Tokoriki Island

Tokoriki sits at the northern edge of the Mamanuca chain, which means the transfer boat from Port Denarau takes close to ninety minutes, considerably longer than the quick hops out to Beachcomber or Castaway closer in. Lia fell asleep against my shoulder about forty minutes in, woke up disoriented when the engine note changed for our approach, and asked, with real confusion, whether we’d left Fiji entirely. We hadn’t, obviously, but the extra distance does something — by the time you arrive, the mainland and its noise feel meaningfully further away than the map distance would suggest.

That distance is exactly why people come. Tokoriki’s position at the top of the chain means fewer day-trip boats pass through, and the reef around the island has a stillness to it that the more central islands, with their constant snorkel-tour traffic, don’t quite manage. I went out with a small dive operation based on the island and did two dives on a site locally called the Supermarket — named, apparently, for the sheer density and variety of reef fish that gather there — and surfaced from the second dive having lost track of how long we’d been down, which is usually a sign the dive was a good one.

The island faces west in a way that several of the more southerly Mamanucas don’t quite manage due to their orientation, and the sunset from Tokoriki’s beach bar has a reputation locally that I initially assumed was standard resort marketing. It wasn’t. We watched three consecutive evenings from more or less the same spot on the sand, and each one did something slightly different with the cloud cover — one full orange collapse into the water with no clouds at all, one lit up in long horizontal bands of pink and grey, one where the light came up from below the horizon after the sun had technically already set and turned everything briefly the colour of a struck match.

Lia, who has strong and frequently stated opinions about resort sunset rituals being manufactured nonsense, stopped arguing with me about it by the second night and just sat there quietly with a drink, which from her counts as a full concession.

When to go: May through October for the clearest dive visibility and the most reliably dramatic sunsets, since cloud buildup increases through the wet season. Budget extra transfer time either way — Tokoriki’s remoteness within the chain is the whole point, but it does mean a longer boat ride than its southern neighbours.