Australia’s Cocos Islands: too perfect to be true
The remote, isolated atoll, a four-hour flight from Perth, is home to the top-ranking Australian beach – so why is no one visiting it?
In late 2016, a new edition of 101 Best Australian Beaches featured 300 metres of palm-fringed sand on an uninhabited speck in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands as its top choice.
“As near to perfect as a beach can be,” enthused one of the guide’s authors, who claimed to have visited each of the other 11,760 beaches in Australia before making an announcement that attracted all the media attention no doubt intended. Few Australians had even heard of Direction Island before, let alone visited it.
The Cocos – two atolls and 27 coral islands – are a four-hour flight northwest over the Indian Ocean from Perth. The view to the left just before landing is of a necklace of low-lying strips of coral that surround a limpid lagoon – tousled-palm desert islands too perfect to be true.
A single pretty beach is far from the only reason to visit, not least because so few other people do the same – the islands receive fewer than 2,000 leisure travellers a year. Imagine the Maldives without the millions. In fact, imagine the Maldives but without anyone else on the beach at all.