“Fiji is a place that drums on your senses, and reminds you that you are alive”: What it’s really like to visit the world’s friendliest island

I was expecting to spend most of my time in Fiji, a nation of more than 300 islands, on or in the water, but I’d mostly been thinking of the ocean. Yet on a warm morning in May, I found myself deep within the mountainous interior of Fiji’s largest island, Viti Levu, roaring in a red jet boat down a winding, mud-brown river, past sheer cliffs, dense jungle, and gentle banks where locals watered their horses or fished for tilapia or mud crabs. The river was one of Viti Levu’s longest, the Sigatoka, whose fertile, farmable banks are known as Fiji’s “salad bowl”.

After a while, the boat driver, an indigenous Fijian called Captain Nox, steered us into the shallows and cut the engine to share some local history with his 14 passengers. He pointed out a nearby mountain and told us that, because it was sacred, the Sigatoka chiefs had resisted many lucrative bids to quarry its marble deposits. In the 19th century, he said, one tribe lived in caves at the top and would rain rocks and spears down on anyone who tried to invade via the only trail that snaked up the mountain’s sheer face. He beamed. “But now Fiji is the friendliest island, eh?”

It’s true; nothing compares to the plosive enthusiasm of the Fijian greeting “bula!” It’s a word that floats like a bubble. Everyone says “bula” to everyone, even passing strangers. And historically, many have passed through here. A crossroads in the heart of the South Pacific, Fiji spans from eastern Melanesia, the region populated in prehistory by ethnically African people, to the western edge of Polynesia, which was inhabited later, by people who migrated from Southeast Asia by outrigger and double-hulled canoe. A little more than half of Fiji’s 900,000 people are Indigenous, or iTaukei, and nearly 40 per cent are ethnically Indian, descended from indentured labourers brought to work on sugar plantations during British colonial rule. Nox motored us to our next destination, Mavua, a typical rural iTaukei village of brightly painted cement houses with roaming chickens and children, populated mostly by subsistence farmers.

In Mavua's community hall, a big, open-raftered room with louvered windows, 30 villagers welcomed us with a kava ceremony. Beloved throughout the South Pacific, kava is an earthy-tasting brown beverage made from the macerated root of a shrub in the pepper family (black, not bell pepper) called yaqona. On the first sip, kava makes your tongue go a little numb and, if you keep drinking, it induces a state of mellow good vibes. Glug enough of it, and you may find yourself more or less immobilised. Fijians are passionate about kava, which they call grog, and the slo-mo communal act of drinking it has long served as a tool for forging relationships and mitigating disputes.

As the kava was prepared, the village chief and the oldest man in our boat (by default, our chief) engaged in a ritualised dialogue, punctuated by clapping and, eventually, sipping. As the bilos (cups for drinking kava) were passed around, heavy rain fell, drumming on the roof. Women in brightly printed dresses draped us with salusalu, or leaf garlands. The village dogs, drawn by the smell of lunch, waited hopefully outside the open doors. Sitting in long rows on the floor, we ate cassava and banana, greens, roti, sweet fried bread, ramen with curry sauce, and chicken. Afterwards, while men played guitars and ukuleles, everyone danced together, shuffling back and forth across the hall side by side with arms around one another’s waists, laughing. Then we jet-boated away in driving rain, the engine growling ferociously as Captain Nox spun us in circles.

Later, back at the sprawling Nanuku Resort Fiji on Viti Levu’s south coast, where I was staying, I had a private kava ceremony. Organised by an iTaukei man named Josua Cakautini, it was performed by four burly, bare-chested men who sat around a huge wooden bowl, in which they prepared the kava. During the ceremony, Cakautini explained that, before Covid, the yaqona root was often chewed by women rather than pounded. “Covid clashed with everything we stand for,” he said. “Unity and sharing. But you have to survive. And now we can welcome you here, and we say ‘bula’ to you to show we are respecting you as a human being.” He demonstrated how to clap to receive my bilo of kava. Then I was to say “bula” and drink it all in one gulp. I did. My lips tingled. “Fijian culture is changing,” he said. “The language. The way we dress. The way we live. But kava is the same.”

Bula means “hello” but it also means “life”. Fiji is a place that drums on your senses, and reminds you that you are alive. It’s lush, colourful, and busy. Hardly anyone will let you arrive at or leave a place without singing a song of welcome or farewell. The roadsides are full of grazing horses and children in school uniform walking or hitchhiking, the boys in dapper narrow skirts called sulus, the girls in sleeveless shirt-dresses in mint green or coral. Snack bars try to outdo one another with clever names: Road Krill, Cannibal Country, and Cuppabula. People sell fruit, yaqona root, and strings of fish from simple stands. Outfitters offer cage-free shark dives and advertise snorkelling and scuba excursions with laminated photos of reefs bustling with fish. Water, always water.

One day I went out snorkelling at a teensy private island with Kelly-Dawn Bentley, a marine biologist and native of nearby Pacific Harbour. We glided over a reef in water so shallow I barely dared move my fins. Little black fish bustled out of the coral as though to shoo us away. A school of silvery thumbprint emperors flashed around us like a swarm of UFOs. Bentley explained that a familiar practice was being used to conserve Fiji’s aquatic resources. “We are working with the local chief to hopefully designate this area as tabu,” she said, gesturing at the water between us and a nearby outlying island.

Throughout the South Pacific, tabu (Captain James Cook imported the word to the English language in 1777 as “taboo”) is a sacred prohibition that, traditionally, wasn’t used only to forbid offensive behaviour but also to manage community resources. For example, if a chief decided that a mountain had been too heavily hunted for pigs, he might declare it tabu until the pigs had time to recover. After overfishing in Fiji reached crisis levels in the ’90s, communities banded together to resurrect the practice of designating reefs as tabu so that fish could breed and mature in peace. The system is not perfectly effective (enforcement is a problem), but it’s an intriguingly modern application of an ancient idea. “Sustainability isn’t just about the environment,” Bentley told me. “It’s socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental.”

At Kokomo Private Island, the luxury is so assured and pervasive as to seem effortless and casual, even homey. The passion project of Australian property billionaire Lang Walker, Kokomo occupies all 140 acres of an island south of Viti Levu called Yaukuve Levu that is a 45-minute seaplane flight from Fiji’s international airport at Nadi. As we approached, the barefoot pilot descended over the aquamarine shallows of the surrounding Great Astrolabe Reef, circled once over a green, bottle-shaped dollop of land with villas studding the long sandy beaches on either side of its neck, and splashed gently down.

Kokomo has 21 villas and five larger residences amid grounds that have been manicured into an idealised version of Fiji’s wild jungles: dense, rustling, green ranks of thriving palms and shrubs and broad-leafed banana plants, punctuated with vibrant maroon ti plants and sprays of white frangipani blossoms. The clientele tends to be Australian or Kiwi – and often families. There is a spa, of course, and a terraced five-and-a-half-acre organic farm, plus a floating platform off the main beach where guests can have drinks delivered by paddleboard. You know the room-service sashimi is fresh because the person on the other end of the phone will have to check with “the boys” to see if any fish has been caught yet. A grand, open, timbered and thatched building known modestly as The Beach Shack serves as the lobby and main restaurant. A second restaurant, Walker d’Plank, is perched above shallow waters patrolled by blacktip reef sharks.

My aquatic lifestyle flourished. I could swim in my private pool or walk a few steps down to the beach, passing under a budding tree swarmed by black butterflies. I could snorkel or go out on a boat with iTaukei marine biologist Viviana Taubera to see Kokomo’s coral-restoration project or, as we did one afternoon, search for manta rays. We motored across the water made dark by an overcast sky, headed for a cleaning station off a neighbouring island, a place where the massive creatures were known to hang out and let smaller fish nibble the parasites off their bodies. “It’s too quiet out here,” said Taubera, scanning the sea. Just then the water around us exploded with a silvery disturbance: mackerel. “A school of thousands,” she said, lighting up. On the remote island where she grew up, she’d spent all her time in the ocean. “Marine biology was always a passion,” she told me. “For a while, I regretted studying it because I couldn’t find a job. But now…” She smiled. Now there was Kokomo. When no mantas showed, she was as crestfallen as a first-time visitor. “I really wanted to see one,” she exclaimed.

On my second-to-last morning, I was on Kokomo’s main dock before dawn. A two-level, 51-foot fishing boat was waiting for me, as was Jaga Crossingham, an Australian sportfishing guide and spear fisherman. “The kitchen told me no more fish,” he said. Showing me around the boat, he pointed out the padded, bolted-down chair at the stern, complete with a seat belt and footrests, where I would sit, theoretically to reel in a big fish. “This is where we fight,” he said. A pile of neon rubber squid-like lures and silver decoy fish with hooks as long as my hand lay at the ready.

When the fish weren’t biting inside the reef, we went outside to where waves were breaking on the protective coral of Astrolabe. As the boat rolled heavily, we trolled along, booms extended like wings, trailing six lines. One zinged out, and I was sent to the chair. I reeled and reeled until my arm burned, finally pulling in a rainbow runner about three feet long. “Just a little one,” said Crossingham, dropping the fish in an ice-filled cooler against the kitchen’s edict. “It’ll make good sashimi for the staff.” We stayed out for a couple more hours, but the fish showed no more interest. “You did well,” said Crossingham when I stepped back onto Kokomo’s dock. At first, I thought he meant reeling in my little big fish. But then he explained, “99.9 per cent of people would have been very seasick.”

Out on that reef, I am reminded that any ocean nation is inherently a wild place, governed by water, for better or worse. We might have missed the manta rays, but it’s nice to think that they may be busy elsewhere. Thrashing waters might have the ability to turn a seaman green, though their energy is, in part, sheltering the marine life below. Warming seas endanger the reefs that protect the islands and the creatures that live in and around them, feeding Fiji’s people. There’s life there, in all its complexity. There’s bula.

Where to stay in Fiji 

The majority of Fiji’s best spots are off the shores of its two main islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu, and many include private transfers for guests.

Kokomo Private Island (doubles from about £1,765) – a series of hilltop villas and beachside bure cottages overlooking the pristine waters of the southern Kadavu archipelago – is its own frangipani scented, barefoot-luxe ecosystem. The exceptional staff lead snorkelling tours to meet the manta rays that the resort helps to protect, and serves local mud crabs or baked mahi-mahi, with produce from the on-site organic farm, beehives, and vanilla plantation. 

On the southern edge of Viti Levu, the thatched-roof villas of Nanuku Resort Fiji (from about £546) poke through the trees on a paradise stretch of beach. Further afield than the diving, spa-going, and private plunging, activities include whitewater rafting through volcanic tunnels and exploring mangroves on foot or raft (the latter might involve traditional crabbing). 

Other stay options include the Six Senses Fiji (from about £715), on the surf-ready Malolo Island west of Viti Levu, where endangered Fijian crested iguanas roam among the thatched bure villas with private pools. 

What to do in Fiji

On Viti Levu, the mighty Sigatoka is one of Fiji’s longest rivers, and the Sigatoka River Safari takes guests past emerald hillsides and local villages with tales of its history. The eco-minded Talanoa Treks bring hikers through Fiji’s lush interiors, with dense forests and waterfalls.