Paradise gets helping hands

‘Vinaka’ is ‘thank you’ and much more for the Yasawas, writes Lisa Scott

Hope would fall through the holes in their pockets if the people of the Yasawas didn’t have a dream to cling to. Enter a different kind of tourist experience. Fiji has 333 islands. Some are large, some small — sticking up like green molars in a Listerine sea, each with its own smile of beach. The water around them is so blue, other blues must be embarrassed, so blue it looks photoshopped.

Tourists flock to Fiji’s resorts; where the cares of the world are shed as easily as winter clothes (revealing all the ills flesh is heir to) and the worst that could happen is a stab in the mouth from a cocktail umbrella. Golf courses, swimming pools, champagne for breakfast . . . with life no longer lived at taxi-meter pace, reality drops away and it becomes an effort to turn the page of your thriller. Cast on a sun lounger, here is where most remain. Vast in entitlement, lean on meaningful encounters.

However, there is another Fiji. Dotted in a palmy archipelago northwest of Viti Levu are the remote and unspoilt Yasawas: crystalline waters, pearl bright sands, lush forests and soaring peaks — far, far removed from the cracking pace of Nadi’s development. No four-lane highways being built here.

Following the mutiny on the HMS Bounty, William Bligh was the first westerner to sight this group of 20 islands in 1789, but the Yasawas remained largely ignored by the wider world until the United States used them for communication outposts during World War II. Volcanic in origin (their riven and spiky sides reminiscent of Orc armour ) the region was made famous by Brooke Shields and Christopher whatshisname in the 1980 movie The Blue Lagoon; a tropical tale of cousinly love.

The splendour of these unplugged isles is their pristine nature. No plastic bags jellyfish the ocean, empty snack packets do not tumble in the breeze. The clearest water in the world teems with myriad fish and every now and then a showy sailfin jumps out of it. Most serene at dawn as the sun rises in glorious pink, it’s paradise.