The Cocos Islands: a remote Indian Ocean paradise

Few tropical archipelagos are quite as beautiful, remote and appealingly quirky as the Cocos Islands, said Ruaridh Nicoll in the Financial Times (FT). 

Isolated in the Indian Ocean 660 miles south of Indonesia – but governed from Australia, 1,720 miles to their southeast – they are an "all but mythical world of tides and sun", surrounded by glorious coral reefs. They are a joyous place for lovers of the sea, but they also have a strange history, and are home to an "idiosyncratic" and tight-knit community of some 593 people who "make a point of drawing in visitors". 

However, this is not a tourist hot spot. There are only 144 tourist beds in the whole archipelago and two incoming flights each week, both from Perth. The islands were first spotted in 1609, but not settled until 1826, when a "horror" called Alexander Hare arrived with a harem, "thinking he was going to have a fine old time". Hare also brought in Sunni Muslim labourers from Malaysia and Indonesia, from whom most of the islands' current inhabitants are descended. He was soon pushed out, however, by one of his former captains, a Shetland islander called John Clunies-Ross, generations of whose descendants then maintained a semi-feudal rule over the islands.

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They "held Scottish country dances, imported deer to hunt, walked around shoeless in white suits", and were even visited by Queen Elizabeth II in 1954. But in 1973, they were forced to sell up by the Australian state under advice from the UN's decolonisation programme.

There are two main islands, Home and West, both about seven miles long, but very narrow. Most of the best places to stay – such as Waves Oceanfront – are on West, as is much of the social action. This revolves around the "club" (the islands' bar), games of Scroungers ("an absurd round of golf straddling the runway") and several restaurants (which open in rotation, as they share the same staff). But it's worth exploring further afield – ferry rides across the lagoon are "spirit-soaring", and Cossies beach, on Direction Island, is truly idyllic.