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.

Fiji Above Water

It has taken me a long time to write about our experience in Fiji above water. And it has taken me such a long time because I was surprisingly touched by our experiences. As much as we loved diving underwater, I think Mark and I will most treasure the people we met above water and our brief encounters with Fijian culture. I was so moved by the warm feelings extended to us by the Fijians, that on the day we left, it took me completely by surprise to be blubbering like an idiot.

But perhaps the right place to start would be to write about my preconceptions about Fiji and how the reality matched with those preconceptions. Before coming to Fiji, I had never really given the culture there much thought. Skimming through travel guides on Fiji, I was left with images of large, well-maintained resorts, friendly people and of a rich Indian culture resulting from the large Indian population there.

There is a reason why people don't see much of Fiji beyond the large resorts. Fiji is a very poor country. Many of the native people there live a subsistence lifestyle: gathering fruit, fishing and farming to small extent. And many people live in modest, single story, two or three room cement block houses. There are villagers who are so poor and with so little access, that they rarely see foreigners, and are amazed to even see cars driving down the road.

But it is wrong to say that the quality of life in Fiji is poor. Fiji has quite a low population (875,000 people as of this writing). It appears as though such a low population has not yet overwhelmingly burdened the islands, either from a waste standpoint, or food standpoint. 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 experience in crowded countries, including our own. I did get the sense, however, that people are sensitive to environmental conditions worsening. When I told our chauffeur that Fiji seemed very clean, she replied somewhat wistfully, "Fiji is still clean?" as though apprehensive that it could all soon change.

Another factoid I had gleaned in my readings was that the Fijian people were some of the friendliest people in the world. I took this to mean that the Fijian people were rambunctious extroverts. That was far from the complex truth. Truth is: there were shy Fijians as well as extroverted ones, but almost all the people we met were warm-hearted. They were also charismatic, funny, and clever. They were elegant and at ease in their bearing. The resort managers at Beqa Lagoon Resort told us that Fijian people are almost always happy, and when they are sad, they don't stay sad for long. They also told us that Fijian people don't hide what they feel, and what is shown on their face is usually what was going on inside their heads. We found that to be true in our daily greetings with people. There seemed to be no filter between the warmth people were feeling, and how they behaved. Whenever our car drove past, pint sized children would jump up and scream "Bula!" (which means "hello" in Fijian), their exuberance was unfiltered by the restraint we so often feel in our cold, Western society.

Most of all, we enjoyed the company of our divemasters, whom we dove with everyday. Our divemasters entertained us with stories, amused us with practical jokes. They showed us a little of their hopes and dreams. One divemaster, Missy, told us how his vigorous schedule of diving 6 days a week wiped him out, and then he made the hand symbol of drinking a bottle of booze. Anyone who has ever dove for a significant amount of time would know what he meant. You feel totally tired and a even a slight buzz after a full day of diving. My heart went to him, because he had two small children and a new baby on the way. It was not a good time to be tired, as a brand new father. Another divemaster, Tusy, expressed his desire to obtain the full divemaster certification. He led divers everyday, but did not have the books necessary to study for this first level of professional diving instruction. , yet a third divemaster touched us with a surprising goodbye gesture When we were about to leave Beqa Lagoon that I can't write about, but caused me to break down into tears because it was such a poignant, tender gesture.

It has been a few weeks since we've come back from Fiji and I am now more fascinated than ever by the Fijian culture and national psyche than ever. Gleaning what we could of the troubles brewing below the surface of all the welcoming smiles, we wished we had more opportunity to explore Fijian culture more in depth. Cracking open my travel guide on the South Pacific, I am itching to explore all the other island nations that await: Palau, Micronesia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and looking forward to soaking up more of that intoxicating South Pacific feeling.

9th Day: Fiji Honeymoon

On our 9th day at Beqa Lagoon we decided to do a couple of dives with the new crew who had just arrived. We were sitting on the fence as to whether we would be diving today. We had already exhausted our dive package, and Mark and I were feeling pretty wiped out from a whole week of diving. Mark was feeling tingling on his face, which he had only previously felt after doing decompression diving in Cozumel. So naturally, we thought he might be feeling something akin to the bends. Ultimately, we decided to go for it. The symptoms weren't painful and it wasn't getting worse with time so we were pretty sure he wasn't experiencing DCS. I also felt we would be missing out on all the action if we sat these dives out. The crew that had just arrived was really cool and it would be fun to go diving with them.

This group, whom we had met at dinner the day before, weren't part of any dive club but were different couples and a single thrown together. This made it easier to converse with them. The single of the bunch was a distinguished lookin Aussie gentleman with a marine biology background who told us about the coral reef rating scale, which is part of the "coral watch" organization in Australia, and which I had never heard before. Coral health is rated on a scale of 1 to 6 and is judged by the potency of it's color which is indicative of the health of the photosynthetic organisms (I don't know their names) residing inside. He rated the house reef a 1.5 out of 6, which convinced me that it was hardly worthwhile to explore it.

Others in the group included a cool, well travelled, and well-tattooed Aussie couple, a San Jose couple, an Arizona couple and a couple from Long Beach who invited us to stay at their house if we would ever to visit the upcoming Long Beach Dive Expo.

Given that the marine biologist was only diving at Beqa Lagoon for one day, and given that coral health was so important to him, we were hoping that the dive crew would take us somewhere that represents the best that Beqa Lagoon had to offer. Unfortunately, that was not to be the case. It was many of the peoples' first day of diving in over a year and the dives we were going to do would be checkout dives. There was too much current to do Fantasy or Golden Arches, so we ended up doing a site called Stone Henge, which Seru admitted they very rarely dove but were forced to due to the weather conditions. The dive site was pretty miserable as far as coral health was concerned, but we still saw cool, shallow water things we had never seen before. There were a whole bunch of Canary Fangblennies at this dive site, which are cute, and like many South Pacific marine life I noticed, had long trailing tendrils off their tails. We also observed shrimp gobies for the first time. These are gobies that share burrows with tiny shrimp, which I gather help excavate the burrow. It was fascinating to watch this symbiotic pairing in action. it was hard to spot the shrimp because the shrimpgoby did such a good job sounding the alert.

The second dive, Sea Fan Coral, I considered to be fairly average, below average. Even so, I had a spectacularly good time. I was feeling more comfortable than I had all week, in that my buoyancy control and my trim was better, and my mask wasn't giving me issues. The small anthias and dascylluses werent even bothered by my prescence. And so I was just hanging out watching fish behavior, soaking in my last dive in Fiji. I never felt so reluctant to leave a dive site as I did then. I hung off the descent line during my safety stop like Tarzan hanging from a vine. The line kept swinging due to the erratic behavior of the boat in the choppy waves, and the weighted rope nearly hit the coral of the bommie. At one amazing instance, I saw the rope nearly hitting 3 crinoids off a ledge. But I saw these feather stars recover and grab hold of the ledge again. It is hard to believe these feather balls are animals which can crawl and chose where they choose to reside, but yet they are. I continued to hang off the weighted line to make sure the rope did not damage any more coral life by pushing off from the rock until my safety stop was done and I reluctantly boarded the boat.

Dive 181: Stonehenge
Mina: 65', 1:11 min.
Mark: 51', 1:08 min.
Shrimpgobies
Canary Fangblennies
Pennant Bannerfish
Moorish Idols
Longnose Butterflyfish
Regal Angelfish

Dive #182/ Sea Fan Coral
Mina: 59', 1:05 min
Mark: 67', 1:00 min.
Humbug Dascyllus darting around branching coral
Latticed Sandperch
Picasso Triggerfish
Arc-eye Hawkfish

-- Post From My iPhone

8th day: Fiji Honeymoon

Dive #180: John's Tunnel
Mina: 54', 0:54 min
Mark: 69', 0:52 min
Spotted Unicornfish
Seru spotted a Brown Banded Pipe fish
Black spotted puffer (Fish that looks like a harbor seal)
Black sweet lips

Surface snorkeling interval
12 anemone fish and a black Dascyllus fish

Dive #181: Golden Arches:
Mina: 65', 1:05 min.
Mark: 64', 1:04 min.

Golden sea fans under a large arch
Schooling Spotted Unicornfish
Humpback Unicornfish
Three-spot Dascyllus
Grouper with trailing tail
Orange spine unicorn fish
Scalefin Anthia Fuschia anthia with spine on head
Small black and white reef fish
Longnose Tang
Giant clam that Mark took video of


-- Post From My iPhone

7th Day: More Small Group Diving

Dive# 178: Three Thieves
Mina: 72', 1:16 min.
Mark: 72', 1:14 min.
-this is one of favorite dives in Fiji. We were treated to a duet of lionfish swimming out in the open, and a pair of ribbon eels
-for some reason I went into deco, which explains why I had such a long dive. I was doing a deco stop at the top of the bommie. Mark rolled his eyes and stayed behind.

Dive #179: Seven Sisters
Mina: 63', 0:56 min.
Mark: 62', 0:54 min.
Missy plays volleyball with a giant sand dollar the size of a beachball

After diving, I got a 90 minute massage at the spa by the beach which was wonderful. Later on, we experience an evening of Fijian dancing and singing. What a treat.


-- Post From My iPhone

6th Day: the Fiji I Envisioned

Today's diving encapsulated the Fiji diving I had been dreaming of. Small fish of every color imaginable danced over the reef, obscuring the reef beneath them. Wherever I looked there were soft corals and sea fans hanging off every available square inch on the bommie.

Today, there were only 5 people on the boat, which was a gift in itself. The large Russian group and the San Diegan group were leaving. We were going to have the dive sites all to ourselves. Maybe with the group being so small, the diving improved. Maybe it was the quality of the dives themselves. Maybe it was because Mark and I were beginning to feel comfortable with our gear. Or maybe it was because we were finally learning to appreciate the Fijian sea life. It was probably a combination of all four.

One of the divers we were privileged to dive with today is an 80 year old diver named, Gordon. Gordon is as smart as a tack and regaled us with stories of his youth surfing in Hawaii. He proudly tells us he will dive until he dies. I would love to dive until I die, like Gordon!

Dive #177: Fantasy
This is the must-do reef dive in Beqa Lagoon. If you ever travel to Beqa Lagoon, make sure you don't miss this dive. No other dive captures the color and sheer volume of fish that the word Fiji conjures. This reef is particularly famous for it's unusual patch of blood red anemones and large population resident anemone fish.

Mina: 66', 0:54 min.
Mark: 64', 0:49 min.

Dive #178: Gee's Rock
This is one of the top 5 dives we did in Beqa Lagoon, primarily for the cool things we saw and did:
(1) I saw my first mantid shrimp (a very colorful lobster sized shrimp).



(2) I had my teeth cleaned by a cleaner shrimp for the first time.
(3) And in a stunning scene that I couldn't have planned better, I was able to capture Mark, a Spade fish, a pair of pyramid butterfly fish, and a pair of bannerfish in one photograph.

Mina: 68', 1:01 min.
Mark: 61', 0:59 min.

-- Post From My iPhone

5th Day: Shark Dives

Holding on to the current line with one hand, I survey the deep blue water beneath me. The surface water is choppy, and the water is so deep I can barely make out the bottom. As I wait for the other divers from our boat to jump in, I feel oddly exposed. The water is teeming with sharksuckers. About 2 feet long, and sporting large suction pads on the top of their heads, these fish are bigger than the better known remoras, and they are swarming just a few feet below me. Some have had huge bites taken out of them. Some are even missing their tail fins entirely. But somehow they manage to stay alive. It is a sign of what is to come below.

We are about to do the famous shark dive in Beqa Lagoon. The Fijians from Beqa Island have an ancient belief, that no shark would ever harm them. To this day, the Fijian divemasters, who hark from this island, feed large sharks by hand. On every dive there are lemon sharks, nurse sharks and bull sharks. On almost 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). Although the Bull Shark is probably the single most dangerous shark in the world, based on it's number of fatal attacks on people, they are actually the smallest of the three sharks, topping out in length at about 8 to 10 foot. The Tiger shark and the Great White sharks, however, can grow to 20 feet in length. Although enthusiastic (especially male) divers like to refer to these large sharks as "big boys", they are more than likely members of the opposite sex. You can call them "big mamas".

Up to this very day, there haven't been any deaths or injuries among either the dive crew, or the divers. And it is not by luck alone. The normally fun and ebullient Fijian divemasters become strict taskmasters on this dive.

Finally, everyone has entered the water and we descend to the bottom. We line up behind a rope just a few feet above the staging area. I am surprised to see divemasters Missy, and Seru wielding large metal poles the size of crutches instead of their usual pointers. They perch behind us to fend off any sharks should they get too close.

Black Jacks the size of tombstones swirl above the scene. There are 3 or 4 Bull Sharks circling for a handout. They turn on a dime to face the feeder and open their mouths like puppies for a hand held fish head. Mark is invited down to the amphitheater floor to take closer camera shots. The 7 foot Bull sharks come within an arms length of him. He pulls his camera, and his arms in closer. These sharks are surprisingly wide, and their girth makes their beady eyes look even smaller. We are told later that these are the fattest bull sharks one well travelled diver has ever seen. There are more than enough fish heads to provide for all of their eating needs. One Bull Shark burps up a cloud of fish juice.

Pretty soon, the tornado of fish grows out of control and gets ever close. The effect is like sitting being beside a high speed freeway. Mark turns around to find that the divemaster beside him, who had erstwhile been protecting him, has already jumped over to the safe side of the rope. Leaping over the wall with one hand, Mark demonstrates a fine sense of self preservation.

Dive #175: Bistro I
Mina: 82', 0:43 min.
Mark: 84', 0:43 min.

Dive #176: Bistro II
Mina: 65', 0:47 min.
Mark: 63', 0:47 min.

-- Post From My iPhone

4th Day: Jon's Tunnel

Jon's Tunnel
We were alerted in advance by Tina and Jim, a friendly San Diegan couple, that this was a favorite dive of theirs, as they dove it on their honeymoon more than a decade before. This was an awesome dive and my favorite dive in Fiji thus far.

We started out at a ship wreck in 80' of water. The ship was covered in soft coral. Buried in a hatch one story below deck was a green moray eel whose body was about as thick as a woman's waist. I had heard about eels taking off peoples' fingers, so I did not approach. But, I heard later a lady on our boat did get close, but purely by accident. She was filming the machinery inside the hatch before someone alerted her to the fact that the ginormous eel was right at her fin tips.

There was a metal grillework on the stern of the wreck heavily hung with sea fans. Perhaps one of my favorite diving moments ever was swimming upside down underneath the sea fans. With every inhale I drifted up closer to the fans. With every exhale, I drifted down. On the same dive, elsewhere, I saw a diver lying down on the sand blowing donut bubbles. Sometimes the best part about diving is just being silly underwater.

We then headed to some bommies in the distance where there was a deep tunnel swim through. Excellent buoyancy was definitely required in this 20 ft long overhead environment that was heavily inhabited by soft corals and sea fans.

At the end of the dive, we hovered over the top of the bommie. My computer was edging midway through the yellow caution zone but I kept staying behind in this gaily colored world.

Dive 172# - Jon's Tunnel
Mina: 73 ft., 1:04 min.
Mark: 71 ft., 0:54 min.
Other sights:
-Black lionfish
-Fluted Giant Clams
-Clown Triggerfish
-A pair of Pennant Bannerfish
-Greasy grouper
-Map Puffer

Mark at Turtle Head

Flurry of Life at Turtle Head

Dive #173 - Turtle Head
Mina: 62', 1:02 min
Mark: 62', 1:02 min
-Sunset wrasse
-Sharksucker (free swimming)
-2 foot long Pineapple sea cucumber the width of my calf
-A pair of Regal angelfish that evaded pictures

-Longnose hawkfish
-Dwarf hawkfish
-Moorish Idols
-Longnose Butterflyfish
-Sleeping octopus in a crack
-8 Orangespine Unicornfish

Juvenile Lion Fish on Night Dive

Dive #174 - Ridge Reef (night dive)
Mina: 65', 1:05 minutes
Mark: 62', 1:01 minutes
-Sleeping porcupine fish that kept bumping it's face into rocks
-Cornet fish?
-Baby lionfish
-Two hermit crabs that were fighting over a larger shell
-Sleeping parrot fish inside cages of antler coral- you wonder how they got there.
-Upside-down jelly that lifted off from the sand when bothered
-Crab
-Crown of thorns
-Large sea urchins the size of bowling balls


-- Post From My iPhone

3rd Day: First Dives in Fiji

It was our first day of diving in Fiji and I think I was a little bit disappointed.

If only I could have seen out of my mask, I think I would have enjoyed it more. But as it was, my mask kept fogging up, obscuring the entire dive, no matter how much I spit into them before hand. It got so bad toward the end of each dive that I was filling and clearing my mask every 10 second just to remove the fog. Mark had issues with his mask as well, except his mask kept leaking.

Corals on the Top of the Bommie

The dive sites themselves are all along a 90 mile coral ring around Beqa Island, which was shaped by an ancient volcano that collapsed into the sea. The dive sites consist mostly of coral bommies, which we have never dove before. These are rock silos whose tops are at 20 ft and whose bottoms are at 50 to 70 feet. At the top of each bommie are shallow hard corals, each of which comprises an apartment complex for tiny neon anthias and dascyllus fish. Along the sides of the bommies hang the soft corals and sea fans, where the lion fish, butterfly fish and parrot fish like to reside. Even lower still, near the sea floor, are the eels and ground hugging gobies and other sand dwelling creatures.

Sea Cucumber on the Sand Floor

To my chagrin, we found ourselves at the resort with social groups already firmly established. Beqa Lagoon Resort encourages social interaction with other guests. Guests sit together at all meals. There are set activities every day, and the dive boats are so small that you are forced to mingle with the small number of guests at the resort, unless you want to be a social pariah.

One of the main groups is a 20 person strong dive club from San Diego. With some exceptions, they are not terribly friendly. They are also very well-off, judging by the volume of expensive video cameras bristling with insectoid strobes. The other group is from Moscow. They don't mix with others at all, perhaps due to the language barrier. But they also don't seem to smile very much. At all meals, the dive groups are seated separately at their areas. Mark and I, are seated at the overflow table, where the resort managers, Mark and Sue, try to make their guests feel welcome.

Diver on the Side of the Bommie

We are put on the boat with the San Diegans as part of today's diving. Part of the reason why I didn't enjoy myself is because this group is very, very experienced in diving, and perhaps I felt self-conscious about my own comfort level in the water. These people know their cameras and fish ID inside and out and they are all mostly in their late 40s to 80s. I think we established ourselves as the dive "newbies", which is an unusual position for me since I have a divemaster certification! On the boat ride over, I expressed some nervousness about diving with our brand new BCDs, and mentioned that Mark and I hadn't dove in a year (with a couple of exceptions last month). Maybe that labelled us with the San Diegans.

Even so, I think I surprised the divemasters, and the others on board when I stripped to my bathing suit and was one of the first people to jump in the water. Everyone else wore hoods and wetsuits. The wetsuit that I had brought over was an extra large, and rather than swimming around in a garbage bag, I decided to risk it without a wetsuit. I'm a cold water diver after all!

Life on the Side of the Bommie

Immediately after my first dive was over, I was slightly cold. The water temperature was around 80 deg. F, which can get a little cold when you are in the water for greater than an hour. Also, I came out with stings and itches all over my body. I was later told that this was from the "sea lice" that was floating in the water column (thimble jellyfish). They are so small, I don't recall seeing them at all.

This day was definitely intended to shake out all of our equipment issues, including our underwater camera. Some of the underwater photos in this blog definitely reflect our inexperienced camerawork.

Dive #169 - Soft Coral Plateau
Mina: 80 ft, 1:01 min (weight worn: 4 lbs)
Mark: 80 ft, 0:59 min
Dive highlights:
Black tip reef shark
White tip reef sharks
Jacks
Moorish Idols

Dive #170 - Three Thieves
Mina: 62 ft, 1:08 min.
Mark: 61ft, 1:05 min.
Dive highlights:
Barred Unicorn fish
Ribbon Eel
Indian Lion fish
Black-Blotched Porcupine fish in a cave
Pipe fish
Clown Triggerfish
Barred Snake Moray
Moorish idol
Long fin Banner fish
Leaf Scorpion fish

Dive #171 - Shark Reef
Mina: 54 ft, 1:00 min.
Mark: 54 ft, 1:00 min.
Dive highlights:

Leaf fish
Cleaner shrimp
Blue moray eel
Clown fish in anemone
Chromodoris sp. nudibranch

-- Post From My iPhone

2nd Day: Settling in

After what seemed like forever (2.5 hours by car and 45 minutes by boat) we have finally reached Beqa Lagoon Resort.

We are currently settling into our deluxe Garden bure (a bure is a Fijian thatched roof house). The bure is quite nice and is exotic in flavor. There are elaborate wood carvings on the doors and on the walls. There is a separate living area apart from the king sized bed, and a generous porch its own seating. There are fresh flowers strewn on the beds, the tables even on the floor. We even got fragrant flowers leis placed around our necks as soon as we waded to shore.

Mark has settled into the day bed with an issue of Scuba Diving Magazine. I am in our separate living area on the sofa writing this post. It is so quiet here, all we can hear are the rain drops falling. It rains heee on and off all day. And yes, there is no TV (which explains why I have the time to write this post at all).

We managed to get some fun in in addition to all the boating and driving to get here. We had a morning to kill before our ride to Beqa Lagoon Resort, so we hired a driver to take us on a 3 hour tour of the Nadi area. Our first stop was a fruit and vegetable market where we saw vegetables we had never seen before. I was quite interested in the display of kava root for sale. A group of Fijian men were lined up to buy this popular product. Kava in case you haven't heard of it is a mild sedative that the South Pacific Islanders like to drink daily. If you drink a lot (10 bowls or so) you can get quite drunk. Mark must have been feeling flush with cash because he bought a mango from a small Indo-Fijian lady for 2 Fijian dollars (that is around 1$). We later learned from the driver that we paid around 4X more what we should have. Ah well, at least it's a funny story to tell.

Our next stops were the giant Hindu temple that the ciry of Nadi is famous for, and the Garden of the Sleeping Giant. The former I wasn't overly impressed with since I've seen a grander Hindu temple in Singapore. The latter was nice as there were hundreds of orchid species to take pictures of (see iPhone photo above).

We were also taken to see the "First Landing" which is a point on Vitu Levu where the first Fijians arrived by boat. It was sad to see that a mediocre resort marked this site rather than a nice memorial or museum.

Finally we were taken past various Fijian villages (where only Fijian people were allowed to live), and also through Lautoka town, which is the second largest town in Fiji, and whose main commerce is in processing sugar. It was here that I grabbed a bite to eat at the corner grocery store, a bland meal of fish and chips. (That's Mark below warning me we have to go soon.) I was particularly to eat with the locals - several large and well tattooed Fijian men.

As a side note, I have already decided in the brief period I have been here that Fiji is quite a nice place to live. Were I to decide between living in Mexico, the Bahamas or Fiji, I think I might decide on Fiji so far. Fiji is clean, and everyone is well housed, at least by Silicon Valley standards, which aren't very high. As the managers here at BLR told us, "you never see an unhappy Fijian, nor do you ever see a hungry one." Unemployed Fijians, which I suspect number quite a few, can subsist off the land. There is plenty of unfarmed land, plenty of fish and fruit off of wild trees.

The tour over, we embarked on a long trip along the coast to the BLR. It was pretty, and uneventful. What was unusual were the Fijians who kept waving us hello as we drove past them in the car. (See top picture.) That is how friendly they are.

Once at Beqa lagoon we were treated to the voices of a local choir. There was some talent in that group in spite of the fact that they came from the two small villages that sit on either side of the resort. I am glad I attended when I could have slept instead. The voices were angelic. One lady sang with tears running down her face, so moved was she by the song she was singing. Dinner (all meals come with the dive package) was New Zealand lamb with a French style reduced brown sauce. This was the best lamb I've ever tasted. We had wonderful tablemates- the manager, whose name is Mark, and his wife. These were truly interesting folks who had previously managed resorts in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

Tomorrow will be our first day of diving. I'm already getting jitters just thinking about it. Well, it is off to bed for me. More tomorrow...

-- Post From My iPhone

1st Day: Enroute to Fiji

I write this as we fly over the middle of the Pacific Ocean on our way to Fiji. The plane interior is dark. The outside is jet black, all except for the brightest stars I've ever seen in my life. In between those stars are countless more tiny stars, all of which tell me, we are not in Kansas anymore.

By the time we land in Fiji, we will have spent 13 hours on a plane, and four hours in various airports. I spent the first couple of hours at San Francisco International Airport decompressing from work from the previous week. While at the gate waiting for our plane to depart, I sprang off last minute e-mails and text messages to members at work. It is difficult to leave the pace of the Silicon Valley behind.

Right now, I am feeling rumpled and not very glamorous given that we're supposed to be on our exotic honeymoon. It is hard to shake off the adrenaline from the past week at work, and perhaps that explains the anxiety that I feel.

There were many highs and lows going into our trip, especially when Mark discovered his passport was missing the night before we were supposed to leave. We managed to postpone the trip while we spent those extra days acquiring a new passport. Those extra days I spent at work were some of my more heroic moments. I swept in, made some last minute discoveries, and was generally such a big help that management admitted to being glad to have benefited from my passport demise. At least Mark has his passport this time, expedited over this past week at great expense.

At this same moment I have been wondering: why am I here and at such great expense? When will I be happy? Scuba diving vacations cost a lot more than regular vacations. For the same amount of money that I have spent on our resort stay alone, I could have bought an entire package to Egypt, including airfare. These moments of questioning, however, are interspersed with moments of pure glee as, I look over at Mark and we grin conspiratorially. Mark and I are finally going on our much needed tropical vacation.

-- Post From My iPhone