There’s a scratching noise coming from my bathroom at Villa Papaya, making me slightly edgy. But when a small, red leg extends through the wooden window shutters, I laugh, gently dislodging the intruder. My would-be roommate could not be more iconic. It’s a Christmas Island red crab, a creature found nowhere else but on this far-flung speck of land in the eastern Indian Ocean.
Though I’m just 350 kilometers south of Java, Christmas Island is in fact an external territory of Australia, whose nearest mainland lies 1,500 kilometers to the southeast; the only regular flights into its little airport are from Perth, three and a half hours away. First settled as a British possession in the late 19th century
