Octopus Resort in Fiji
- seanick9
- 2 days ago
- 16 min read
When we initially booked our trip to Australia, we did not yet have a solid plan for what would come next, but knew that since Australia’s tourist visa ETA (subclass 601, Electronic Travel Authority) only lasts 90 days, and sometimes they ask how long you plan to stay when you enter the country, that we should have a plan for where we were going next.
We weren’t sure if we’d be returning to the USA at that point, or continuing on to Southeast Asia. We had discussed all this with Lizzii and her friend Aggie when we were in Guernsey last fall, and Aggie told us about a beautiful resort she stayed at in Fiji called Octopus resort.
Anna, Emily and I had enjoyed staying at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico a couple years ago, because while we didn’t previously consider ourselves resort-people, or beach-people, that all seems to change when you have a young child! Turns out, having someone else watch your kid while you hang out at the pool and read a book is pretty delightful.
So, when the topic of staying at a nice resort in Fiji came up, we thought that was a pretty reasonable idea - in particular, Fiji is not quite midway in the Pacific between USA and Australia (still quite a bit closer to Australia), but if we did decide at that point to return to the USA we’d already be part of the way there. That gave us a bookend to the Australia leg of the trip, so we could enjoy the rest of our Europe, US and Australia travels without worrying too much about when we had to leave.
We did end up penciling in Aggie’s suggestion of Octopus resort. We didn’t book it right away, but when Anna was researching options, how to get there, and what we could do, the reviews all looked great and we came up with a pretty reasonable itinerary.
When you fly to Fiji, most of the international flights land in Nadi (pronounced Nandi) on the main island. There’s a shuttle boat that picks you up from there and takes you out to the Yasawa islands, where many of the resorts such as Octopus are, but the shuttle only has two times to leave the island - 10:00 am and some time in the afternoon, we think 4:00 PM - with the flights in to Nadi arriving late and then having to clear customs, we didn’t think we’d make the later shuttle. Therefore, we had to stay somewhere on the mainland for a night before catching the shuttle, and fortunately there's a pretty nice hotel right across the street from the airport called Fiji Gateway Hotel that Anna had stayed at before, so we went ahead and booked that for a night before taking the morning shuttle to Octopus the next day.
The flight from Melbourne to Nadi was uneventful, and clearing customs did take a while but wasn’t too bad - the whole time we were in line, there were some musicians serenading us. And we knew that we didn’t have much else that we had to accomplish after leaving the airport. And, the first night at Fiji Gateway Hotel was surprisingly nice! When I hear “Hotel near the airport”, I envision small cramped rooms, no amenities, maybe a hotel bar and bland food. This hotel was nothing of the sort. It apparently used to be called Raffles, and it had its own resort feel to it. Two pools, multiple bars, delightful food and even the rooms were pretty nice. One of the pools had a water slide, which Emily went down a few times. I can’t even describe how good the food was. A chili chicken stir fry with coconut rice and stir fried veggies, and with the Fijian dollar (FJD) having a great exchange rate of about 2.5 to 1 USD, the resort prices ended up looking quite reasonable.
Shuttle to Waya Island
The shuttle from Nadi to the Yasawa islands was a metal-hulled boat that held maybe 50 people, and our luggage below-decks, and takes about 2 hours for the journey. Unfortunately the day we embarked it was windy, rainy and the water was quite choppy - there were many points during the trip that it was slapping down hard after every wave and was not a very enjoyable ride. I had my laptop in my backpack, and was worried that it would be destroyed from all the impacts the boat was taking- but fortunately we made it with all our bodies and possessions intact.
Octopus was on the second island the boat stopped at. Once we arrived, the shuttle boat couldn’t actually land on the beach, so they sent out a longboat to take us the rest of the way to shore. We weren’t actually prepared for this! Some folk were wearing sneakers and had to take their shoes off to wade the rest of the way. I carried Emily, and the porters wore our backpacks and hauled our luggage. But in the end we all made it onto the resort where they had delicious tropical fruit drinks waiting for us.
Octopus Resort
The resort itself was stunning. In a small little village resort, there were huts along the beach, straw-roof-covered beach chairs, open-air bars and a main restaurant that was also open-air. The beach sand was clean and beautiful, and there was a snorkeling reef right off the shore. Past the resort, the jungle started immediately and continued all the way up the mountain behind. There were beautiful birds, flowers everywhere and coconuts and bananas literally falling off the trees around us. We did have to wait a bit while they checked everyone in, and routed bags to rooms, but eventually someone came to show us our way.
The room
Our first impression was to be a bit shocked and disappointed, to be honest- the "Bure" (beach front cabin) itself was not massive - we thought we’d asked for a two bedroom family cabin, but instead the family cabin just had one king bed and two single beds on the other side of a dividing wall in the same room. Each of the beds had mosquito netting around them, and there wasn’t really a table or couch, and the TV didn’t have anything available on it. Then it started pouring down rain. So, we were thinking “what are we going to do here for a week??”
After our initial trepidation wore off, though, we grew to really like it- it was a standalone bure, and our bure was literally right on the beach. We had our own chairs and hanging bed, and the bathroom is just a fenced area outside - the toilet covered, the shower not. Outdoor showering is quite a freeing feeling and we grew used to the feel of the space. Emily has had a thing about bugs lately and so we think the mosquito netting actually made her feel safe at night (though we hardly saw any mosquitos at all).
Emily at the kids club
Okay, so now that we’re all checked in, let’s see what this place has to offer! It wasn’t quite time for dinner, so we thought we would go poke our heads into the kids club. There were a couple of staff members and one or two kids in there, but they were ready immediately to take Emily in and even offered to take her to “Kids dinner” where all the kids from kids club eat at the same table with one or two of the staff, so the parents can have dinner to themselves! Needless to say we were on board. The kids club there ran most of the day starting at 8:00 AM, with breaks for lunch and dinner, and there was an optional babysitting service where you could hire a babysitter to watch the kids after dinner or before breakfast. Our room included some hours for the babysitting service, so we ended up having parents lunch to ourselves every night, which was great.
The kids club itself was a fairly small room, but it didn’t seem to limit them much. In addition, they regularly took the kids outside for activities in the playground, on the beach, as well as coloring and other arts and crafts activities in the room. After lunch and after dinner there tended to be some TV time watching kids movies which Emily enjoyed.
Emily made some friends in the kids club, in particular for the first half of the week there was a girl about her age that she had a really good time playing with, both in the pool with the parents, and in the kids club by themselves. It was a sad day when that family had to leave. There were a couple other kids that showed up near the end but Emily didn’t really make friends with them.
The main girl that Emily ended up playing with for the most of the week was one of the staff’s kids, and she basically lived on the resort (actually in the village nearby, but spent most of every day at the resort). We were really glad. Emily and her had a great time.
Scuba diving
Something Nick was pretty excited about was scuba diving. There was a PADi dive shack as part of the resort (PADI being one of the most well known SCUBA training programs), and I had thought that I would try to get in a few dives if there was time. It turned out there was plenty of time with Emily being quite happy to go to kids club and play with the other kids at the resort, and Anna happy to go to the spa for various spa services!
The first thing I had to do was to have a couple of refresher dives. When you get certified for scuba diving, the expectation is that you will keep diving periodically, and keep your skills sharp - but if you go a few years without diving, like I have, then you need to make sure you remember the basics for safety reasons, because the last thing you want to do is find out you don’t remember something important when you are 60 feet underwater.
The dive shack manager looked up my member number and was able to set me up with an instructor to do my dives. Our first refresher was in the hotel pool - which had a nice deep spot in the middle for such purposes, and a second one was in the reef just offshore from the resort. I’ll spare the details but these were uneventful, though it did take me a bit to remember how to efficiently clear the pressure from my ears.
After the refresher dives, a couple of the other mornings I went back and was able to dive in some of the more interesting sites on the island. The coral really was spectacular, and there were a ton of fish, a sea turtle, and some reef sharks around. There were some giant fan coral along with anemones, brain coral, boulder coral and thousands of small fish. The instructor also showed me a few things specifically - some lobsters hiding under rocks, color changing coral, a sea turtle and a few other things.
The coral all seemed to be in pretty good health (While I did spot a couple of crown of thorns starfish on the dives, they didn’t seem to be in an active outbreak.) The water was a perfect temperature, 84 degrees and I got to play with the depth feature on my Apple watch which matched the dive computer perfectly. Unfortunately I had not brought an underwater camera this time, so there’s no pictures of this part to share!
Overall great experience with the dive shop, they were happy to accommodate my desires and I went on 4 dives with them. Thanks also to my wife for being flexible on the timing! She enjoyed going for massages and reading books while Emily was in the kids club, so maybe she wasn’t struggling too much.
Local village
One of the resort’s excursions was to go to the local village, to visit the schoolhouse, see the community hall and see a local market. We signed up for this one day, as it sounded interesting. It was a bit of a walk to get there, over a hill, walk through the farm where we saw a handful of pigs and chickens, and along the beach on the other side of the ridge. After the walk there, the guide led us through the village itself. There must have been around 25 buildings, in various states of repair spread out around a couple of fields. There were a variety of out-buildings, outhouses, storage sheds, cooking nooks and laundry facilities (buckets full of soapy water and soaking clothes near some hand-laundry buckets and clothes lines.) There is full electricity and internet available in the resort, but it’s clear the village operates more on solar and people-power.
We walked as a group through the main garden areas to the far side of the village where the guide showed us to the school house. The school house was a long building with a couple of rooms in it- the main classroom had about 20 chairs, some desks, signs along all the walls written in English and Fijian languages, and other school-related stuff that you’d expect to see in a small town school. Outside the schoolhouse, a couple of locals opened up some coconuts for us to buy and drink the water out of (which we did, and Emily liked it at least for a few minutes). We hung out around the school house taking pictures of the beach, the classroom, coconut trees, and each other for a while.
The guide next took us to the community center where we learned a bit about some of the cultural customs. The community center was a larger one-story building in the center of the village, with a large covered veranda out front. We walked up the steps to the veranda. Women had to cover their shoulders, we all had to take off our hats and our shoes, and we gathered around the leaders in a circle.
The guides of the tour talked us through the Kava ceremony. Kava is a beverage made by soaking/ massaging the roots of the kava plant in water, then the water is sipped out of a coconut shell. In the ceremony itself, there are certain roles and actions that must be performed. In this case we nominated a village chief and a second (speaker?), who will be the first to drink the kava and receive it (who is playing the role of the chief visiting from a different village) from the person who prepared it (who in this place is played by the guide). When drinking the kava, you first clap and say “Vinaka” (thank you), then receive the coconut shell and drink the kava in it. The rest of the people in the circle then clap three times as the recipient passes the coconut back to the person who is ladling it out. This then continues around the circle until everyone has had at least one serving. The chief can then decide if there should be one or more additional rounds of the ceremony which usually continues until the kava is gone.
Obviously I had to participate, and Anna and Emily took part as well. The kava itself tastes exactly like what it is: a root that came from the dirt, with maybe a hint of the tingling sensation you’d get from tea leaves. It is supposedly a mild sedative but none of us noticed any effects. The circle continued for a couple of rounds, after which time the guide went out to find the conch shell, and blew the horn to gather the villagers who were going to put on a show for us.
This part took quite a long time and Emily was getting quite hot and bored, so she (along with a few other kids that had come along) went inside the community center building to play around for a while. Eventually the villagers started coming in after what seemed like 30-45 minutes, and began to set up inside the community center room to perform some traditional music and dancing for us. We were glad when it finally got going as it was starting to get pretty uncomfortable just sitting around in the heat, but once they were in full swing, there were 10 ish musicians and 8 dancers going full volume in not a particularly big room - so it ended up being quite loud for Emily. She ran outside and we ended up just leaving after a bit.
After the show, there was supposed to be a market but we didn’t get to see that. We’d heard from some of the other parents who did stay that they had bought something. We’re pretty sure that the same goods displayed there were in the market that they set up at the resort a day or two later, so we don’t think we missed much there.
Sketchy hike
One day we went on one of the morning organized hikes. The first day we tried to go, it had rained the night before so they canceled it, and I thought that was a bit silly, but okay, so we signed up a couple days later. Could the rain really had made that much of a difference? I don’t mind a slippery rock or two. Well, it was for a good reason as we found out later.
The morning we went on the hike, the group had to meet at 7 so we needed Emily to go with the babysitter. We went for an early breakfast then dropped her off, and took off as a group of about 8 people with one guide. It started by walking along the beach near the locals village, to the far end of the beach where the water was a bit deeper than the guide was expecting along the rocks. So instead of walking across the river in front of the waterfall, we had to break a trail up around behind it, and even at this point it was clear that this was not going to be as easy as we expected.
We made it up to the main trail after a few false starts, and the guide told us this was going to have about 7 stops along the way. One of our group seemed pretty challenged even by the small hill between the resort and the locals village, so we were a bit surprised they were still with us, but it didn’t take long for them to bail. The jungle itself was pretty dense - many different grasses, bushes, ferns, palms and trees that had foliage at every possible level, so it was quite challenging even to see what the trail we were walking on looked like. At times it was small gravel and scree, mixed in with larger rocks, while other times we walked on the grass leaves and mud. Some parts of the trail were more mud than anything else, and we crossed a couple of streams which had made a large rock face that we needed to cross quite slippery.
We finally reached our second rest point, where we were able to take a look around, enjoy the view and look at just how much more we had to climb.
We began our journey upwards again, and after a couple of slips and falls by one of the group ahead of us, another companion decided to turn around at this point as they were catching the shuttle back to mainland in a couple hours and didn’t want to miss it. Anna and I almost turned around at that point but everyone else was still keen so we kept going. This is where the trail turned into alternating mud and slippery rock face. It hadn’t even rained, but there was not much in the way of footholds or handholds to support upward travel. At this point I noticed that while the guide had told us before the hike that we should wear supportive footwear, he was in bare feet! Most of us were slipping and falling all over the place regardless of what was on our feet.
We made it up to the 4th stop (of 7), where we were able to see much more of the island from the new vantage point, but then Anna and I decided this would be where we turned around. One group of 4 was all that was left, and they decided to go with the guide to the top. We were on the other hand, concerned that we’d lose the trail on the way down, and that it would be even more slippery on the descent.
Actually the descent ended up fine, except we forgot about the detour at the beginning and found ourselves on the wrong side of the waterfall. At this point, the tide had receded some, so we just decided to take our shoes off, roll up our shorts and cross through the water along the beach. We did catch up to the girl who had turned around before us where we all laughed about the ridiculousness of this mad scramble they called a hike - I think it probably would be much nicer in dry season, but if you’re there when the weather is wet at all I would give it a miss.
Snorkeling
We wanted to go snorkeling to see the coral and fish, but the timing didn’t work out until the second to last day since the hike and massages took precedence. Eventually we did end up going to the Shark point site and we were both very pleased with the experience. The only issues with the snorkeling experience are that the group kept getting very spread out, and that it was right in the middle of the day so we were worried about getting sunburned a bit.
There was a group of maybe 10 of us that rode the longboat out to the snorkel boat, which then took us around the island to a couple of spots on the northern side where the coral had a big curve around the cove. The boat dropped us off at one spot, and then traveled over to the other side of the reef to pick us up in 20-25 minutes. We had lathered ourselves head to toe with sunblock but it was right at the peak part of the sun - I didn’t know the UV index went as high as 12, I thought it was a scale of 1-10! So that was a bit on our mind. Other than that, the waves were a bit strong at the shore, and we could feel the water pushing us back and forth just a few feet above the coral - but it was fantastic to be so close to it and see all the fish riding the currents around the edges of the reef, poking into crannies and looking for food.
There are a couple reasons why snorkeling is in some ways better than scuba diving to see reef fish - one, seeing it from above and near the surface means the light is brighter and you see more of the colors of the coral, and the other is that the scuba regulator is quite noisy compared to a snorkel. When you are scuba diving, much of the time you’re hearing the air go in from the regulator, and leave in the form of bubbles. When you’re snorkeling, there’s a direct tube from your mouth to the air above, and you don’t hear it at all- so instead you can hear the beaks of the parrotfish tapping as they peck at the coral among other things which is just a fun sound.
We eventually got back on the boat, and traveled to another site. I tried to put a second layer of sunblock on but it’s tough when you’re wet. The second site was also quite beautiful as well, though a bit more exposed to the waves. I kept looking for more sharks and turtles but only saw one reef shark. Nobody else seemed to see it so maybe they didn’t believe me. I think that snorkeling should have been more of a priority than the hike, in retrospect, but as Anna and I are both cardio enthusiasts we were looking forward to some exercise to offset the food and drink of resort life - were I to visit this resort again, though, I’d just go right back to snorkeling.
Overall we had a great time at Octopus and in Fiji in general, and think this type of vacation may actually be something we do more of!
Comments