Maravu Taveuni Lodge

Maravu Taveuni Lodge is a resort with bungalows and shared dorms for the money - conscious traveler or backpacker. It's location right by two dove shops is good and the highlight is the friendly, outstanding staff. Always upbeat, they will do their best to make your stay comfortable and make dealing with the power- and internet outages much easier. I really cannot praise the staff enough. So why only one star you may wonder now?! Well - bedbugs! It took my partner and me a couple days to realize that the bites we had were not from the hordes of mosquitoes around, but from bedbugs. We realized this on our last day (of a total of 7 nights), when we found a bug crawling across the mattress. After that, we had a terrible last night, where we slept with the lights on - or at least tried to. I usually check the mattress when I come to a new place, but after traveling for 5 months, it must have slipped my mind that one time. After we found the bug (photo attached), all the other telltale signs became painfully obvious: stains on the mattress, washed but still visible spots on the sheets. After that last horrible night, we left for another place. We told the owner of the new place of our experience and have done everything we could to prevent a spreading of the pest. We have spent days cleaning, scrubbing, desinfecting, washing, and drying hot. Still, we keep finding bugs, dead and alive. I expect that it will take many more days to really get rid of this pest, and the money spent on replacing infested items, washing, cleaning supplies, etc is adding up rapidly, thus making Maravu one of the most expensive, if not the most expensive week of my travels.