry says his geography teacher told him as a child that he would never go there because it was going to disappear. The video ends with the prime minister putting numbers to that.

What it is actually about, though, is the community — an entire population out on the airport runway every evening because no aircraft is coming.

Obs: the video carries an eSIM sponsorship. The provider is not recorded here.

Key moments

• [00:01] The premise: rising seas, and not on a scale of decades — cyclones and spring tides already flood the islands.
• [00:34] Why nobody comes: remote, expensive, and almost no tourism infrastructure.
• [01:05] Flying in from Suva, Fiji.
• [01:38] Visa-free for every nationality — which he flags specifically for people travelling on passports that get refused everywhere else.
• [01:38] The flight leaves and doesn’t come back for three days.
• [02:09] The airport manager takes them around personally, and they are allowed to drive on the runway.
• [02:41] There are no hotels. They stay in somebody’s house.
• [02:41] Australian dollars, about 12,000 people, very good beaches.
• [03:11] Asked what there is to see, a local answers: only the sea.
• [03:43] They hitch to the airport and rent a motorbike from a house.
• [04:09] The prison, and the gates are open. It is a free open jail.
• [04:18] A prison officer who watches the channel — the first person Harry has met in the Pacific who does.
• [05:30] Three inmates, and Harry cannot tell them apart from the officers.
• [06:06] Why it works, as the officer explains it: everyone knows everyone, and some of the officers are related to the inmates. They aren’t bad people; they made mistakes.
• [06:44] The economy: the .tv domain. Tuvalu licenses its country code to the streaming industry for around $8–10 million a year, roughly 10% of GDP (from video – unverified). Harry calls it pure luck and says they deserve it, given how little tourism brings in.
• [07:17] The reflection the trip produces: no skyscrapers, no air pollution, no noise, and a life that isn’t short of anything that matters.
• [08:18] The island is one beach wide — ocean on both sides in the same shot.
• [08:53] Two metres above sea level. His account of the science: within 30 to 40 years the sea takes it, and there is very little Tuvalu can do.
• [09:17] The runway is the park. With no flights due, it fills up with a traditional ball game — a hard ball fired at a team who have to work it back volleyball-style, with women singing behind them — and then football.
• [10:29] Something like half the population is out there every evening.
• [10:56] Fatele, the traditional dance. All eight islands have their own, and the performance he watches is a rehearsal for a real celebration the following week rather than a show put on for visitors — which is exactly why he rates it.
• [11:35] A woman who has lived there her whole life: life is peaceful, everyone worries about the sea, and the worry is for the next generation.
• [12:45] Their guide is a first-time tour guide — it is her first job of the kind, which tells you the state of the tourism industry more precisely than any statistic.
• [13:21] Asked whether she’d leave: she isn’t planning to, and says most people already have.
• [13:53] Reclaimed land, dug and pumped into place — he compares it to Dubai and then corrects himself, because this one is life and death. Currently used to store cargo; building starts in a few years.
• [14:26] A boat to another island in the same atoll, half an hour away. No roads, no police, a couple of families.
• [15:02] Fala Island, and the war history: the Japanese came, and people fled here from the capital. Fewer than 100 people live on it now. He is told the Americans later took the capital, and says on camera that he isn’t sure and that history is written by the winners.
• [16:08] A man weaving a sleeping mat for his grandson — not for sale, for the family — with the house open to the night because there is nothing to keep out.
• [16:41] Amazon Prime playing in a house with no roads outside it.
• [17:17] Extended families live in one house — grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins — sleeping together on mats in one room.
• [17:17] Education runs out here. Preschool on the island, then the mainland for secondary, and some go on to university.
• [18:33] The one good meal of the trip: taro, fish and lamb, cooked by a family.
• [19:00] The prime minister, reached because the guide is his niece — Harry’s point being that everything on the island connects to everything else.
• [19:49] The numbers, from him: by 2050 more than half the land regularly inundated by tides; fifty years after that, more than 90%. Fortifying the coastline has been the top priority of every government and will be of the next.
• [20:21] What he asks other countries for: resources to build resilience — and says it is hard to advocate for a place until people have come and seen it, so that they feel attached to it.
• [20:53] Why visit: they are the front line of climate change. He adds that Tuvalu is a deeply religious country that believes the land is God-given and will not be taken — and that they must be realistic, listen to the scientists, and build the adaptation plans around the evidence.
• [21:32] The one flat criticism: the food is consistently bad, among the worst he has had anywhere, the family meal excepted.
• [21:56] The sign-off: this may be the last time he can visit, and success isn’t the size of a bank account but the impact you have on people.

Extracted pages

• Country: Tuvalu
• Person: Kieran