Taking a Dive - Fiji Style
Wednesday, August 23, 2001
7:00 AM – Brrriing. Is that the sound of the alarm
clock? No, because we did not pack one. It is our friendly myna birds
squawking away outside. When the windows are open all night and it is
quiet, the contrast of morning in Fiji will wake you up in a hurry.
7:15 AM – Our usual breakfast of fresh fruit, orange
juice and baked goods arrives, just as the coffee pot finishes
brewing. Weather normal – beautiful. They did not tear down our movie
set overnight and cart it away to the prop shop. The palm trees are all
in their proper places and Natewa Bay forms its usual serene backdrop. Only today, we are in a hurry.
8:15 AM – We drag our dive gear down the wooden
walkway to the ever-faithful Suzuki Jimny. We rattle away down the
local road, only to find that the construction crew had added some fresh
fill-dirt in certain places. The only problem is that the “dirt” that
was used has rocks the size of grapefruits strewn throughout. We make
it out to the Hibiscus Highway and “floor it” down the correct (left)
side of the road. That lasts about a half a minute until I get to the
blind curves and the three-tracks, often shared by two oncoming
vehicles.
8:30 AM – We slow down to go through our favorite local village. It is a
settlement that is about two hundred-fifty yards long, and has houses
of varying quality and age on each side of the road. The sign says,
“Slow through Village” as many road signs say throughout Fiji. We
smile, wave and shout-out our usual “Bula” to the village folk. They
smile, wave back and give us the “Bula, Bula” (or was that an old
college song?) in return.
Over the next four or five days, they would watch us
roar off to go diving in the morning and roar back through on our way
home for lunch. They must have wondered what we were doing with that
little car each day that kept us roaring back and forth.
8:50 AM - After negotiating both the old part of
the road and the ever-shifting detours of the new road, we almost sped
right past the Koro Sun Resort, which is a bucolic hotel with bures for
rooms and a coconut plantation for grounds. Later, one local Fijian
told us that if you stayed there, you got “free golf”, for just the
price of the room. What they do not tell you is that it is a “mountain
course”, with more uphill and downhill than any championship course in
the world. Since a driving iron would send the ball straight into the
nearest grassy knoll, it was a “wedges-only” course.
We pulled in to the hotel grounds and asked the
native Fijian woman who was using a palm frond to sweep the driveway
where the dive shop was. Finally, she gave us discernable directions,
or perhaps we just stumbled upon the dive shop. It was the little
freestanding storefront on the “beach side” of the highway. Beaches, in
the Caribbean sense of the word are very rare in Fiji. At that time,
some of the promotional materials from the Koro Sun showed sunbathers on
wide, sandy beaches. There is about six to twelve feet of sand at the
edge of the lagoon, but so much for truth in advertising.
The dive shop looked like saloon from the Old West. It had a false front that
made it look like it was two stories high, although it was not. When
we arrived, it was as deserted as a ghost town. Of course, we forgot
that we were on “island time”, which runs on a clock of its own.
Despite our anxiety over possibly “missing the boat”, since we were the
only divers registered that day, the boat would not have left with out
us. We also discovered that this satellite location of the Jean-Michel Cousteau Resort was open only on demand.
A previous dive company had built the rock jetty on
which the dive shop sat, as well as building and outfitting the
building. They then carved a channel out of the coral to get the dive
boat out to the deeper water of the lagoon. In 2000, when everything
was completed, the “Coup Plotters”
tried to take over the Parliament Building on Viti Levu and put a total
stop to all tourism in Fiji for months. Needles to say, the dive shop
went out of business before it really had a chance.
When we visited, in August of 2001, tourism was
making a comeback throughout Fiji and the Cousteau people decided to
“make another go” of the location. We were among the first of the
intrepid divers to try out these dive sites since Cousteau brought
diving back to the east end of the island. Since the unanticipated
consequences of the 911 attacks in America were less than a month away, we were probably also among the last to dive these sites for some time to come.
9:00
AM – We placed our gear on the boat and our lead weights in the
weight-pockets in our buoyancy control devices (BCD’s), so that we would
sink properly once we were in the water. Sam, the boat driver and
sometimes dive master was ready to go.
9:15 AM – Gary, a New Zealander who runs the main
Cousteau Resort dive shop arrived and we took off. He had come over to
check us out and be sure that his satellite operation was adequate. He
made sure that he did not interfere with our diving, but it was nice to
know that there was the safety and security of another set of eyes to
make sure that everything was OK. That morning, Leonard was our dive
master. He was the only Fijian that we met during our entire stay who
seemed a little standoffish. He was a rich kid, by their standards and
wanted our undivided attention, even when we were not quite ready to
give it to him. Sam, on the other hand was a big bear of a man, and as
kind and generous as could be.
9:30 AM – We arrived at the Fanfare Site, just a mile or two out of the
alt="Exiting the lagoon, on the way to our dive site, Vanua Levu, Fiji,
August 2001 - Click for larger image (http://jamesmcgillis.com)"
/>lagoon and around the point. So there we were, ready to dive the
fabled waters of Fiji. Having dived the Kona Coast, Maui, Cozumel, Belize, Bonaire
and Curacao, to name a few, we had high expectations for Fiji. Once we
were under the water, however, it all seemed a little ordinary. The
colors were drab and there were very few extraordinary sights. The trip
out in the boat was as interesting as the two dives.
As the week went on, we discovered why the diving
was not great. Vanua Levu is mountainous and a lot of silt had washed
down the streams, smothering the reefs in many areas. Based on the
large number of logging trucks we met on the roads, I can only imagine
what is really happening in the highlands. My gut tells me that they
are taking too much timber. With the land deforested,
the silt is sweeping down the streams and into the lagoons, where there
the lack of circulation allows it to settle near shore.
During our dives along that coast, we found whole
coconuts rolling along the bottom and lots of coconut fronds and smaller
pieces of plant life strewn about. Since the area is not dived that
much, there is a lot of undisturbed material along the bottom. I found a
large, dead clam that still had both halves attached at its hinge. It
was almost one foot across at its widest point. The fact that such a
large and relatively sensitive animal could have thrived there recently
told a tale that I did not want to consider. It is sad to say that much
of the siltation damage had probably happened during the very recent
past.
11:00
AM – Our second dive was at a site called The Thumb, where you could
dive around and through a volcanic reef formation. It was interesting,
but not spectacular. Still, it was great to be out on, in and under the
ocean that morning, even if we were learning a lesson in forest and
reef management that we had not expected. When we returned to the dock,
we found that I had not secured one of my weight pouches to my BCD and a
weight pouch was now missing. I did not look forward to finding out
what the replacement pouch would cost.
12:00 PM – We motored slowly back through the narrow
channel to the dive shop. It was so shallow at low tide that Sam had
to use the hydraulic lift on the two outboard motors to keep them from
scrapping bottom. When we got back, Sam found an old brown and dried
coconut and cut it open for us. He told us that the big green ones are
for drinking and the little brown ones, which have shed most of their
husky skin, are for eating. The meat of the coconut is copra, which
they pronounce “KOP-ruh”, but we Americans tend to pronounce
“COPE-ruh”. Sam seemed amused that we thought it was a bit of a
delicacy. The coconuts lay around like so much trash on the ground over
much of the island. Each day that we dived, thereafter, Sam took a
machete and opened another coconut for our refreshment.
12:30 PM – We were on the road Lomalagi Resort
again, retracing what would soon become familiar territory. We no
longer turned at the wrong places or wondered where we were. Like an
old horse returning to its stable, the Jimny could practically find its
own way home.
1:15 PM – Collin waited lunch for us, which was nice.
3:30 PM – 6:00 PM – It was time to plan the balance
of our stay in Fiji, including our various side trips, and to do nothing
at all (worth mentioning) for a few hours.
7:05 PM – Dinner, with time afterward to gaze at the
crescent moon going down and to see the Milky Way light up as the sky
rapidly darkened. Looking up at the Southern Cross and the stars of the
southern sky, one could get a sore neck craning to see the new and
wonderful sights. Fittingly, to end our evening, a meteor streaked
across the sky.
9:45 PM – A few minutes after we returned to the
room each night, the walkway lights would go out. With the Moon down,
darkness was all around. The only human made lights emanated from our
bure and a couple of fishing lanterns, down on Natewa Bay. As the moon
grew larger each night, fewer fishing families would appear, until the
last few nights, when we saw none.
By James McGillis at 04:30 PM | Travel | Comments (0) | Link