Kioa Island

I’d read a single paragraph about Kioa in an old guidebook and couldn’t stop thinking about it: an island bought outright in 1946 by Ellice Islanders — what’s now Tuvalu — fleeing overcrowding on their home atolls, resettled here in Fiji’s Buca Bay with the blessing of the local Fijian chiefs. Eighty years later it’s still a distinctly Tuvaluan community, speaking Tuvaluan as a first language, inside a country that speaks Fijian and Hindi and English. I chartered a small boat from Buca Bay, on Vanua Levu’s northeast coast, for the twenty-minute crossing, having arranged a visit in advance through a contact in Savusavu — Kioa doesn’t get casual drop-in tourism and prefers it that way.

The village that greets you from the water looks, at a glance, like any coastal Fijian settlement — a church, a school, houses on stilts and houses on the ground, nets drying on fences. But the language changes everything. Children ran past speaking Tuvaluan to each other and switched fluently into Fijian-accented English the moment they addressed me. An elder named Fiaui, who’d been a boy on the original crossing as told to him by his father, sat with me under a mango tree and talked for an hour about atoll life on Vaitupu, the low coral island his family came from, comparing its flatness and vulnerability to the sea against the mountainous safety of Kioa. “We are Fiji now,” he said, “but we are also still there.”

The island itself is steep and densely forested, rising sharply from a narrow coastal shelf, and a track climbs from the village through plantations of cassava and yaqona to a ridge with a view back across Buca Bay toward Vanua Levu and, on a clear day, the silhouette of Taveuni beyond it. I walked it with two teenage boys who’d offered to guide me for the cost of a cold drink afterward and who narrated the whole climb in a mix of Tuvaluan, Fijian, and English depending on which language the joke landed better in.

There’s a small museum-like room near the community hall with photographs from the original settlement, black-and-white images of thatched boats loaded impossibly high with belongings, and a framed copy of the original land deed. It’s not curated for visitors in any polished sense — it’s just there, maintained by whoever has the key that week, which felt more honest than anything a formal museum could offer.

When to go: Visits should be arranged in advance through a local contact or tour operator in Savusavu, as Kioa has no tourism infrastructure of its own. The dry season, May through October, makes the boat crossing from Buca Bay considerably more comfortable.