Finding The Dream House - Vanua Levu, Fiji Islands
Thursday, August 24, 2001
6:45 AM – The myna bird "alarm clock" started ringing, right on time. I put the coffee on; went back to bed.
7:10 AM – Breakfast outside, in nature.
8:15 AM – The scuba diving gear is already at the dive shop, so our trip will be easier this morning.
8:40 AM – We arrive at the dive shop, but we find no
dive boat. The feeling is something like what you experience when you
run out of gas in your car. You are not sure if your plans are going to
work out that day, but you know that they will be different from what
you planned. Luckily, we did not have to wait too long to start the
next chapter in our adventure. A filmmaker had chartered the dive boat
for fishing and it was due back soon.
9:30
AM – We were running a little late, so we motored out the channel, past
the first point, but still inside the reef line of the lagoon. We
dived the Dream House site, named for the lone house standing at the end
of a nearby spit of land, which extends straight out into the lagoon.
On our dive, we saw oceanic whitetip sharks,
which I am sure I don’t have to describe, other than to say that they
really do have white tips on their dorsal and pectoral fins. If you are
painting these scenes in your mind, even the tips of their tails get a
little splotch of white paint.
In addition to the sharks, there were several other
large fish hovering near their favorite underwater retreats. It was
like an underwater nature walk, with each species represented by only
one or two of its kind, separated by enough space that it felt like
walking from diorama to diorama at the Museum of Natural History. Although there were no explanatory signs adjacent to each fish, that was all that appeared to be missing.
10:00 AM – I’ll digress. I bet you didn’t expect me to do that. The Dream House dive site is just offshore from The Dream House,
itself. It is an unpresupposing example of rectangular architecture,
with a gabled roof running its length. However, it could be your little
piece of paradise, paid for by the day. Sitting in the middle of the
lagoon, you might find yourself living in a simple house, with all the
amenities, but none of the pretensions associated with big-time resort
living.
As the afternoon wears on, the winds will pick up a
bit and you will hear the waves crashing on the reef, half a mile
offshore. There is a small volcanic island toward the West. It is
eroded at the base and has no shore to speak of. The waves undercut the
edges of the island leaving it looking like a large green mushroom,
with palm trees atop. As the Sun sets, we Americans look to the South
and West, in anticipation of where the Sun has set all our lives.
However, here the Sun swings North and West and sets behind the trees of Vuana Levu.
Still, the Dream House beckons, inviting us set up
household and live our daily lives on this island. If I keep up this
line of reasoning, we shall all soon be living fulltime in an island
paradise. They teach us to be more sensible than that, don’t they?
11:00 AM – Our second dive was at The Caves, with aptly eroded lava structures smoothed and punched full of holes by time and tide. It reminded me of diving that we did along the Kona Coast
of Hawaii, only there the island includes a live volcano and all the
lava structures seem new, or at least recently installed. Caves are
fun, but there is usually a lot of sediment inside, thus only the first
person through will have a clear view.
Regardless of water clarity it is an amazing feeling
to swim into a hole where the light does not penetrate, then swim
through a lava tube, up and out at the other end. As you rise and exit
the tube, seeing the blue sky filtering down through the water, it is
very birth-like. At human birth, you have to struggle to get out of the
womb and receive that first breath-of-life. In your waterborne
rebirth, your eyes are open and you have a pressure-regulated breathing
device already in you mouth. You are born from Mother Nature
and sent up and out toward the sky, to freely breathe the clear air and
to live your life again. Looking back on it, it wasn’t such a boring
dive site, after all. Those clever dive masters take you in from below,
so you can gently ascend to your new life on the New Earth.
1:00 PM – On the return trip to Lomalagi, we met an SUV
at a bend in the road. Driving fast, he must have been a local. As
the vehicle whizzed past us, Cagey commented, “That was Terry and his
mother, Linda going towards town”. The next day, we were talking to
Terry down by the resort office and the subject turned to cars and
trucks. I was using all my best arguments, railing against oversized
and wasteful SUV’s. After a few minutes, Terry seemed to summon up his
nerve to ask a question to which he intuitively knew the answer. He
asked, “What’s an SUV?” With that honest question, I realized how much
had changed in the twenty years since Terry had lived in the U.S. After
I answered his question, we both were a bit embarrassed.
3:00 PM –We relaxed and enjoyed the afternoon, watching as the puffy 
clouds in the sky drifted by at high altitude. It was another stunningly beautiful day in paradise.
clouds in the sky drifted by at high altitude. It was another stunningly beautiful day in paradise.
6:00 PM – As usual, we observed Sunset on the Lanai.
7:05 PM – After dinner, we gazed again at the
setting of the crescent moon, seeming larger now and setting later than
before. Time was growing closer to the day of our departure, back to
Los Angeles and away from our island paradise.
