King's Road, Tailevu Coast

King’s Road is the older of Viti Levu’s two ring roads, the one that hugs the northeast coast through Tailevu province before eventually looping around to Rakiraki and back to Nadi, and almost everyone who drives it is headed somewhere else — Nausori airport, the Natovi ferry landing for Ovalau and Vanua Levu, or all the way around the island. We had exactly that plan, a straight run to Natovi to catch the Levuka ferry, and ended up taking most of a day to cover what should have been ninety minutes because Tailevu kept interrupting our schedule with things worth stopping for.

The road itself sets the pace. It narrows and curves along a shoreline dotted with small Fijian and Indo-Fijian villages, copra plantations gone slightly wild with disuse now that coconut oil no longer commands the prices it once did, and roadside stalls selling whatever the surrounding land produces that week — we bought a stalk of the greenest bok choy I have seen anywhere from a woman near Wainibuka who weighed it on a hand scale hanging from a tree branch and refused to let us pay what we offered, insisting on a lower price because, she said, we had stopped for her and not driven past like everyone else that morning.

We detoured briefly into Naililili and a string of small Methodist mission villages that punctuate this stretch of coast, remnants of the intensive Wesleyan missionary activity that swept through Tailevu and the wider Rewa region in the nineteenth century, and stopped longest at a village called Wainibokasi where a Sunday service happened to be finishing as we arrived — a wall of harmonized singing pouring out of an open-sided wooden church that stopped us in our tracks on the roadside before we had even decided to stop. Nobody minded us listening from outside. A woman waved us in instead, and we sat at the back for the final ten minutes of a service conducted entirely in Fijian, understanding none of the words and feeling the whole thing anyway.

Further along, near the Wainibuka river mouth, the road climbs a short headland that gives an unexpectedly wide view back down the coast — mangrove flats, a scatter of fishing canoes, the green wall of the interior highlands rising behind everything. We pulled over simply because the light was doing something dramatic with a rain squall out over the channel, and ended up staying forty minutes watching it move across the water toward Ovalau, which is exactly where we were headed and exactly the kind of delay that, three weeks into this trip, we had stopped apologizing to each other for.

When to go: May through October for the most reliable driving conditions, though King’s Road stays open and drivable year-round unlike some of the interior highland routes; allow far more time than the distance suggests, since the villages and viewpoints reward stopping rather than driving through.