Boutique Hotels in Fiji

Our hotels are in three places, two of them in the north. Matei, at the northern tip of Taveuni beside the airstrip, is where the island's villas sit, each on its own stretch of beach with its own staff, with the Tavoro waterfalls of Bouma National Heritage Park a short drive away and the Rainbow Reef offshore. Inside the club, members access rates the hotels themselves do not publish. Savusavu, on the south coast of Vanua Levu, is a one-street town on a bay where visiting yachts anchor and hot springs steam at the water's edge; the villas here sit on the rainforest hills around the town, and one peninsula on the reef at the island's eastern end is reached by boat alone. The third is off the west coast: the Yasawa Islands, shut to land-based tourism until 1987, where our address has the last island in the chain to itself, half an hour from Nadi by charter.

International flights land at Nadi on Viti Levu, with Nausori outside Suva the alternative. Small planes fly from Nadi to Savusavu in about an hour and to Matei in about an hour and a half, and the resorts meet their guests at the strip. A ferry crosses the Somosomo Strait between Vanua Levu and Taveuni, an overnight ferry from Suva reaches Savusavu with vehicles aboard, and the hotels run their own boats to the reef. Fiji uses its own dollar, and cash is useful outside the resorts and the main towns.

Kokoda is the dish to order first, raw fish cured in lime and finished with coconut cream, and the one thing on the menu worth ordering twice. A lovo is the feast: pork, fish, chicken and dalo, the local taro, wrapped in leaves over hot stones in an earth oven. Indo-Fijian kitchens add curries and roti across the islands. Kava, yaqona in Fijian, is the drink of welcome, a mildly numbing infusion of pepper root served in a half coconut shell; clap once before you take it, say bula, drink it in one and clap three times after.