Fiji without a domestic flight: the sugar city at Lautoka, five days up the Yasawa chain on the one catamaran that serves it, the dunes and the shark reef on the Coral Coast, the river villages behind Navua, and out east to Levuka, the capital Britain built and then abandoned because there was nowhere to put a second street.
Nadi
Land, change money, buy kava. The Sri Siva Subramaniya temple at the south end of the main street was consecrated in 1994 and painted by artisans brought from India — it is usually described as the largest Hindu temple in the southern hemisphere, and it is the first thing that tells you Fiji is not one population. The municipal market is where you buy waka, the bundled kava root you will need before you walk into anybody's village.
Lautoka
Forty minutes north. Lautoka calls itself Sugar City and means it: the mill began crushing in 1903, it is still the largest in the country, and through the season from about June the two-foot-gauge cane railway runs loaded rakes through the middle of town to the gate. The market, then the botanical gardens. This is the landscape the rest of the route keeps referring back to.
Up the chain to Waya
The Yasawa Flyer leaves Denarau Marina at half past eight, once a day, and it is the entire public transport system for two island chains. Two hours out it stops off Waya and a longboat comes off the beach at Yalobi to meet it, because the catamaran docks nowhere in the Yasawas. Afternoon: the ridge behind the village, a steep couple of hours on a path with no shade, and the best view in the chain from the top of it.
The manta channel at Drawaqa
An hour further north to the channel between Drawaqa and Naviti, where manta rays feed on the tide from roughly May to October. When they come through, somebody rings a bell on the beach and everybody swims out; it is not a boat trip and it is not on a timetable. Out of season the reef here is still the best snorkelling south of Nacula.
Nanuya Lailai and the Blue Lagoon
An hour further to the top of the chain. The strip of water between Nanuya Lailai and Nanuya Levu is marketed as the Blue Lagoon and the 1980 film was shot on the island across it; the beach is a five-minute walk over the island's spine from where the boat lands. The last northbound call is Nacula, a little beyond this, and that is where the boat turns: Nanuya Lailai is served on the southbound leg only, so landing here means staying aboard through the turnaround and coming back to it at about half past one.
Sawa-i-Lau
A limestone dome sitting among volcanic islands, and you swim into it. The outer chamber is open to the sky through a hole in the roof; the inner one is reached by ducking under a metre of rock in the dark behind a guide with a torch. The caves belong to the villages of Nacula district and the fee goes to them. Afternoon at Nacula village or back on the reef.
South to the Coral Coast
The Flyer turns around at the top of the chain in the early afternoon and runs back down it, reaching Denarau at about a quarter to six — which is the whole reason you can only move north before lunch and south after it. Off the boat, eighty-five kilometres down the Queens Road to Korotogo, and take the taxi rather than wait for a bus, because the coast services have thinned right out by that hour. Then stop moving for two days.
The Sigatoka dunes
The dunes west of the river mouth became Fiji's first national park in 1989 and the highest ridges run to about sixty metres. They are also one of the largest burial grounds in the Pacific: Lapita pottery and human remains erode out of the sand after storms and are recorded where they lie. Two hours of walking in full sun with no water on the route. Afterwards go up the valley, which grows most of the country's vegetables and is the least resort-shaped hour on this coast.
Beqa Lagoon
Seventy-five kilometres east to Pacific Harbour. In 2004 the villages of Galoa and Wainiyabia agreed to stop fishing a stretch of reef in exchange for a levy charged on every diver who enters it; the result was declared Fiji's first national marine park in 2014 and holds up to eight shark species, bull sharks routinely and tiger sharks some days. It is expensive and it is not a stunt — the levy is the reason there is anything down there.
Up the Navua river
Fifteen kilometres east, then inland by longboat up a gorge that narrows until the walls are basalt and waterfalls come in from both sides. The villages upstream are reached this way or not at all. Present your kava, drink what you are handed, and come back down on a bilibili — a raft of bamboo lashed together and steered with a pole.
Suva
The capital since 1882 and nothing like the west of the island: wet, green, crowded and genuinely urban, with rain most afternoons. The Fiji Museum in Thurston Gardens holds the Ratu Finau, the last ocean-going drua built in Fiji, and a rudder off the Bounty recovered from Pitcairn. The municipal market is the largest in the region and worth an hour on its own.
East to Levuka
Bus two hours up the east coast to Natovi Landing, then the ferry across — at present straight into Levuka wharf, although the older routing put you ashore at Buresala with a bus over the island, and the operator on this crossing has changed twice in recent years. Four and a half hours end to end on a through ticket, and it does not sail every day. Levuka was the capital until the government gave up on it in 1882 because there is no flat ground: the town is one street between a volcanic wall and the sea. UNESCO inscribed it in 2013 as Fiji's only World Heritage site, and it is a working port with a tuna cannery rather than a preserved one.
Nasova and the Lovoni crater
A kilometre south of town at Nasova, Ratu Seru Cakobau and twelve other chiefs signed Fiji over to Britain on 10 October 1874; there are three stones on the grass at the water's edge — the cession, independence ninety-six years to the day later, and the centenary of the first — and very little else. Then the 199 steps up Mission Hill for the view, and a carrier truck inland to Lovoni, the village inside the crater at the centre of the island, whose people held out against Cakobau until 1871 and were sold as plantation labour when they lost.
Good to know
The Yasawa Flyer is one catamaran: it runs north from Denarau every morning and south every afternoon, so you can move once a day and only in the direction the boat is going. A Bula Pass is sold by number of days rather than number of hops, which means the chain has to be planned before you buy one. The Flyer docks nowhere in the Yasawas — resort longboats come off the beach to meet it — and you cannot board without accommodation booked, because on most of those islands there is no shop, no road and nothing to walk to. That also settles the food question: Yasawa properties sell a compulsory meal plan and it is not optional in any meaningful sense, so budget three meals a day at island prices for every night in the chain. There is no ATM anywhere in the Yasawas and card machines run off generators, so draw Fijian dollars in Nadi or Lautoka and carry them. Buy waka — bundled kava root, roughly twenty to thirty dollars a bundle — at the Nadi or Sigatoka market before you go near a village, and let a guide present it; hats and sunglasses off, shoulders and knees covered, and do not touch anyone's head. Sunday is observed seriously outside the resorts: buses thin out, shops in Levuka and Suva shut, and some villages ask visitors not to swim off their beach. Cyclone season runs November to April with the worst of it January to March, and what it does to a trip built on small boats is cancel them rather than the flights, so keep two slack days before an international departure whatever the month. The Suva–Levuka through service does not sail every day, and which day is blank keeps moving: Goundar pulled off the route in a dispute over the PAFCO wharf, Venu Shipping picked it up, and the gap is currently midweek rather than Sunday. Confirm at the Suva bus stand the day before rather than trusting anything printed, and allow a full day to get back west, either on the four-hour Queens Road coach from Suva to Nadi or the short Fiji Link hop out of Nausori. Coral cuts infect fast in this climate: wear reef shoes and clean anything you open the same hour.
Shorter or longer?
Fly Nadi to Taveuni, two or three times a day on a Twin Otter with a fifteen-kilo checked allowance — well below what you flew in with — and give five days to the Somosomo Strait: Rainbow Reef, the Great White Wall, the Bouma waterfalls and the Lavena coastal walk. Then the twice-daily ferry across to Natuvu at Buca Bay and the connecting bus about three hours west to Savusavu on Vanua Levu, and fly back from there.
Nadi, four nights up the Yasawas on the Flyer, then the Coral Coast and the Beqa shark dive. Cuts Suva, the Navua river and the whole of Ovalau, and removes both long transfer days.