Hell at The Sheraton Denarau Villas, Fiji

Picture by J Isaac Swanenburgh

Fiji’s surrounding waters, the brightest blue I’ve ever seen and filled with tiny and gorgeous coral atolls, is one of the most breathtaking places on earth.What never fails to amaze me about it is that from the time your plane touches down in Nadi Airport to the time you step onto the golden sand of your chosen Pacific atoll less than an hour may have passed. This includes getting to and clearing immigration (3 minutes), getting your luggage (2 mins), clearing customs (30 seconds) - obviously Nadi International Airport’s not exactly Heathrow - getting from the main terminal to the chopper pad (2 mins), loading your stuff onto the chopper (2 mins), choppering to the island of your choice (10 mins), checking in and having the island’s welcome song (every island has a different one) sung to you and drinking your fresh coconut milk direct from the shell (5 mins), getting to your beach front buree and changing into your swimsuit (3 mins). Heaven. So I’ve never been able to understand why anyone in their right mind would choose to fly all the way to Fiji to have their holiday on the mainland which, is universally awful.

On one occasion in Fiji, due to poor flight connections, I was forced to overnight in one of the mainland’s many horrendous, built up ‘resort’ style hotels - The Sheraton Denarau Villas. We had 18 hours to endure there and they dragged by more slowly than any I’ve known. The main areas put me in mind of the very worst kind of shopping mall while the rooms were tired 80’s with glaring lighting, pokey balconies and plastic furniture. The pools looked like seething tubs of bacteria - one from memory actually had a bar in the middle of it, which can never be a good thing. The sea was a tidal, windy, muddy rubbish dump. The 4 or 5 restaurants offered various options that gave the overall impression of a food hall in a shopping mall - I settled for the most disgusting pizza of my life which had as it’s highlight tinned pineapple. Breakfast was even worse. Buffet style which is almost never good, the terrace was closed in with netting - the purpose of which I know not what - and I was forced to eat my tinned fruit salad while staring at the back of what from the front had seemed like a human man but from the back was actually a chimpanzee. On the up side people finished breakfast early so that they could grab the best (plastic) deck chairs looking onto the muddy seascape. The scene by the pool and the breakfast buffet put me in mind of Hieronymus Bosch’s apocalyptic vision of medieval hell. People I’ve met who holiday in places like this always justify it by saying ‘it’s great for the kids’ but this is Fiji and a little buree on a coral atoll that opens directly onto the sand would surely have to be the best thing in the world for any kid.

Add to Denarau’s other charms its over inflated prices (it costs about 5 times what it’s worth) and this is surely the worst hotel I’ve ever experienced.