Fiji

332 islands in the South Pacific, about 110 of them inhabited, with 930,000 people across an archipelago spread over a piece of ocean the size of western Europe. Fiji is the hub of the Pacific — the flights connect here, the university is here, and it is the one South Pacific country most people can actually name.

It is genuinely two destinations. There is the resort Fiji — the Mamanucas and the Coral Coast, family-friendly, easy, and the reason Fiji is Australia and New Zealand's default beach holiday. And there is the other one: the Yasawa backpacker boat, the Rainbow Reef off Taveuni with some of the finest soft coral diving anywhere, Beqa Lagoon where you kneel on the sand while bull sharks swim past, and highland villages on Viti Levu where you present kava to a chief before you are allowed to stay.

The social story is the interesting one. Fiji is home to two peoples who arrived a century apart: the indigenous iTaukei, and the Indo-Fijians descended from indentured labourers brought by the British between 1879 and 1916. That relationship has shaped every political crisis the country has had — four coups since 1987 — and it is also why you can eat a very good curry and drink kava on the same evening.

The practical case: it is warm all year, English is an official language, the flights from Australasia are cheap and frequent, and it works for backpackers on 40 dollars a day and for honeymooners on 800. The catch is that it is a genuinely long way from Europe — around thirty hours from Prague — and there is a cyclone season.

Fijians call their country Viti. "Fiji" is the Tongan pronunciation, Fisi, picked up by Captain Cook and fixed in English by the traders and missionaries who followed. The country is formally the Republic of Fiji, and its people are constitutionally all "Fijians" — a change made in 2010 that matters more than it sounds.

Two big volcanic islands and a great many small ones, scattered across 1.3 million km² of ocean with only 18,274 km² of land. Viti Levu and Vanua Levu together hold about 87% of the population; the rest are coral atolls, volcanic cones and limestone islands.

Nadi in the west of Viti Levu is where you land and where most trips begin. From there it is a boat west to the Mamanucas and Yasawas, a road round the Coral Coast to Suva, or a short flight to Taveuni, Savusavu or Kadavu.

The Lapita people reached Fiji around 3,500 years ago, part of the extraordinary Austronesian expansion across the Pacific, and Fiji became the crossroads where Melanesian and Polynesian worlds met — which is why Fijian culture has elements of both and why Tonga and Fiji have been entangled for a thousand years.

Pre-contact Fiji was a landscape of chiefdoms, fortified villages and near-constant warfare, with a genuine and well-documented tradition of ritual cannibalism. Fiji was known to nineteenth-century sailors as the Cannibal Isles, and chief Ratu Udre Udre is credited by a stone count with the largest number of victims of any individual on record. The missionary Thomas Baker was killed and eaten at Navatusila in 1867 — reportedly after touching a chief's head — and the village formally apologised to his descendants in 2003.

European contact brought sandalwood traders, bêche-de-mer, muskets and disease. Ratu Seru Cakobau, the most powerful chief, converted to Christianity in 1854 and eventually — facing debts to American traders and pressure from rivals — ceded Fiji to Britain in 1874. A measles epidemic the following year killed perhaps a third of the population.

The colonial government then made the decision that shaped modern Fiji. To develop sugar without alienating iTaukei land or labour, it imported indentured workers from India — the girmitiyas, from "agreement" — around 60,000 of them between 1879 and 1916, under conditions that were investigated and condemned at the time. Most stayed. That is the origin of the Indo-Fijian community and of everything that followed.

Fiji became independent on 10 October 1970, exactly 96 years after cession, with a constitution designed to balance the two communities. It held for seventeen years.

Understanding Fiji means understanding that it has two founding populations who arrived a century apart, live largely parallel lives, and between them make the country what it is. Neither is going anywhere and both are Fijian.

Yaqona — kava — is the centre of Fijian social life. It is a mildly sedative drink made from the pounded root of a pepper plant, drunk from a coconut-shell bilo out of a communal wooden tanoa, and it is offered constantly. Refusing is possible; accepting is much better.

Visiting a Fijian village is not like visiting a town. Villages are private communal land, they have a chief, and there is a protocol — sevusevu — for entering. Getting it right is easy, and it changes the reception completely.

The main island, where almost everyone arrives and where a surprising number of people never leave. There is more to it than the airport strip.

The capital, about 190,000 people in the greater area, on the wet south-east coast — and the real capital of the South Pacific: the University of the South Pacific, the Pacific Islands Forum, and the embassies all sit here. It rains constantly and it is by far the most interesting city in the region.

The two island chains west of Nadi, and where most visitors spend most of their time. The Mamanucas are close, developed and easy; the Yasawas stretch 80 km further north and are wilder, poorer and considerably more interesting.

The second and third islands, and where Fiji stops being a beach holiday and starts being a place. Taveuni is the Garden Island — rainforest, waterfalls, the 180th meridian and the diving. Vanua Levu is bigger, emptier and almost entirely undeveloped for tourism.

Fiji is called the soft coral capital of the world and the claim holds up. Strong currents through narrow passages feed enormous fields of dendronephthya soft corals in colours that look artificially saturated until you see them. It is among the best diving on the planet and it is not expensive.

Beyond the reef, Fiji has world-class surf, a serious river, and mountains almost nobody walks in.

Fiji has a reputation for friendliness that is genuinely earned. "Fiji time" is real and means nothing happens on schedule; bula is shouted at you from every doorway; and the communal obligations underneath it all are stronger than a visitor sees.

Three official languages: English, iTaukei (Fijian) and Fiji Hindi. English is the language of government, education and tourism, and you will need nothing else — but a few words of Fijian go a very long way.

Rugby is not the national sport of Fiji so much as the national religion. A country of 930,000 people is a global power in sevens, exports players to every professional league on Earth, and won the first Olympic medal in its history — a gold — in Rio in 2016.

Two cuisines on one small archipelago: iTaukei cooking built on root crops, coconut cream and the earth oven, and Indo-Fijian cooking that is among the best Indian food outside India. Eat both, and eat the Indian food in Suva.

What to eat

Kava first, and then beer. Fiji has one large brewery, an internationally famous bottled water, and a rum industry that comes with the sugar.

Fiji's calendar carries Christian, Hindu and Muslim holidays as public holidays, which is a fair summary of the country.

Fiji's economy rests on three things, and one of them has been dying for thirty years. It is also the most developed of the Pacific island states and the region's transport, education and diplomatic hub, which matters more than its size suggests.

Tropical and warm year-round — 22–31 °C with little seasonal variation in temperature — but with a real wet season and a real cyclone risk that should shape when you go.

Nadi International (NAN) is the Pacific's main hub outside Auckland, and Fiji Airways is a genuinely good airline. Getting to Fiji from Australasia or North America is easy; from Europe it is a long way whichever direction you go.

Fiji is about as far from Prague as it is possible to get — roughly 16,000 km and 28 to 36 hours of travel with two stops. There is no short version, and the time difference is 10 or 11 hours ahead of Czech time, which means genuine jet lag in both directions.

One of the easier tropical destinations: English everywhere, decent infrastructure on the main islands, and a tourism industry that has been doing this for fifty years. The friction is in the small islands, where power, water and connectivity are all limited.

One of Fiji's real strengths: it works at almost any budget. A backpacker can do the Yasawas on FJ$100 a day; a couple can spend FJ$3,000 a night on a private island. Both are the same country and the water is the same colour.

Fiji is a safe country for visitors, with the caveats you would expect of anywhere with real poverty and a big tourism sector. The genuine hazards are the sea, the sun and the weather rather than people.

On the island of Ovalau, a two-hour ferry and bus from Viti Levu, sits Fiji's only UNESCO World Heritage site — and almost nobody goes. Levuka was the capital until 1877 and is the best-preserved Pacific colonial port town anywhere.

Fiji is a small country where tourism is a third of the economy and where most of the land under your feet belongs to a village. That combination makes a few things matter more than they would elsewhere.

Fiji is the easiest tropical country I know to have a good time in and one of the easiest to visit without seeing at all. You can land in Nadi, transfer to Denarau, spend a week behind a gate, and go home having met nobody. Thousands of people do exactly that every week, and I understand why — the beaches are lovely and the effort is zero.

But the country is somewhere else. It is in a Yasawa lodge where the generator goes off at ten and the family who own the land eat with you. It is in the Suva market on a Saturday with an aisle of kava and an aisle of chillies fifty metres apart. It is on a mat at midnight, six bowls in, being asked genuinely difficult questions about your country by people who have thought harder about theirs than you have about yours.

Two pieces of advice. Do the Yasawa Flyer rather than a resort transfer — hop three islands, take the cheap places, and let it be slow. And go to Suva for two days even though nobody will tell you to. It rains, it is not pretty, and it is where Fiji actually is.

And drink the kava. It tastes like muddy water and it numbs your mouth and the first bowl is unpleasant. It is also the door into every conversation worth having in this country, and it costs twenty dollars and an evening. Clap once, drink it all, clap three times, and stay for the next one.

— Radim Kaufmann