Paradise Taveuni Resort, Fiji

Dear Fellow Diver,

"C'mere, I got a moray," signed Sio, my divemaster, 20 feet away from me at Jerry's Jellies.

"Nah, I'm good here," I flashed back. I love a good moray, but I was communing with a magnificent anemone full of tomato clownfish. I can see morays nearly everywhere, but I flew across the Pacific for anemone fish.

"Come here, now," signaled my travel companion, kneeling beside Sio. OK, I motated on over to a trio of ribbon eels, one black and yellow, the other two blue and yellow, doing their wide-open mouth thing. My dive buddy always has my best interests at heart.

We were diving at Jerry's Jellies, one of dozens of dive sites along the Rainbow Reef in Fiji's Somosomo Strait. It's a 35-minute boat ride from Paradise Taveuni Resort on Taveuni Island, southeast of Vanua Levu. This was my fourth trip to Fiji; the others were on liveaboards.

After a 10-hour flight from San Francisco to Nadi, I schlepped my gear from the modern international airport to the domestic third-world terminal, which included the sobering task of stepping onto the luggage scales with my carry-ons. Then it was a 75-minute flight to Taveuni Island, where our group of 27 Americans (some were on later flights) were greeted by several resort vans for the one-hour drive to Paradise Taveuni, the last half a bone-crunching trip over the unpaved ragged road. While other resorts are nearer the airport, Paradise Taveuni is a 20-30-minute boat ride closer to Rainbow Reef. Pick your poison.

The staffers gave us a big Fijian welcome, serenading us with guitars and beautiful singing. Here, the Fijian people shine. While they were colonized 150 years ago by the British who planted sugarcane, the Fijians didn't want to work the fields (why, when you could catch a fish and get a coconut off a tree?), so the oppressors brought in underpaid and illiterate East Indian laborers. I've been to plenty of dive destinations where the bitterness among the locales simmers just below the surface -- I get it. But the Fijian people have gone beyond that. Their joie de vivre made us immediately at home. By day two, most of the staff knew each person's name.

The resort buildings are almost new because owners Allen and Terri Gortan had to rebuild after Cyclone Winston leveled the place in 2016. The covered opensided restaurant flows into a seating and small bar area, plus a tiny gift shop, clothing boutique, and dive shop, with an air-conditioned camera room. There's even a bakery that provides cinnamon rolls for between dives. The bures, which can accommodate 32 guests, are generous, comfortable, and air-conditioned, with refrigerators and lovely open-air showers. Most are spread along the beach. There are hammocks and gazebos on the grounds and a swimming pool front and center -- a nondiver with a reading addiction could be very happy, as was I. After four decades of diving worldwide, I'm at an age and stage where I'm happy with two or three good tanks daily, with leisure time to enjoy a good book and take in the locale.

We arrived early enough to take an afternoon shore dive. The house reef is as good as any "step out of your room and fall in the water" location I've dived, but much of the coral is bleached -- whether that's a hangover from Winston or climate change, I don't know. With plenty of action down to 50 feet, it was the perfect dive to get acclimated and ensure my gear worked. Fish were plentiful, including South Pacific stalwarts such as anthias, anemone fish, tangs, butterflies, and even triggers and trevally. Snorkeling one afternoon, my buddy and I spent 20 minutes following a marauding school of bigeye jacks with two massive trumpetfish embedded in it, as they prowled the reef, occasionally wreaking havoc on a damselfish nest. On my one night dive, too many divers went in one general direction; whenever somebody found a "Thing" (e.g., octopus), eight divers, four with cameras, would converge on it.

Mike, the dive operations manager, reviewed C-cards diver-by-diver and asked about recent dives. I was a NAUI instructor in a previous life and taught in Monterey. Plenty of divers on the trip did just fine, but I wouldn't take them on a Monterey, California beach dive. They were out of air in 25 minutes and probably did some damage to Fijian coral. But they were in good hands as the operation scaled the diving to everyone's skills.

My wife (regular dive buddy) is always a bit of a finesse because she got NAUI certified (by me, in Monterey) 25 years ago. She never got an "advanced" certification but has made over 500 dives, including a Fiji liveaboard and the Galapagos. With the PADI hammer-lock on the dive resort business, they sometimes want to tell her she can't go below 60' because "no advanced C-card, but for 'XX' dollars, we could give you an advanced certification." We've always managed to talk our way through that, as we did with Mike.

Paradise has a big boat, Taveuni Explorer, but it was off for repairs, so we took two smaller boats, one with 14 divers (with a marine head), the other with 10, mainly the photographers; it had a rinse bucket reserved for cameras, but no dry area. We left the dock at 7 a.m. each morning -- our gear had already been put aboard -- for a two-tank boat dive, returned for lunch, and then made afternoon shore dives. On our last day after two tanks, they took us to a beach that could have been the set for Gilligan's Island, served box lunches, and then we napped, goofed off, and mostly stood around waist-deep in crystal clear water before our third tank.

Each day, they called roll before we left the dock, though not after the boat left the site. We drift-dived in groups of 5-6; with multiple divemasters in the water, air hogs were politely escorted to their safety stops. The rest of us generally continued for a 50-55 minute dive, ending in the shallow. The divemaster would send up a sausage from the safety stop -- newbie divers often hung on that line -- and the boat would retrieve us when it was our turn.

Our divemasters (A.P. and Alisia) were top-notch. While I'm sure they visually counted noses before we left our site, a formal roll-call would leave no doubt all were on board (though perhaps I wouldn't have missed a particularly grating diver who kept up constant yelling and joking -- Gilliam's Constant: there is precisely one total A.H. in every group of divers. With the chaos he created, perhaps a formal roll-call would have shut him up for 30 seconds.)

Our dives were along the Rainbow Reef, with our first day at White Wall, the belle dame of the reef structure. I kicked into a swim-thru that started at 40 feet, popped out on the wall at 70 feet, and turned left to be awed by an entire wall of white soft coral extending deeper than I cared to go. Squint a little bit, and it looks like a snow-covered mountainside. As at most sites, visibility ran 80-100 feet. As I turned toward the blue, big schools of fusiliers and bannerfish were nibbling on plankton over the drop-off.

While divemaster A.P. was poking around for interesting things, I took in the grandeur of the entire scene. Near the end of the dive, I found eight fire darters in coral rubble -- the most I've ever seen in one place. Back on the boat, everybody wanted to give a laundry list of the critters they saw. But for me, the grandeur was the panorama, where I enjoyed not just the trees but the entire forest. It was magnificent.

Nowhere was that more true than Rainbow's End. For my money, it blew away White Wall and made it into the top handful of my 1500 dives. It was a constant maelstrom of colorful tropical fish, individuals and schools. Anthias, bannerfish, fusiliers, chromis, butterflies, and big bluefin trevally looking for trouble. They were all dancing over a sea of hard and soft corals, a scene beyond even what a Disney animator on acid could imagine.

If you've never seen true soft corals, they're hard to visualize. Under a dive light, the stalk gently glows as if internally lit. And the colors -- red, white, purple, orange -- well, they pop. Stop and spend some time with a healthy soft coral specimen -- you'll never be the same.

After five days of diving, my Suunto Zoop briefly gave me a 10-foot ceiling as I ascended toward a safety stop. It was gone by the time I reached the stop. I recalled Mike and Alan's warning that the recompression chamber in Suva was a very long trip away, so I took off the next day to read, snorkel, nap, and get a massage. I couldn't find any specific guidelines online, but it felt like a good idea.

Several of our divers had equipment issues (who ever thought wireless communication between a computer and a regulator's first stage, in salt water, for life support, was a good idea?). The Paradise crew was generous and competent, but equipment and parts are hard to come by, so one must be as self-sufficient and failure-proof as possible. If you don't own your gear, rent it at home.

As for meals, I was pleased; the tuna was yellowtail, caught by divemaster Papa's brother. Most vegetables came from a nearby organic garden. Modern Fijian cuisine is heavily Indian-influenced, so if you like Indian food, lean that way.

All meals were served, and while we made lunch and dinner selections at breakfast, some folks asked for something not on the menu, and they usually got it. There were many vegetarian choices, with portions notably more European than American, which I'm sure served us all well.

The breakfast menu usually offered varied omelets, eggs with ham, pancakes, and a fruit cup. Some folks ordered a breakfast burrito, but I knew if I had one, that's the morning we'd have choppy seas. Lunches started with an eggroll appetizer, a rice salad, or something similar, then fish, pasta, and sometimes beef dishes, with an occasional Indian curry. The three-course dinner always included fresh fish or options (a curry many nights), followed by rice pudding, ice cream, and an unusual whipped-topping confection with chocolate in it. Order mix-ups were frequent but were always sorted out with a smile. Remember that Fiji is a third-world country -- flexibility about things is good for your blood pressure. That said, Flo, the head of staff, could run any railway station in Switzerland, as could Mike, who heads the dive operation.

But we came for diving, not for food. The Purple Corner was awash in purple hard and soft coral (and purple fish). A.P. said, "When we get to the corner of the wall, we'll sit for a moment and watch everything. Once we've all turned purple, we'll go." He's one of the few divemasters I know who will stop and indicate it's time for everybody to pause and take in the world around them. Seeing my dive group's shining eyes and leaky regulator smiles as we marveled at the scenes was soul-filling. Double shakas of joy were frequent.

I have a passion for sharks, but sadly, humans are making it difficult to see them. I saw only a handful of whitetip reef sharks and may have seen a single grey reef shark glide by below. However, at Barracuda Point, I saw a big barracuda, then two blacktip reef sharks zipped by me and over the ridge. A.P. said, "The blacktips, they're always going somewhere. I just see them disappearing away." I followed them over the ridge and found a 10-foot giant guitarfish (G. typus) lying in the sand. Several divers saw it, but it bolted when it realized it was the center of all that attention.

For our off-gassing day at the end of the trip, we took what was to be a seven-hour bus tour of Taveuni, with a handful of stops, which turned into a long 11 hours, thanks to the young and inexperienced tour leaders' poor group management. I could have happily spent two hours at the main waterfall at Waterfall Park, swimming, jumping, and napping. Our visit to the Vuna village, where many of Paradise's staffers live, was the highlight. These folks have few material possessions, but radiate joy. My grandchild would have envied the natural swimming hole the kids have at the shore. Two village elders quickly befriended my travel companion, and they happily chatted throughout the tour.

A fellow in our group fell and probably broke his elbow within the first hour of the tour. Two medical professionals in our group said he needed immediate attention, but that didn't happen. When we finally got back to the resort, owner Terri took over, the nurse in our group put him in a sling, and somebody provided Vicodin. Terri looked the guy in the eye and said, "You do not want to go to the hospital. Get home, now." A danger of traveling to many countries like Fiji is the off-chance that Something Bad happens. Like driving home in a tour bus at night on the twisty, hilly dirt road with no seatbelts. Something "kinda bad" in the U.S. could be life-threatening in Fiji, requiring a flight to New Zealand or Australia.

(More to read from our blog: The Trauma of Third World Medical Treatment)

At home, as I think about this trip, I remember Cabbage Patch and how amazing it was to float by what felt like an acre of cabbage coral with thousands of ternate chromis dancing over it. But just as good a memory was watching one of our group sit with the Fijian musicians on the resort's Fiji Night, borrow a guitar, and play an American pop standard. The Fijians jumped right in, everybody sang along, and just for a moment there, I was proud to be a Homo sapiens.

-- S.E

Author's Bio: S.E. has been a certified diver for over 40 years and a NAUI instructor for 15 of them. He has something like 1500 dives under his weight belt and takes equal joy in dives in Monterey, California, and Fiji.

Diver's Compass: We paid $2800/person double occupancy for 10 days/9 nights through our group rate . . . Night dives were FJ$120, about $60 U.S . . . Afternoon shore dives are included if you are boat diving that morning; otherwise, there's a fee . . . Nitrox (FJ$20 per tank) . . . . Boat snorkelers had their own guides . . . . In late October-early November, we had postcard conditions and flat seas . . . If you tote tons of scuba gear, getting it flown to Taveuni might take days. Pack light . . . 240V power with Australian plugs . . . Bring cash for tips and as much as possible; everybody (including the resort) charges a 4% credit card fee . . . . WIFI is slow but reliable in the common area, spotty in the bures (FJ$45 for the week) . . . dress appropriately for village visits; for women, that means long skirts and covered shoulders . . . . Using mosquitos repellents at night is a good idea . . . There's a wide array of alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks to purchase at the bar, and milkshakes in a giant metal cup for FJ$8 . . . . My 90-minute massage was FJ$120, and I felt like a new human . . . There is 24-hour security at the resort; our wallets and passports were in our room safe, but that felt like a formality . . . If there's room in your gear bag, stuff in school supplies and guitar strings for the Vuna village . . . It's a 10-hour flight, but only a 4-5 hour time difference from the west coast.