Brian McDonald has no idea how many perfect waves he’s surfed in Fiji. “Who knows?” he asks. “During Covid alone when they shut the borders here, I probably got a thousand to myself. Maybe 2000?”
If you’re a surfer, you’ll hate Brian McDonald. While you may spend hours in crowded, often cold-water city surf breaks battling for one wave decent enough to bring you back again next week, next month or next year, McDonald and his wife, Donna, run a surf resort beside seven of the best surf breaks in the South Pacific.
The luckiest surfer on Earth lives deep within a littoral rainforest beside a lagoon in a house suspended above the forest floor. His guests are close by, connected along a platform a metre above the forest. It weaves between 500-year-old fig trees, giant swamp taro plants with leaves the size of me, a yoga room, a small day spa and an organic garden. It spills out onto an outdoor restaurant and bar, beside a pool and jacuzzi, next to a beach where three boats wait at anchor, ready to take us surfing.
All this – this whole surf resort, this whole surfing-for-a-living caper – was an accident of fate. McDonald never actually meant to own a surf resort; he’s a librarian.
“I was working at Suva’s university and Donna was running a B&B,” he says.
“I’d seen there was a nice white sandy beach here going past in my boat and I figured it’d make a good spot for a surf camp. The villagers here wanted to meet us, so we just asked about it and they said we can have it. We’d never even set foot on the property.”
Matanivusi Eco Resort
Matanivusi Eco Resort: This retreat is the only surf resort of its kind in the area, and yet it flies under most surfers’ radars.
It’s a heck of a job even finding Matanivusi Eco Resort. That’s how the McDonalds planned it. In a country renowned for world-class surf, it’s worth keeping a secret or two.
I’m driven an hour or so east along the Coral Coast on Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu, past locals selling chestnuts and coconuts beside the road. We take a sharp right turn down a dirt road with no signage. It passes through a small village where locals wave, then takes me under a cathedral of rainforest canopy before it funnels into single-lane with a drop to the ocean below. There’s a hair-pin corner ahead, then you’re there: where the road ends, and the lagoon begins.
There are as many non-surfers when I arrive as there are surfers; the McDonalds didn’t want to build a surf camp for “boys’ trips”. They’d seen too many in their travels. They wanted surfers with partners, and families. I’m shown round the resort while McDonald tells me about diving trips, yoga sessions, spa treatments, village visits, waterfall hikes and kayaking for non-surfers.
“We didn’t want a thatched hut in the bush,” he tells me. “If surfers want a cheap boys’ trip, there are plenty of places in Indonesia. We wanted a place where a woman by herself would feel just as comfortable. Everyone sits together, it’s all communal, like we’re all friends on a holiday together.”
Matanivusi Eco Resort
Rooms are just a few metres from the ocean.
Fiji is where the luxurious, all-inclusive surf resort concept was conceived. Surfers in the 60s and 70s roughed it in rudimentary surf camps. But in 1984, Tavarua Island in Fiji’s Mamanuca Islands, offered the first all-inclusive, all-exclusive surf resort, for $US100 a day. Twenty-four surfers had exclusive rights to some of the best waves on Earth.
Surf resorts became big business. As surf travel hit the mainstream, competition for uncrowded waves became cut-throat. Finding the perfect wave – and having it entirely for yourself – became something surfers spent tens of thousands of dollars to do.
And Fiji is where every surfer knows that the perfect wave breaks. It has the world’s third-largest continuous reef, a 200-kilometre-strip of coral that’s home to some of the planet’s best surf breaks. Unlike Hawaii, waves are consistent year-round (Hawaii’s infamous big waves only break in winter).
For over a decade a stop on the world professional surfing tour, the planet’s best surfers can be found surfing around Tavarua Island, eight kilometres off Viti Levu’s south-west coast. But Matanivusi Eco Resort – about 100 kilometres east – is the only surf resort of its kind in the area. Located between the Coral Coast and Pacific Harbour, it flies under most surfers’ radars.
A rapid-fire lightning storm passes overhead as McDonald finishes up his tour of the resort. It passes as quickly as it came. McDonald tells me to get ready: the storm’s killed the wind so conditions are perfect.
We motor – the two of us – across the lagoon as fish scatter among the coral below. McDonald kills the outboard and ties us to a mooring as I watch wave after wave break right-to-left across the reef. It’s only a two-minute paddle to a completely empty line-up. By the time I’m in position the coral’s bright below my board, like I’m surfing in an aquarium. When the first wave shapes up towards me, I’m so shocked by the idea that it’s all mine that I nearly miss it.
Matanivusi Eco Resort
An outdoor restaurant and bar sits beside a pool and jacuzzi.
To non-surfers, our quest for the perfect wave with no-one on it probably seems a little selfish – can’t surfers learn to share? But only a surfer understands that no surf is ever the same. No wave ever breaks the same way as the one before it. So when the perfect wave comes at us – delivered across thousands and thousands of kilometres of empty ocean – it stings to watch someone else just a few metres better off than us take it.
I surf till dusk, till my shoulders ache and the skin on my fingers looks like sultanas. On the trip home, I can’t see the resort from the sea. It’s low-impact, part of the forest it’s built within.
It took the McDonalds five years of hard work and planning to turn a hunk of forest in the middle of nowhere into an eco-resort. Rather than knock down the ancient trees that line the beach here, the McDonalds built around them.
All buildings have rainwater collection gutters and tanks, waste and sewage is converted into compost and water to irrigate the gardens and solar panels provide all the power the resort needs.
These qualities, and more, made Matanivusi Eco Resort the first surf resort in the world to become a certified sustainable surf resort.
After a jacuzzi by the lagoon, I finally make it to my room. It’s open to the sea breezes, cocooned within mosquito screens and just a few metres from the ocean. Dinner is served outside under the stars, beside the lagoon; the main course is tuna caught this morning, with veggies from the garden. I turn in early to listen to the noises of the forests outside – fruit bats squealing, coconuts dropping, frogs croaking – and the waves crashing on the reef.
For four days I surf deserted breaks, have massages, do yoga, eat, swim, soak, drink coconut nui and I become the luckiest surfer on Earth.
THE DETAILS
MORE
See: fiji.travel; myfiji.com
FLY
Fiji Airways (fijiairways.com) and Air New Zealand (airnewzealand.co.nz) fly regularly to Fiji, the resort will organise all transfers.
STAY
Stay at Matanivusi Eco Resort in a villa beside the beach with all meals included, surfing, snorkelling, SUPs and kayaks (transfers are extra) from FJ$550 (NZ$403) a night a person, see surfingfiji.com
Craig Tansley travelled courtesy of Fiji Tourism and My Fiji.
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