Laucala Island

Laucala doesn’t want visitors like me, and it’s honest about that, which I respect more than the alternative. The island, a few kilometres off Taveuni’s northeast tip, was bought by the founder of Red Bull in the early 2000s and converted into a single ultra-luxury resort occupying the entire landmass — villas that run to five figures a night, a working farm supplying the resort kitchen, a private airstrip, and a level of seclusion that makes most exclusive resorts elsewhere look like public parks by comparison. I was never going to stay there, and I didn’t pretend otherwise to the boat captain in Waiyevo who I hired instead for a slow loop around the island’s perimeter.

What you can see from the water is still worth the trip — a coastline of small coves and dense jungle interrupted occasionally by a rooftop or a private jetty, the visible edge of what was once a coconut plantation covering most of the island before its conversion, and a handful of staff boats moving between Taveuni and the island with a purposefulness that made clear exactly how much infrastructure it takes to keep an island this private running smoothly. Our captain, who’d worked briefly on Laucala’s construction crew years earlier, narrated the whole loop with a mix of pride and mild irony — pointing out the golf course carved into what used to be forest, the desalination plant, the specific bay where, he said, guests sometimes paid extra for a private beach dinner cleared of all resort staff except the one delivering the food.

There’s something worth sitting with in the contrast between Laucala and somewhere like Rabi or Kioa, twenty minutes and eighty years apart in the same island chain — one island bought by a displaced Pacific community rebuilding a life from nothing, another bought by a European billionaire building a private paradise from everything. Both are legitimate parts of Fiji’s story, in the sense that colonial-era land transactions shaped this whole archipelago, but only one of them lets you visit for the price of a boat ride.

We finished the loop, tipped the captain generously, and went back to our considerably humbler guesthouse on Taveuni for a dinner that cost less than the fuel for the boat we’d just been on.

When to go: Boat loops run year-round from Waiyevo, though calmer seas from May through October make for a smoother ride and better photography conditions. Don’t expect to land — this is strictly a from-the-water experience unless you’re a paying guest.