Island Hopping in Fiji

After traveling around so much, we thought we’d find sitting in one town for a whole week rather boring, so we booked ourselves on an island hopping tour for a few days.

Our first island, Kuata, is only half an hour away from the mainland, but it seems a lot more remote as it has no electricity for most of the day, and broadly speaking if the local’s can’t acquire something they need from the island, then they make do without it.

We hopped on a little boat to visit a nearby village. In Fiji, it’s customary to ask permission to visit from the village chief before setting foot inside – though that’s easier said than done when there’s no phone. Permission granted, we went for a wander around the local school and church, before chatting with the locals and heading home.

Fiji Villiage

In the evening we sat around drinking and talking long into the night. Cups of kava, a local drink that looks and tastes like muddy water, are passed around from a bowl in the middle of the floor. Kava contains some kind of sedative that puts your mouth to sleep before starting on the rest of your body.

Sitting around the kava bowl. A very enjoyable evening.

Some time early in the morning, much worse for wear, we retired to our bure.

Our bure

Next we headed to Naviti island, which apart from being slightly bigger and further north, is the place where Britney Spears had her honeymoon, and Tom Hanks filmed castaway. In reality, he wasn’t so much a castaway, as 15 minutes walk from the nearest village.

Landing beach

Naviti is such a good place to relax, that we didn’t manage to do much else before heading back to the mainland. We did take a jungle walk to ‘Honeymoon beach’ but that was about as much physical execution as we could manage in the humidity.

This little 'refugee boat' took us to the main catamaran that we took around the islands. Getting off one and onto the other was made no easier by the captain shouting at us 'this is very dangerous'

Some other photos

There's more in the gallery, but here are a few favourites:

Welcome to Vietnam!

Sandsledding in Vietnam

Feeding a Kangaroo, Australia

Parasailing, Malaysia

Street in Cambodia