Shelter from the rain by the walls of the Spanish fort, look up at the ruins of the German Bell Tower, glance left at the Japanese war memorial, then turn right to see the crowd cheering at a game of baseball. You are in Kolonia, in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), one of the world’s most frequently colonized and loosely assembled nation-states.
FSM encompasses more than 600 islands and 110,000 people, scattered across 2.5 million square kilometres of the Pacific Ocean. Often spectacularly beautiful, the islands range from vivid coral atolls to volcanic outcrops clad with dense tropical rainforests and drenched in some places with up to 400 centimetres of annual rainfall. Few people bother with umbrellas, they just get wet.
