Fiji Museum Pacific Collections, Bull Shark Diving at Beqa Lagoon, Kava Ceremony & 330-Island Archipelago
📍 Suva, Fiji📅 3-day itinerary
The South Pacific's largest capital city (outside Australia and New Zealand) on the rainy southeast coast of Viti Levu — where the Fiji Museum's cannibal forks and ocean-going drua canoes document a Melanesian culture that produced the finest pre-European sailors in the Pacific, where the Beqa Lagoon 2.5 hours south offers the most intense bull and tiger shark diving on the planet, and where the Indo-Fijian community descended from 60,000 indentured labourers brought from India in 1879-1916 has created a distinct South Pacific cuisine from the collision of Bihari, Tamil and Polynesian food traditions.
The Museum Where Fijian Cannibal Forks Are Displayed Alongside the Sperm Whale Tooth That Was Worth More Than Money in 19th-Century Fijian Society and the Double-Hulled Drua Canoe That Could Outsail European Square-Riggers of the Same Period
The Beqa Lagoon Bull Shark Feed Where 3-Metre Carcharhinus Leucas — the Species Responsible for More Attacks on Humans Than Any Other Shark — Approach Within 1-2 Metres of Kneeling Divers on the 30-Metre Sandy Bottom in a Conservation Programme That Has Made the Sharks Worth More Alive Than Dead
The Mamanuca Island Where Tom Hanks's "Cast Away" Was Filmed on an Uninhabited Volcanic Profile with No Infrastructure — and the Blue Lagoon Bay in the Northern Yasawa Islands Whose Electric-Blue Water Over White Sand Gave Brooke Shields's 1980 Film Its Name & the Dinner Table Where 60,000 Indentured Labourers' Descendants Have Built a Pacific-Indian Fusion Cuisine Unknown in Either South Asia or Polynesia