Back from Fiji...

[schultz]

The travel brochures always make the destinations so incredibly fanciful that many voyagers to remote locations tend to forget how long it can actually take to get there. In this instance we are focusing on the islands of Fiji, which are located slightly north and east of Australia. The diving here is wondrous, but with a time difference of 17 hours, halfway there, your brain begins asking the question “Why am I doing this?”

Leaving LAX at 11:30pm on a Thursday night can help a bit with transect, allowing the traveler to sleep during the flight, but you still lose a whole day in travel. One can look at it as if it were daylight savings time on steroids. Instead of spring forward one hour, you spring forward a complete day, missing your Friday in its entirety. Air Pacific has a great staff, and of course being an international flight, the free drinks are always appreciated. I would recommend Fiji’s Bitter. A product of the Carlton Brewery in Fiji, it is a fine English style Bitter that makes for a good hot weather beer as well as an excellent sleep aide.

We finally arrive on the main island of Viti Levu at 5:00am Fijian time. Our travels are almost, but not quite over since we still have to take a smaller flight to our final destination. Tavueni is the third largest island in the over 300 total comprising the nation of Fiji. Also know as the Garden Island, its rain forests, friendly people, and incredible reefs truly provide a diver’s mecca.

Our fourth and final flight was running a bit late and we knew we were in for a ride when, with hopefully all luggage and people aboard, the captain closed the aircraft, sat in his seat, and exclaimed “OK!” No pre-boarding speech, no “please take a moment to read your safety card, no “make certain your trays and seats are in their upright position”, or “make certain your luggage is stowed properly,” just a “enough chit-chat let’s see what this puppy can do and fly her to the next stop, OK!”

This final leg took us no higher in altitude than 3000 feet, but unfortunately through some of the tropical storms that frequent rain forests. It was a little bumpy to say the least, and with the caviler landing we made at Savusavu en route to Tavueni, you begin to question their qualifications. But given the all mountains and the small, one-plane-only landing fields nestled amongst them, it becomes increasingly apparent that these guys are effectively bush pilots getting you safely to all these 300 islands. Finally, at 10:00 am Fijian time – after 27 hours of travel, 3 jet aircraft, and one small twin-engine propeller puddle jumper, we finally arrive at our destination.

After a nice long sleep to rid our fatigued bodies of our travels, we awoke to the sounds of what we thought was bird chatter. Looking outside our room however, we noticed a tree full of rather large fruit bats, all hanging upside down in their roosts, squawking at one another when encroachment of their personal space was violated. Most fruit bats are endangered and belong to the genus Pteropus. Pteropus bats do not occur in continental Africa, Europe or the Americas but are widespread throughout Asia, from Pakistan and India, China and South East Asia through to Australasia and the Pacific islands. They are found on the pacific islands, ranging as far as Fiji and Samoa but not as far as Hawaii. For more info, see

The Fruitbats seemed to entrap all the visitors to the resort every day, but we were here to dive….