Nabua family bliss
Chloe New Zealand Jul 18, 2026 Solo traveller
We were blown away by this humble, high quality, family owned accomodation. Upon arriving on the island, you are instantly greeted with a sense of remoteness, professionalism, authenticity and relaxed, private vibe. We had two kids, 4 and 9 who instantly felt at home, which is so important after travelling and transferring away from home. The individual family bures / huts were exceptionally clean, as was the communal dining hall, and all the staff were really cool and happy. We have since come to a resort after leaving Nabua and have realised how lucky we were to have found Nabua and what a gem of a place it is. It felt great to be able to support local business on the remote islands by going up there and it also felt great to be served dishes like taro and fish all cooked by the locals. We would highly recommend doing all of the activities they send you thru on the booking.com message closer to your trip, including the village tour (bring long sleeve shirts and under knee skirts, cash for souvenirs and coconuts), cave tour, and snorkeling trip to the good spots. As well as a walk over the hill. I honestly never saw one fly in the dining area or our bure, it's all so tidy and clean and maintained so well by the local family owners. It's so different at a resort where the flies and sales people are all over you. We will never take our Nabua experience for granted after that! Even tho our resort has much fancier rooms and facilities, we totally miss the well maintained but simple utilities that Nabua had because it was just so much cooler. Thank you sincerely to Vani and her team of exceptional locals (Ben, Rosie, Wise, Lucy, and everyone else!) for making our first family vacation absolutely amazing, and being so cool about everything. We are going to tell everyone who will listen that Nabua is where it's at! Vinaka!
Worth knowing
July seems to be very windy, maybe check what part of the season the wind calms down as it is a bit different up there compared to the Nadia island area we went to next (bounty island etc) which has had not a bit of wind. There seems to be some kind of communication issue between Nabua and Booking.com I'm not sure who is on the messenger on booking.com but it's not Nabua, and they seemed to have repeated instances of people turning up with bookings from booking.com and AirBnB but they had not been notified. It's a long way to travel to get there and potentially find you can't be accommodated if it's busy. Luckily the mysterious chat person had shared us a Whatsapp number to a local for transfer bookings called Fin / Finau, who notified Nabua of our arrival a few days before when we called her to check our transfer was booking from the ferry. Maybe just do that to ensure your stay is smooth, because it's totally worth it!!
