Wakaya Island

Wakaya is a small island entirely owned by a private company, reachable only by a chartered flight or boat arranged through its one resort, and I ended up there covering a travel story rather than as a paying guest, which gave me the odd experience of walking through genuine five-star infrastructure while mentally converting everything into a price I was relieved not to be paying. The island has been privately held since the nineteenth century, passing through a string of owners that reportedly included a stint tied to the family of a well-known cereal fortune, and its current incarnation is a resort of a few dozen villas spread across a coastline of coves so private that guests can go days without seeing anyone outside their own party.

What surprised me more than the resort itself was the island’s interior, which the property has largely left undeveloped — rolling grassland and forest where a population of introduced deer, descended from animals brought over generations ago, still roams more or less wild. A staff naturalist took me out on an ATV one afternoon to see them, along with a protected colony of crested iguana that exists on Wakaya and a handful of other islands and nowhere else on earth, small and startlingly green against the dry grass.

The reef surrounding Wakaya includes a formation locally called the Colosseum, a horseshoe-shaped natural amphitheatre of coral where currents concentrate fish life into a density I hadn’t seen elsewhere in Fiji — schools of barracuda circling in tight formation, reef sharks patrolling the edges, and enough soft coral colour that the resort’s dive team, unprompted, called it one of the best sites in the country. I dived it twice and believed them both times.

The obvious catch is cost — Wakaya operates well outside any budget I’d normally plan a trip around, and staying there requires either significant means or, like me, a reason someone else is paying. Still, it’s worth knowing it exists as a data point on how varied Fiji’s islands can be, from village guesthouses with communal kava bowls to this, an entire island turned into a single closed loop of luxury.

When to go: May through October for calm charter flights and the clearest water on the Colosseum reef. Access requires a confirmed resort booking well in advance, as capacity is deliberately kept small.