Leleuvia Island

Leleuvia sits in open water roughly between Ovalau and the mainland, a flat sandbar island barely a kilometre around, reachable by a boat transfer arranged from Bau Landing near Nausori. It has been a backpacker fixture for decades, the sort of place that shows up in the dog-eared guidebooks of travellers who came through Fiji in the nineties and, when we mentioned we were headed there, lit up with a specific kind of nostalgia I didn’t fully understand until I arrived.

The island runs on dormitory bures and a handful of private ones, a single open-air restaurant, and a bar that operates on an honesty system where you write your name and count of drinks on a chalkboard. There is no real schedule. People swim, read, play volleyball on a sand court that floods at high tide, and gather at sunset for a kava circle that anyone can join regardless of how long they’ve been on the island. I sat in on one my first night and left three hours later having learned two Fijian card games and precisely nothing about the man to my left except that he’d been meaning to leave Leleuvia “next week” for the past six weeks.

The reef surrounding Leleuvia is shallow and easy, good for snorkelling straight off the beach rather than requiring a boat, and the island’s owners run a small marine sanctuary area where you’re asked not to touch or stand on coral — a rule that, refreshingly, most guests actually observed. I swam out one afternoon and found a resting hawksbill turtle tucked under a coral ledge, apparently unbothered by an audience, which I watched for a long ten minutes before it decided it had had enough of me and drifted off.

The island has no fresh water source of its own — everything is shipped or collected — and the accommodation is basic in a way that some travellers find charming and others find genuinely rough. It suited me fine. There is something recalibrating about a place with this few decisions to make in a day.

When to go: April through October for stable weather and calm boat transfers. Leleuvia can feel exposed in wind, so avoid scheduling your visit right before a forecasted squall if you can help it.