Jac’s Journey

Fiji. Nestled in the middle of the South Pacific. It makes me think of the Musical, the bottled water, exotic islands and coral atolls in an expanse of warm, tropical ocean. I’ve always had a dreamy image of the South Pacific in my mind’s eye.

Having arrived, I didn’t know the first thing about it.

Because Fiji was almost at the end of my trip, I didn’t research anything before I left home. I knew there’d been a military coup a while back. I knew that there was some great diving. I knew about an island group called the Yasawas that everyone seemed to go to, and that was about it. I knew nothing about the culture, about the people. I didn’t know where I wanted to go.

My first evening in Nadi was spent reading a borrowed Lonely Planet and chatting to people who knew a bit more than I did. One of the things I’ve learned about how I like to travel is not to choose somewhere because it’s the ‘place to go’ but to choose somewhere that suits what I like to do, and more than that, somewhere that suits the particular rhythm I have at that time.

And my rhythm was looking to sloooow dooown.

New Zealand had been non-stop activities and I’d driven over 5000km in six weeks. I was tired and needed a rest. But I still wanted to experience Fiji, to experience the exotic of the South Pacific.

After my evening of reading and chatting, I chose to head to Taveuni, a fairly large island to the east of Fiji’s island group. Known as the ‘Garden Island’, it’s particularly lush and green, which means a bit more rain than the other islands, but that didn’t put me off. Hey, if I can take New Zealand in winter, I can visit Fiji’s slightly wetter Garden Island!

With some of the best diving in Fiji, Taveuni also has some lovely walks and interesting attractions, not least playing host to the International Date Line that bisects the centre of the island, exactly opposite the Greenwich meridian.

I arrived in Taveuni on a wobbly 18-seat propeller plane. The safety spiel was given by the co-pilot who then jumped into her seat and helped the pilot take off. There was no door between the passenger cabin and cockpit so I could see the pilots, all their controls and out of the front windscreen from my seat in the second row. Flying across the stunning Fiji islands, humps of leafy green edged with golden sand, I grew excited seeing the distinctive green hues of coral reefs hidden underwater. I spotted the famous Rainbow Reef where I would be doing most of my diving and as we approached the runway at Matei, I watched over the pilot’s shoulder until we bumped onto the tarmac.

I booked to go diving with Tyrone, a well-known local dive instructor who has notched up an incredible 15,000 dives. It was a privilege to dive with someone who knows the local reefs and marine life so well, and can read the ocean like a book. I decided to finish my advanced diving certification, and learned so much from him in the process.

Fiji has been dubbed the soft coral capital of the world and the reefs are truly stunning. Soft corals are living creatures that open up their tentacles to catch nutrients passing in the current, so they flourish in tropical waters with lots of movement. This creates a bigger challenge for diving, as trying to move against the current can at times be impossible. I couldn’t have hoped for a better instructor than Tyrone. The water around Taveuni has some serious currents but when the current is strong, the soft corals are fully open to feed and at their most beautiful, which makes diving in currents well worth the effort.

I visited 7 beautiful dive sites, but the one that really stood out was the Great White Wall. We descended through a chimney (a vertical cave) emerging at the bottom to see a huge wall of lavender-white coral stretching off into the distance and down to the deep. It was like nothing I’ve seen before. We swam along the length of it, one moment moving up close for a detailed look, the next swimming backwards to get the big picture. At the end of the wall, we ascended through another chimney to finish our dive around a beautiful coral garden.

One evening, while chatting with some new friends, I was invited to a local school for a fundraising concert. Naselesele village recently built its own school, but it’s a temporary building and they’re trying to raise funds to build a permanent home. The kindergarten children put on a show of traditional Fijian singing and dancing and their mums cooked a feast of delicious traditional Fijian food. The cuteness of these kids was beyond belief, almost upstaged by the blonde American toddler who was beside himself with excitement and started squealing and dancing, his faced wreathed in smiles. Together with the numbing effects of kava, the local brew, the evening was delightful.

My time on Taveuni was a mixture of diving, gentle walks, reading and spending evenings with new friends. A series of buffets introduced me to the delights of Fijian food and gave me ample opportunity to become better acquainted with Fiji Bitter. By the time I left, I was ready to get energetic again, which was just as well as I was heading to California…

Fiji