Island of Viti Levu offers authentic village experiences

The best way to see Fiji is to keep on the move, as Hawaii writer Sheree Lipton titled her book “Fiji, I Love You, Full Speed.”

You’d have to be nuts to try and see all 332 islands (106 are inhabited) and 522 islets. So most reasonable travelers settle for one or two of these: the gateway island of Viti Levu; the Mamanucas, which are just a 45-minute boat ride from Viti Levu; Taveuni (which has absolutely charming smaller islands around it); the Yasawas that have a high-speed catamaran connection to Viti Levu; and the scuba diving favorite, Vanua Levu.

There are big resorts everywhere, but plenty of budget-travel places to stay as well.

My recent trip was limited to Viti Levu, its capital city of Suva, its airport-and-touristic-fun city of Nadi, the interior Nausori Highlands, Korolevu, Pacific Harbor and the small village of Keiyasi, where my wife and I and then 5-year-old daughter lived during a summer 39 years ago.

Two things strike you as soon as you land in Fiji: the extreme niceness of all the people you will meet, and the extreme green-ness that makes your photos look like landscapes by Claude Monet.

Also immediately noticeable is the fact that Fiji hasn’t yet ruined its coastal areas with edge-of-the-water, high-rise hotels Hawaii style. You’ll mostly see single-story bungalows on the beachfront with hotel properties set back in the bushes and trees. It makes you realize what we could have been!

Weather is a factor in any travel and I must warn you that Fiji’s main city, Suva, tends to have buckets of rainfall almost any time of year. You learn to live with that, the city’s horrible traffic on narrow roads and the scarcity of parking spaces. But Suva also has one of the world’s great open markets on two floors with everything from necessities, to touristic gewgaws, to yagona root to be ground and rubbed into kava — the traditional drink. You should take an offering of quality yagona roots if you go to visit any village and present them to the headmen.

Suva has food and more food. Local, Indian and Thai prevail, but a visitor must try Governor’s Museum-Themed Restaurant — locally just called (and written) as Governors without the apostrophe.

Do not miss the national museum, which doesn’t look like much from the outside but is a real treasure-trove and once you get into the back rooms. You’ll quickly realize why I tout the place. Amazing artifacts and photos line exhibits and the museum does not gloss over Fiji’s history of cannibalism.

Our daughter is posted with the U.S. Embassy there so we needed no lodging. If I did I’d probably spring for the $240-a-night Grand Pacific Hotel, the oldie but goodie on the water.

Nadi (pronounced nahn-dee just as yagona is pronounced yahn-go-nah) is, as I wrote earlier, the touristic heart of Fiji. Partly because that’s where the main airport is and largely because the sun always seems to shine there.

But the town’s main street is a gritty affair with schlocky shops. So a wise person heads off to the Port Denarau Retail Center, a collection of good shops, good restaurants and a marina with boats that offer tours for fishing and diving, or to the small, offshore Denarau Islands.

That’s where some very-high-end resorts are, and if you only stayed there you’d never meet an ordinary village Fijian. No one there is going to tell you that the islands were created by filling in mangrove swamps that were home to plenty of wildlife. You’re there to swim, gorge on barbecue and drink wildly in the thatched beachfront bars.

So my recommendation is to quickly escape Nadi for the Nausori Highlands. Your destination is Navala in the Ba District. You’ll need to rent a car — we had our diplomat-daughter’s — as a bus passes by only once a day and that would be a long, uncomfortable trip. Yes, you will be driving on dirt roads but good dirt roads with fewer potholes than our paved ones on Oahu.

Rustic but comfortable

Your first destination should the town of Ba for lunch, with a reservation for an overnight stay at Bulou’s Eco-Lodge adjacent to Navala Village — which you can only visit with the permission of the lodge owner’s son. The lodge is a group of fairly primitive but comfortable cabins with water, two light bulbs, a toilet and beds. The real joy of a stay there is in the food served in the main house and the stories told by Bulou’s son, who runs things. Bulou had a stroke and is confined to a wheelchair, and she can’t talk much these days. It’s $45 per person per night including breakfast and dinner.

From Navala the road goes south to Keiyasi Village. When we lived there it was all traditional thatch houses — as Navala still has today — but now Keiyasi sports regular, single-story, tin-roofed houses. When we lived there, it was no electricity and no running water. You brushed your teeth and washed at the river edge, where the horses stood cooling themselves and doing their bodily functions.

Our last night there that year, a government agent had brought in a generator and a single light-bulb line running to the headman’s house. Everyone gathered stayed up all night with that light bulb on.

Keiyasi is very welcoming but you must check in first with the headman and you must bring an appropriately wrapped bunch of yagona root.

The dirt road south next goes to Sigatoka (singa-tow-ka) where the river meets the ocean. You join the main coastal highway there. Going west would take you back to Nadi. Turning east takes you through Korolevu’s Coral Coast with its many bure-themed thatched cabins with all the amenities. We loved Mango Bay, starting at $75 a night.

Next you’ll spot the huge resort and housing complex at Pacific Harbor, loaded with elegant hotels with some $5,000-a-night suites. It’s great to stop look at (they’ll gladly show you around) but I wouldn’t want to stay there in such isolation from the real Fiji unless I were desperate for dipping in the ocean — which most of us from Hawaii are not.

One of the quirky things you’ll notice in Pacific Harbor and Suva is that a small Korean Christian sect has moved in — in a big way. It set up very clean restaurants and ice cream parlors, leased huge plots of land and is engaged in mechanized rice growing, which is new to Fiji.

The sect, Grace Road, believes the end of times is coming and that only Fiji is destined to survive the famine and eventual dissolution that will strike the rest of the planet.

They make people a bit nervous with their land acquisition and aggressive entrepreneurship, but so far they seem to be well tolerated in a country that has strict rules about outsiders’ practice of unauthorized religious institutions. Grace Road bought its way in with millions of dollars for land leasing and business investment.

Easily accessible

The nice part of traveling to Fiji from Hawaii is that Fiji Airways has direct flights from Honolulu to Nadi. On some days of the week, the flight makes a one-hour stopover on Christmas Island.

Get a direct flight if possible. On Christmas Island, all passengers must get off the plane, go into an unairconditioned shack, hang around a while and then go through a TSA-like search of your person and your carry-ons. I cannot figure that one out since no one has been anywhere but on the airplane.

The airfare is normally $800 to $1,000 round trip for the 5-plus-hour flight, but sometimes special fares dip as low as $480.

And with that, you are ready to greet those in Fiji with a warm hello: “Bula vinaka!!”

Bob Jones is a local journalist and MidWeek columnist who occasionally offers a travel story to the Star-Advertiser.