Ovalau Island

The ferry from Suva to Ovalau takes about three hours and drops you at a wharf in Levuka that looks, from the water, almost nothing like the rest of Fiji — a single street of weatherboard shopfronts with verandas and false-front facades, backed directly against a wall of green mountain that seems to rise straight out of the town. Levuka was Fiji’s first capital and its main port of entry during the copra-trading, blackbirding, and whaling years of the nineteenth century, before the administration relocated to Suva in 1882 for a bigger, flatter harbour. What was left behind is essentially a town that stopped expanding, and UNESCO listed the whole waterfront as a World Heritage Site in 2013 for exactly that reason.

I walked the main street with Lia on our first afternoon, past the Ovalau Club with its faded sign and dart board visible through open shutters, past the old Morris Hedstrom store that’s now a small museum, past a row of Chinese-run general stores that have apparently been run by the same families for three or four generations. An elderly man sitting outside one of them told us, unprompted, that his grandfather had arrived as an indentured labourer and that the family had simply never left, and that most of Levuka’s shopkeepers could tell you a version of the same story. There is a particular texture to a town that isn’t performing its own history for visitors, and Levuka has it — the buildings are original, not restored to a theme.

Behind the town, a steep trail climbs to the Nasova stream and up toward the crater rim of the extinct volcano that formed the island, past mango trees and the ruins of an old waterworks. We hired a local guide named Save who’d grown up on the trail and who stopped every few minutes to point out something we would otherwise have missed — a species of fern used for weaving mats, a patch of wild kava growing feral by the path, the exact spot where you can see both the town and, on a clear day, the silhouette of Gau Island out on the horizon. The climb took about two hours round trip and left us both drenched in sweat and slightly giddy on the view.

We stayed at a small guesthouse run by a Fijian-Indian family who fed us curry and rourou for less than we’d have paid for a mediocre sandwich in Nadi, and spent an evening on the veranda listening to a church choir rehearsing somewhere down the street, their harmonies drifting over rooftops in a way that made the whole town feel, for a moment, like it was humming to itself.

When to go: May through October for the driest, most comfortable hiking conditions on the crater trail. The ferry from Suva can be cancelled in rough seas during the wet season, so build in flexibility if visiting between November and April.