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If this appeals to you, don't delay making plans. About 70% of Fiji's hotels and resorts are already booked. One idyllic spot with vacancies: Turtle Island, where Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins frolicked in The Blue Lagoon. For a couple's rate of $28,000 a week, guests can scuba dive, explore the island's hills by horseback or mountain bike and dine on the produce of the resort's organic garden. True romantics may want to take advantage of the island owner's offer to throw a lavish Jan. 1, 2000, wedding for a blushing $200,000 (airfare and 10 nights' accommodation included).
DAWN UNDER
Despite Canberra's insistence that the third millennium won't begin until 2001, the rest of Australia plans to celebrate in lockstep with the rest of us. In fact, Sydney is billing itself as the first major city to see the sun rise on the new age.
Famous for throwing great parties, Sydney aims to make the occasion memorable. The streets will teem with jugglers, magicians, clowns, singers, acrobats and stilt walkers. There will be a free outdoor music concert in a central city park, a Brazilian dance festival in Hyde Park, a performance for kids featuring such popular local talent as the Wiggles and Bananas in Pajamas. And for the evening's climax, more than a million people are expected to crowd the city's shoreline to watch fireworks detonate from three major locations around the Opera House and on the Harbour Bridge.
Unlike New York or London, Sydney will probably be balmy on Dec. 31. Furthermore, brags local taxi driver Joe Zaouk, "we have the best harbor in the world. People are friendly. It's clean, fresh and well organized. It's just a fantastic place!" So fantastic, in fact, that all the major hotels are already booked. The only available accommodations are those still under construction. Best bets: the Mercure Hotel Sydney, opening in October, and the Avillion, scheduled to open next April.
BACK TO BASICS
For one little West Bank town, welcoming the millennium will take 16 months and $130 million. From Christmas 1999 through Easter 2001, Bethlehem expects to play host to an estimated 3 million pilgrims. "This is where it all started," says Nabeel Kassis, the Palestinian official in charge of the Bethlehem 2000 Project. "People who believe in the Nativity will want to see where it happened."
To prepare for the influx, Bethlehem is undergoing a major face-lift. The rutted turnoff from the Jerusalem highway is being widened and resurfaced, and Manger Square, until recently an unsightly parking lot in front of the 6th century Church of the Nativity, is being transformed into an attractive, shaded piazza. A pristine four-story peace center will replace the clunky concrete and stone police station, built by the British in 1938.
One of two new hotels under construction, the five-star, 240-room InterContinental, is in the splendid palace of a pasha. When completed, it will bring the number of hotel rooms in Bethlehem to, appropriately enough, 2,000. Despite 200 additional bed-and-breakfast rooms elsewhere in the town, accommodations will be hard to come by; most visitors should plan on staying five miles away in Jerusalem.