Vomo, Fiji

Story by Karen Walker
Photos by Mikhail Gherman

For a mid-price point piece of paradise in Fiji try Vomo. This tiny speck in the Pacific Ocean is unforgettable. Here are just some of the reasons why I love Vomo and keep going back year after year:

• There are only a couple of dozen little villas along a beautiful golden, coral beach. Each villa has a huge terrace leading onto the beach and it’s the best place in the world to spend a day doing nothing.

• The beaches all around the island are sensational. The main beach the villas face on to is small but perfect. The course, golden coral sand is lovely, the water warm and the sky blue. It really is like a photo from a travel brochure or a calendar - the kind of beach you think can’t possibly actually exist in real life.

• The island’s covered in frangipani trees and coconut palms. Take care not to walk directly under the palms - even though the fruit are cut off before they’re ripe it’s not unheard of for unwary tourists to be hit on the head by falling coconuts in Fiji. The frangipani flowers are magical and with you constantly from the moment you get off the chopper and a lei of frangipani is hung around your neck, to the fresh flowers on your pillow each night and your sun lounger each morning.

• The snorkeling at vomo’s great - every tropical fish you can imagine including huge ultra violet starfish all living around the most beautiful coral.

• The aquarium at vomo is home to a family of baby turtles. The very rare turtles occasionally lay eggs on the island, about 100 at a time, and leave them to survive on their own. Without human intervention only a handful survive gestation, the dash from the sand to the water and the first couple of years in the ocean. The staff at vomo takes in any eggs they find and take care of them until they’re big enough to cope on their own at sea. If you ask, they’ll let you feed them and hold them.

• Just off Vomo Island is the even smaller Vomolailai Island. Vomo guests can be dropped there with a picnic lunch for the day and have the entire place to themselves but what I love most about Vomolailai is lying on the western beach of Vomo at sunset watching the sun dropping over the horizon and the thousands of fruit bats who spend the days in Vomolailai fly across the ocean to Vomo where they spend the night enjoying the mangoes and pawpaws that grow all over the island. Seeing bats flying down a perfect Pacific beach at dusk at first seems a little incongruous but there’s something really quite sweet and charming about them.

• The staff at Vomo is wonderful but best of all is the band that plays in the restaurant each night serenade you with traditional Fijian folk songs on guitars, ukulele, tambourine and a double base made of a box, a broomstick and a string (which makes the sound at times vaguely Cajun).

• It’s super easy to get to. You land in Nadi Airport and then it’s a five minute chopper ride to the island. The ride itself is great as this is one of the most beautiful places on earth. On one flight what I initially thought was a fishing boat was actually an absolutely enormous shark, 4 meters long at least. Take heart though that the island’s on a coral reef and sharks won’t swim into a reef so the island has, in essence, a natural shark net right around it.

• The food is very good. Often what lets the island experience down in Fiji is the food which can be either downright awful or repetitive, and let’s face it, when all you have to do is lie around, the next meal takes on a reasonably high level of importance in the day. Vomo doesn’t let you down at meal times.