Three of Fiji’s Islands
It has been our goal from the get-go to spend time exploring islands of the South Pacific. We believe the Republic of Fiji with its 332 islands to be the perfect intro to our next adventure.
Viti Levu
We arrived in Nadi and drove to our resort about an hour away. This was a strategic and comfortable decision as we’ve been staying at Shangri-La properties as often as possible this year (having started with our long stay in Taiwan over the winter months). Book-ending our stay in the South Pacific at that hotel let us leave two large suitcases in their storage as we hop around the islands with smaller luggage.
Fiji is situated North of New Zealand, east of Australia and west of French Polynesia, smack dab in the middle of the Pacific, below the equator in the southern hemisphere. Like nearly all the islands in the South Pacific, it is of volcanic origin with distinctive green palm-tree covered hills.
A guitarist played mellow Fijian songs, his dulcet voice singing that beautiful, vowel-rich language.
We chilled in the infinity pool and snorkeled in tropical waters. We couldn’t believe it; we were finally here where palm trees grew on the edge of sandy beaches and turquoise clear waters, colorful fishes swimming right before our noses (in our snorkel masks)!
We shopped in town for two additional, inexpensive carry-on suitcases to use while hopping around the South Pacific over the next few months. The airline weight limitation is 15kg per bag, and that works really well with these smaller luggage.
For the foreseeable future, we will travel with two small checked suitcases and a backpack each plus one computer bag (Gitty picked up in Singapore) and one ukulele (Randy bought a beautiful instrument in Taipei).
Vanua Levu
The bay at Koro Sun at low tide
We next flew to the second biggest Fijian island, Vanua Levu, and drove three hours through mountain villages and nature to the other side of the island. It was very interesting to see the many small agricultural plots of cassava and taro crops, pineapple, papaya and coconut trees, long green beans, Fijian spinach, tomato, soursop, passion fruit, and rambutan, sort of far away from the coast.
We stayed for a really nice long time at the Koro Sun resort in the south of the island near the town Savu Savu.
The lunch and bar by the pool
The pool overlooked the bay which changed based on the tide
The most incredible ceviche served in a coconut shell with a shot of coconut water, yummy!
It rained a lot, actually every day for a bit, and then we had sunshine again. The overcast and rainy days we filled with a number of activities like visiting a chocolate farm that had delicious, organic variations of chocolate, coated candied-ginger being our favorite.
Cocoa beans take months from sprout to a delicious chocolate bar
We also took a trip to a swimming hole between two rivers, 10 minutes walk into the inner rainforest part of the island. It was a fun and refreshing place to swim, but first we needed to visit the village and offer the elders a Kava root bundle as a gift for their generosity in allowing us to use their natural “healing” pool as it was located on their property.
Sharing lunch in the communal hall
To our good fortune, on that Monday it was community work day where the whole village joined together to improve their infrastructure, like digging and laying a new walkway. We arrived during their lunch time which they shared in their community hall. Every family contributed a dish and so it was a bigger social event with a joyous mood. The whole experience was fascinating, and swimming in the natural pool deeper in the wooded area was very refreshing as, let’s face it, it is always rather humid here (80%) and hot (30C = 86F)
The healing waters of the natural pool certainly lifted our spirits
Kava can refer to either the plant or a beverage made from its root.
Preparing a sale of Kava root at the Savu Savu Saturday market
Serving the root-infused liquid during the kava ceremony
The beverage has sedative, anesthetic, and mildly numbing properties. Fijians are proud of their Kava ceremony where the root of the Kava plant is dried and crushed into a fine powder. The powder, in a cloth bag, is rinsed in a bowl of fresh water using a rolling technique infusing the bowl with the powder until the water appears a dirty brown. Then small half-coconut shells full of the Kava beverage are offered for consumption, leaving one’s tongue with a tingling feeling. One must truly consume a huge quantity of the earthy-tasting concoction to notice any euphoric affects at all.
After the kava ceremony, the staff of Koro Sun and their children perform local Fijian traditional dances
The men performing a warrior’s dance
Another time, we swam in a dark-green lake with a thunderous waterfall, again asking first the villagers permission offering a bundle of kava root. This seems to be customary when visiting an area on indigenous land.
We also enjoyed a tour of a pearl farm and the Saturday farmer’s market in Savu Savu. The pearl farm explained their history of pearl making and how Fiji specializes in colored pearls (opposite dark pearls everywhere else in the Pacific), a process that begins with a natural pearl seed and a genetic scraping from the oyster shell which produces the desired color and follows through with huge tanks that breed millions of oyster larvae.
Orion’s Belt constellation and palm trees at Koro Sun resort
After touring the facility, we snorkeled in the bay where the oysters were placed in a hanging fashion on strings and nets for them to grow the pearls inside. Gitty is ethically torn about the cages, as oysters are animals, and their movements are severely restricted.
For the final part of that pearl tour, a boat brought us to a beautiful, hard-coral reef snorkel site with many fishes and colorful corals. Back on the boat, we enjoyed a fresh oyster tasting. Not as slimy as Wellfleet Oysters, they had a chewy plumpness about them which Randy found particularly unique and tasty.
The resort offered a number of activities including their own golf course, but the nightly rains kept us from trying the soggy nine holes. We rather enjoyed the herons, ibises, and mongooses that roamed the course as well as the fruit bats flying overhead at night kindly reducing the insect population.
The small indian mongoose was introduced in the late 1800s to control rats in the sugarcane fields. Gitty had to look up what a mongoose is; we found them charming to watch, like a small river otter, but as they are not endemic to the islands, they became a hazard to endemic birds and reptiles like frogs and lizards.
Saturday at the Savu Savu market including the below slideshow
Taveuni
All too quickly, we found ourselves packed and waiting for the 6am bus that would bring us to the Taveuni ferry, yawning and blinking sleep from our eyes. Taveuni island is the third-largest Fijian island and is referred to as the Garden Island. Along with the many flowers (all kinds of hibiscus and the endemic Tagimoucia) we also saw many, many butterflies.
The early morning ferry from Taveuni came fully loaded with locals returning to Vanua Levu
The place where we stayed was geared for scuba divers, although they had activities for spouses who didn’t like to submerge. A small cove along the southern coast, it was beautiful with night skies bursting with stars!
We each got a welcome foot massage!
We can’t put in words how clear the water is here in Fiji. The crystalline blue sea had visibility down to the ocean floor with a clarity one needs to behold to believe. We dived the famous Rainbow Reef every day and observed healthy corals and so many fishes of a variety of colors and hues from oranges to iridescent blues, purples to striped yellow and white Angel fish with their long dorsal fin trailing overhead. We spotted nudibranchs (marine snails without a shell) of white and blue stripes with a cluster of antennae on their heads, some mottled orange and yellow or black and white. They come in so many forms and colors, but they’re uniformly tiny sea creatures that are difficult to locate, so seeing them again was an absolute joy for Randy.
Pods of dolphins liked to follow the dive boats
We spotted small white-tipped sharks and wide-winged spotted eagle rays with long thin tails, colorful parrot fish with big lips, sea turtles in the distance, and just so many corals of reds, oranges, browns, blues and purples it is difficult to describe.
With endless oceans of those healthy colorful hard corals, what we found especially fascinating was such a huge variety and huge amounts of soft corals – they only thrive in clean water!
On our last diving day, we scuba dived the famous Great White Wall, among the ten best dive sites in the world. Seeing the wall flowing with soft, snowy white corals from about 50 feet to well below 100 feet, was awesome.
We ended our stay on Taveuni with an island tour that had us straddling the 180 degree meridian with one side being today and the other side, technically, yesterday. Only a rare few landmasses bifurcate the 180 degree meridian known casually as the international date line.
We visited a natural waterslide down a flowing river (Randy could not pass up the opportunity to try that out), and another, even more beautiful, tall-waterfall-fed lake to swim in. This one had a wall of green plants and was literally bigger, better, and more beautiful than the earlier waterfall.
Loved the outdoor showers
So many designs
Tomorrow, we fly to yesterday.
It’s a meridian thing. More on that next time.
Sunset on the northern tip of Taveuni
