Visiting the World’s Fattest Country That Went Bankrupt 🇳🇷

Two days on Nauru with Kieran, riding rented bikes around the entire country in a single loop — which Harry points out is the first time he has ever been round a whole country in a day.

The island was, within living memory, the richest nation per capita on the planet, on phosphate. It is now 80% stripped bare, with the works derelict, the land unusable, and an economy that has since run on offshore banking, selling passports, switching recognition between China and Taiwan, and housing refugees for Australia.

He expected the detention camp to be closed. It isn’t. The most substantial part of the video is a conversation with a man being held there.

Obs: journalists must pay $10,000 or risk arrest, so Harry entered as a tourist. The video carries an eSIM sponsor tied to a charity donation.

Key moments

• [00:00] The premise: one of the least visited countries on earth, once filthy rich, now the island that ate itself.
• [00:33] The superlatives — highest obesity rate in the world, highest smoking addiction rate, an Australian detention camp.
• [00:33] Journalists are banned unless they pay $10,000 or risk arrest, which is why he came as a tourist.
• [01:06] The smallest international airport he has seen.
• [01:42] Third smallest country in the world after Monaco and Vatican City, called Pleasant Island by its colonisers.
• [01:42] Two bikes for $30 a day.
• [01:42] 21 km², population 10,000.
• [02:16] The ring road — the only good road, and a full loop in 20 to 30 minutes by car.
• [02:16] Supermarket prices, everything imported: a watermelon at $24, grapes at $21.
• [02:51] A viewer from Fiji, working at the hospital, who moved for a change of environment and misses her family.
• [03:53] The phosphate story: mined heavily from the 1970s, and it made the average Nauruan four times richer than the average American.
• [04:25] The English discovered it and worked it, and much of the wealth was funnelled away before independence.
• [04:25] Today: 80% of the island stripped bare, only a narrow strip habitable, extreme poverty, no fresh water, life expectancy 64.
• [04:57] No port — jagged coral all round the island, so phosphate was loaded by cantilever booms onto ships offshore. The booms still stand.
• [05:30] To the detention camp, with a joke at England’s expense about building prisons on other people’s islands.
• [06:04] Two attempts at getting in.
• [06:41] It isn’t closed. A restricted area, approved personnel only, and very much still functioning.
• [07:11] A detainee from Bangladesh: a year so far, six months inside and six outside.
• [07:47] Life here is hard, and he can’t go home because he says he’d be killed.
• [08:20] Australia pays A$500,000 per detainee. Reports of inhumane conditions, riots and deaths have made Nauru a symbol of failed migration policy.
• [08:52] The land left behind — not arable, not habitable, worthless.
• [08:52] Deep-sea mining is the new plan: polymetallic nodules for electric-car batteries.
• [09:23] The irony he draws out — powering the green transition while risking catastrophic damage to the seabed, about which we know less than the surface of the moon.
• [09:54] The other survival strategies: offshore banking, money laundering, selling passports, and taking money to switch recognition between China and Taiwan, twice.
• [10:29] The car graveyard — imported 70s and 80s cars left to rot, with no recycling on the island.
• [10:59] The police commissioner who imported a yellow Lamborghini and was too large to fit in it.
• [11:29] Obesity and diet: almost no local food production, so the diet runs on imported processed food. Nearly 50% of the population has type 2 diabetes. The obesity figure is given as 90% earlier in the video and 70% here (from video – unverified).
• [12:37] A Japanese World War II bunker on the north of the island.
• [13:45] Japan invaded in 1942, built bunkers and tunnels and forced Nauruans into labour. The Allies cut the supply lines and starved the island; Australia liberated it and found it broken.
• [14:18] History repeating, as his reason for keeping the reminders.
• [14:48] A full circle of the country in one day — a first for him.
• [14:48] You give way to landing aircraft on the road by the airport.
• [15:21] Independence Day, and a police convoy that is probably the president.
• [15:42] The derelict phosphate works.
• [15:52] By the end they were mining deeper and harder for less, spending hundreds of thousands to find phosphate and barely profiting.
• [16:55] What phosphate is, and where it came from — fertiliser, and on Nauru, bird droppings. Now there is none left.
• [17:10] The camp is full, so refugees are also housed in hotels. He goes to one, carefully, because the government doesn’t want filming.
• [17:29] Better than the camp, marginally — there’s air conditioning.
• [18:02] He’s been told the wait can be 10, 12, 15 or 20 years.
• [18:02] Not allowed to work, and eating once or twice a day because the money doesn’t stretch. A biryani costs $20.
• [18:41] He came by boat from Indonesia, a month inside with no view, trying to reach Australia.
• [19:20] Another boat capsized, and many died.
• [19:50] He knew it was dangerous and went anyway.
• [19:50] Asked what he wants: not his dream but everyone’s — another country, and freedom.
• [20:20] A heart condition, and check-ups but no medicine.
• [20:57] $13,000 paid to traffickers.
• [21:32] Harry’s reading: Nauru is said to profit around $1 million a year, and both governments gain — Australia removes people it doesn’t want, Nauru earns, and the longer they stay the more it earns.
• [22:07] He says plainly that he feels bad for them and that they were a good group of men.
• [22:15] The verdict, conflicted and left that way: he came with negative preconceptions and negative research and found much of it confirmed — and the people were friendly and parts of the island are beautiful.
• [22:38] Blame assigned to the Nauruan government, the Australian government and the leaders, not the people. He hopes it’s a lesson in resource management and says he doesn’t expect it to be.

Extracted pages

• Country: Nauru
• Person: Kieran