The two-hour flight to Funafuti costs £350 return.Finding your feet in Funafuti: the main island of the group has the only airport, and Tuvalu’s only hotel. The Vaiaku Lagi is extremely laid back but comfortable, and costs £35 a night for an air-con room. There are a couple of cheaper guesthouses, and a couple of restaurants. The Kai Restaurant by the airport terminal does great fish dishes for around £3Tony Wheeler is founder of Lonely Planet travel guides.

He was this week presented with the Outstanding Contribution Award at the annual Travelex Travel Writing Awards.”You can borrow the navy,” said the Prime Minister, just before he died Well, to be honest, Tuvalu doesn’t really have a navy. Just the Australian patrol boat Te Mataili, one of 22 that Australia provides for Pacific nations to chase unlicensed Taiwanese and Korean fishing boats that venture into their territorial waters. The patrol boats don’t often catch an illegal fisher, but their efforts ensure that, these days, most of the north Asian fishing fleets do pay their substantial licensing fees. It’s a “keep them honest” policy that brings in many millions to Pacific island budgets.
And we didn’t really borrow the navy.

The boat was going to be out on patrol and we could come along for the ride, stopping off in turn at each of the nine islands that make up Tuvalu But the Prime Minister did die. An event that, among other things, would lead to the British High Commissioner to Fiji losing his trousers.Tuvalu is one of the world’s smallest nations in terms of both land area (just 16 square miles) and population (10,000 people), although that scattering of nine islands occupies an awful lot of Pacific Ocean – 350,000 square miles of it. It’s also one of the newest nations – independence from Britain (it used to be the Ellice half of the Gilbert & Ellice Islands) came in 1978, and membership of the UN in 2000.If Tuvalu impinges on the outside world’s consciousness at all, it’s probably because of dotTV. In the great internet address handout, Tuvalu struck lucky when it got the initials tv, and a steady stream of cash is starting to flow Tuvalu’s way from all the television companies that would like an internet address like BBC.