Fiji Overview from a South Pacific Newbie

We recently returned from our honeymoon in Fiji. It was our first time travelling to the South Pacific, and I'm excited to share my impressions, particularly of the diving. We had never scuba dived anywhere in the South Pacific so it was interesting to compare the diving experience with the California and Caribbean diving that we were accustomed to. A word of warning: this trip report is full of detailed fish descriptions, armchair science, vast generalizations and way more adjectives than you can shake a stick at.

When I planned our vacation, going to the Beqa Lagoon Resort in Fiji was a distant third choice (Palau and a Fiji liveaboard were my 1st and 2nd choices). Unfortunately, diving is a very expensive activity and due to a tight budget this past year I chose my 3rd choice for it's bottom line.

In case you have never heard of Beqa Lagoon, it is a small resort (accommodating only 50 guests). It is located on a small island about an hour's boat ride from the main island of Vitu Levu, and about a 3 hour car ride from the main airport in Nadi. The resort is famous, not only for it's coral reefs, but also for it's shark dives and for its delicious cuisine, which is claimed to rival any restaurants in Fiji. Guests stay in homey thatched roof huts called "bures". There are no TVs in the bures but there are nice decorative details. There are elaborate wood carvings on the doors and on the walls, which give the accommodations an exotic flavor. The oceanside bures have their own dipping pools, outdoor showers and hammocks overlooking the beach.

The resort is all-inclusive. All diving, meals and entertainment are provided for. This was a pleasant experience for us, since we are used to being independent while on vacation. We never had to worry about money at the resort because everything was paid for in advance. Tipping was not encouraged. As I understand it, Fijians may find tipping offensive because it is assumed they would have to pay something in return. It is suggested, however, to donate to the local grade school at the end of one's stay at the Beqa Lagoon Resort, in lieu of tipping. The no tipping policy multiplied our enjoyment of our stay immensely.

It was also inconvenient to leave the resort, I learned quickly. Little did I know before arriving, but there are no cars, let alone roads on the island. There are only 9 small villages occupying the 27 km circumference island. These are linked by narrow, unnamed footpaths through the jungle. I believe there is only one other resort on the island. Wandering off the resort grounds could result in getting lost in the jungle!

And the famous cuisine? The food met and exceeded our expectations. I tried initially to rein myself in, but I soon gave up and ate everything on my plate, including the starter course, and dessert, which, for my 5'1" frame, is quite a feat. My favorite dishes were their New Zealand lamb shank, and their swordfish pasta salad.

The Diving

Our first time diving in the South Pacific was certainly enlightening for us. Other than our local waters around California, we had only dove in the Caribbean. The underwater life in Fiji is very different from the life in either. There are the colorful soft corals that Fiji is so famous for, and justifiably so. But the Fijian hard corals were also much more colorful than Caribbean corals. Such color could argue for the superior health of the Fijian coral reefs over the Caribbean ones, I learned. It is the photosynthetic organisms inside the coral which gives them it's color, and the intensity of hue is an indication of the coral's health.

The South Pacific fish also looked like they were from an alternative universe from those in the Caribbean. The angelfish were significantly smaller and many of the butterflyfish and the angelfish had developed long snouts. My theory for why the fish are smaller is that they have evolved to inhabit the South Pacific coral which only allows smaller fish to be able to hide within it's dense spikes. The larger fish have developed long snouts, the better to reach in between the dense coral spikes to feed. At least that's my theory.

Many of the fish across many separate families sported exaggerated forked tails. Some tails even had long tendrils hanging off of them. The total effect of these was to lend an exotic, oriental appearance to the fish, so unlike anything you see in the Caribbean or California. I am uncertain why such decorative features would ever give any fish an evolutionary advantage. And why this would codevelop across a variety of fish families is beyond me.

Despite all the color, enjoying the diving in Fiji was more difficult than I anticipated. Looking back on our colorful underwater photographs, I can hardly understand why. But I have isolated the possible reasons:

If you are like me, you have to categorize everything. It was hard to categorize the South Pacific fish into the usual triggerfish, angelfish or butterflyfish categories because the South Pacific fish looked so different. In addition, there are families and genuses of fish there that don't exist, at least not in proliferation, in the Caribbean or the California coast, such as the lionfish, anemonefish and unicornfish categories, to name just a few.

On top of all the unknown fish species, the diving was initially hard to "get" because the fish were so much more skittish than their Caribbean or California counterparts. In Fiji, the fish will hide if you go so far as breathe. Mark has some video of the dascyllus fishes (these are fish in the damselfish category) ducking back into the safety of the reef everytime he exhaled. Often times the largest schools of fish gathered below us when we were doing our safety stops, once most of us noisy divers had left.

As a side note, the small size and the skittishness of the fish is probably also caused by the fact that Beqa Lagoon has been fished for centuries. Many Fijians still fish to this day as part of their subsistence lifestyle. And there are yet no Fijian marine preserves. (Nor is there yet any intention by the Fijian government to put aside any marine preserves.)

Finally, the visibility was poor at Beqa Lagoon - enough to mute the colors that showed more brightly in our photographs than they appeared in real life. During our visit, it rained 50% of the time, which granted was unusual, even for the tail end of the rainy season, which was when we visited. The profuse amount of rain cloudied the water. Average visibility was no better than 50 feet at best.

It was probably on our second day of diving that I was able to enjoy the diving more fully. I learned to look for dartfish, shrimp gobies and their partner shrimps, nudibranchs, banded pipe fish and hawkfish. The lionfish, moorish idols and ribbon eels, which are so compelling in photographs, showed up in volume on every dive! And who doesn't enjoy watching anemonefish shimmying through their anemone patches?

I haven't yet talked about our shark dives. The Fijians from Beqa Island have an ancient belief, that no shark would ever harm them. To this day, Fijian divemasters, who hark from Beqa island, feed large sharks by hand on their famous shark dives. The shark dives are conducted without cages and with no protective gear on the part of the divemasters other than perhaps chain mail gloves and long metal sticks. Divers are gathered in a semi-circle around an area where they feed the sharks with fish heads and other fish parts.

On every shark dive there are lemon sharks, nurse sharks and bull sharks. An on every other dive, a Tiger shark will cruise by. Bull sharks and Tiger sharks are two of the three most dangerous sharks in the world, in case you didn't know (the third is the incomparable Great White Shark).

The safety of the dives seemed to me hinged on the following: the resident sharks are satiated from repeated feedings, and have no desire to eat people. In fact the bull sharks we saw were the fattest ones the divers had ever seen. I saw one very full Bull Shark burp up a cloud of fish juice in regurgitation.

The divemaster to diver ratio was also high - there were several divemasters armed with sticks lined up beside and behind the divers. However this seemed less effective than the other factors I listed. I saw one fish feeder repeatedly punching a bull shark in the nose and the response was quite slow and delayed. It didn't seem as though beating a shark in the nose did a whole lot, and probably wouldn't deter one from attacking. Oh, did I just say that?

Being on the shark dive itself is like sitting beside a high speed freeway. The fish feed is like a tornado with Jacks and other pelagics the size of tombstones swirling among the sharks. I have been on shark feeds in the Bahamas before and the Fiji shark dive was much better. The adrenaline was definitely an addictive experience. After it was over, I remember thinking it was going to be impossible to return to regular reef diving.

Conclusions

All in all, would I dive the South Pacific again, and in particular Beqa Lagoon? The diving was excellent, if a little hard to get used to at first. If I were to dive Fiji again, it would probably be onboard a liveaboard, though. The waters visited by the liveaboards supposedly offer clearer visibility and greater diversity of diving. The diving in Beqa Lagoon, except for the famous Beqa Lagoon shark dives, was dominated by shallow bommies. Bommies are silos that sit between 15 to 60 feet of water.

I am not yet enough of a fish nerd to appreciate the macro life or coral life that abounds in Fiji. And from what all the other guests say, there are other stellar places to dive, other exotic cultures to explore: Palau, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu just to name a few.

In honesty, I wouldn't change a thing to my Beqa Lagoon visit, though. At Beqa Lagoon resort, we had the opportunity to be temporarily welcomed into the Fijian community on Beqa Island. It was the Fijians, themselves that left us with the strongest impressions.

Many of the Fijians live a subsistence lifestyle: gathering fruit, fishing and small scale farming. And many people live in modest, single story, two or three room cement block houses. But I don't think that the Fijians live less happy lives than we do necessarily. Everywhere I looked, there was a clear blue sky, empty jungle and empty farm lands as far as the eye could see. There were relatively few people around for the amount of land available. And there was not much garbage lying around. I never smelled any of the putrid smells that we breathe in crowded countries, including our own.

To say that the Fijian people are friendly is too cliche. There were shy Fijian people as well as outgoing ones, much like there are in the United States. However, virtually everyone we met was warm-hearted, and there was less of a barrier between the warmth they felt inside, and the behavior they exhibited. Whenever our car drove past, pint sized children would jump up and scream "Bula!" (which means "hello" in Fijian), their exuberance was unfiltered..

In a nutshell, visit the Beqa Lagoon Resort if you want to experience a slice of Fijian culture in addition to scuba diving. If scuba diving is what you seek, try a liveaboard or go somewhere else in the South Pacific. If peace and quiet is what you are seeking, do not come to the Beqa Lagoon Resort, either. The resort encourages interaction between guests, and accommodates many dive clubs. Meals, and time aboard the dive boats is filled with conversation, natural and forced. If first class luxury is your thing, try another resort as well. You may find the Beqa Lagoon Resort's geographic isolation more rugged than you would expect. But if you enjoy meeting people, want to feel included in the island community, enjoy good food and want to do things other than diving, then Beqa Lagoon Resort is your place.