Tuvalu
Funafuti Lagoon
August 14th to August 16th 2025
Day 1
Woke up at 1:45 am to leave the Funafuti Lagoon hotel by 2am to catch our 5am Fiji Airways flight to Tuvalu. At the connecting airport, we were told that our bags might not make it on the flight due to weight restrictions and backlog from previous flights (other travelers bags had been left behind). The Fiji Airways attendant told us that our bags would come on a later flight a few days later. She suggested we pack some toiletries and a few articles of clothing in our backpacks in case the bags didn’t make it. We made our way out of the check-in line to unzip our bags and shuffle things around. We grabbed 3 pairs of everything and tried to fit it in our backpacks. The lady at the checkin counter assured us that they would keep our bags at the airport waiting for us because the next flight would arrive too late for us and our departure to the next country. After a long travel day, an almond chocolate bar for lunch, a partial chicken pie from the airport, and a bag of knockoff SunChips later - we finally made it to Tuvalu by 2pm. Surprise! Our bags also made the flight.
We put our bags in the room then came back to the common area to have lunch - a tunafish & cheese sandwich and a cheese sandwich.
We rested for a few hours in the air conditioned room. Before we set off to walk to 1 end of the island at around 4:45 by the time the sun was going down. We made it to the end of the island, snapped some pics, said hi to the locals we passed by, and so on. We made it back to the airstrip around 6pm and it seemed that the whole town was out playing rugby, volleyball, soccer, tag - you name it. So we walked the tarmac, cheered on the rugby teams, took some pics and videos of the routine activities of the locals and made it back to the hotel.
Dinner for Hailey was a rotisserie roasted chicken with rice and cabbage. Max had 2 grilled cheese sandwiches. We had a cat that was clawing at us all dinner long to get some scraps. She gobbled the chicken skin right up. The Milky Way that night was sharply visible after the rain clouds passed.
Day 2
Max woke up at 7am to do a half marathon training program and got a run in on the tarmac before the heat got to be unbearable for the day.
We walked to lunch around 12 and had chicken and beef chow mein from a Chinese food shop
Cheese sandwiches for a snack at 4:30 then walked down the other side of the island afterwards, again making an appearance at the tarmac to see all the evening commotion. We opted out of dinner this evening and fasted until the morning.
Day 3
We woke up around 6:30 and did our same 1+ hour walk to the side of the island. It was a Saturday and it seemed like all the local guys on the island were getting together in the morning to lick their wounds from the previous evenings debauchery. Halfway through our walk, we were passed by a cop car that was headed towards where the guys hangout was. 20 minutes later the cop car came back by us along with 2 extra adolescents - who most likely caused some trouble the evening before.
We got back to the hotel, ate breakfast, then went out for a motor bike ride to the far side of the island. It was a nice slow ride, Max as our navigator, driving on the left side of the road, but we got to see the beautiful calm beaches on the left side, and the rocky reef on the right side. The main sighting on this side of the island was where the trash gets dumped and to see how that is stored, managed, combed through, etc. On the drive back to the hotel, a local was in the water, fishing with a basket and after catching the fish we watched him eat it, basically live.
We sat for our last cheese sandwiches at 11am and headed to the airport at 12pm for our 1pm flight back to Fiji, to catch our flight in a few days to Tonga!
If you are a serious traveler trying to figure out how to visit all these remote countries most efficiently, check out our more travel detailed page on how we visited all the South Pacific Oceanic countries