Snorkeling in Fiji by Ann Banks
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It’s a long haul from New York City to the South Pacific island of Beqa in Fiji - go much farther and you’re on your way back. After the transcontinental leg to Los Angeles, you take a ten-hour flight across the Pacific to Nadi airport on Viti Levu, Fiji’s main island. Then you spend four hours on a bus as it winds along narrow roads from the grassy leeward side of the island to the greener, more densely forested windward side. Halfway along Vitu Levu’s southern coast, you switch from the bus to a ferryboat for a 30-minute ride across a turquoise lagoon. Finally you wade ashore at the Marlin Bay Resort on Beqa, a densely forested, 14-square-mile island with neither roads nor phones.
I have just spent two days making this journey halfway around the world, but to me it seems insignificant compared to the distance I travel when I get wet — when I pull on my silicone mask, put my face in the water, and draw breath from the snorkel tube. At that moment, I slip through the looking glass. The ocean surface, a shimmering mirror only moments before, turns transparent. I marvel at the gaudy riot of sea creatures I’m privileged to behold — bright schools of fish fluttering like pennants in the tide; weird ferns resembling giant eyelashes; unearthly neon bouquets of coral. A line from Eudora Welty comes to me: “The thoughts flew out of her head and the landscape filled it.” Seascape, in this case. I cease thinking and simply see.
Transcendence is where you find it, and snorkeling is where I find mine. Too restless, too rational, too earthbound, I neither meditate nor pray. Injunctions to concentrate on my breathing merely make me nervous. With my resolutely Western mind, I am a poor prospect for ego dissolution.
But submerge me in saltwater, and certain boundaries do dissolve. My inner sea synchronizes with the tides. I’m never more fluid, more graceful. I become a time traveler, eye to eye (if eyes they be) with remarkable creatures unchanged for eons. I open myself to the sublime, I sink into a trance. Essential truths that elude me on land are as obvious in the water as breathing in and breathing out. Slowly. Through my snorkel tube.
This rhythm casts its usual embracing spell during my first day face down in the lagoon. I feel at home in the South Pacific. Before five underwater minutes pass, I happen upon a creature so altogether fantastic, yet so uncannily familiar, that I wonder if I may have had gills in a previous life. Why else would I recognize this flashy-looking reef fish shaped like a Chinese food container and colored chrome-yellow-with-black-polka-dots? Then I remember: It swims daily across my computer monitor among the exotic sea creatures in my coral-reef screen-saver.
Soon I spot another marine celebrity. Framed in my face mask, looking every bit as majestic as its mammalian namesake, is a tawny, beplumed lionfish — the poster fish of the South Pacific. Its zebra-like stripes and lion-like mane make an outlandish combination; it’s hard to believe this creature did not spring from the Seussean imagination. Sights like these make me think I’m going to like it here.
Under the auspices of Sea for Yourself, a tour company specializing in snorkeling, I will spend the next week exploring Beqa’s fabled lagoon. Marlin Bay is small -- our group of 18 nearly fills it -- and impossibly romantic. (Though a generator supplies electricity and the resort has all the modern conveniences, evenings are lit mainly by candles and kerosene torches.) Our rooms are elegant thatched bungalows, called bures in Fijian, set in beautifully landscaped grounds -- the effect is more exotic botanical garden than overgrown jungle. Each bure looks out on the palm-fringed lagoon, and each has its own hammock and front porch.
Gathered in the heavy-timbered open-air bar the evening we arrive, my snorkeling companions seem an interesting group — lively, inquisitive and extremely well-traveled. I am not exactly a stay-at-home, but in this circle I feel like Emily Dickinson. Especially when I listen to Alison, from San Francisco, describe the time she snorkeled around the world, from the Great Barrier Reef to Bora Bora to the Red Sea, in a ten-week trip.
Clutching chilled bottles of Fiji Bitter and rum punches, we listen to a pre-dinner orientation talk by Joel Simon, the marine biologist who founded Sea for Yourself. A native Californian with a luxuriant blond mustache and a dry wit, Simon has spent two decades developing and leading snorkeling programs for organizations like the Smithsonian and the World Wildlife Fund. Wherever corals grow, Joel goes. But he has a special love of Fiji, he tells us, because the people are so remarkably warm, generous, and friendly. Later in the week, he’s arranged for us to visit several of the half-dozen or so Fijian villages that dot Beqa’s shore.
But the main focus of the trip will be the lagoon. A flooded volcanic crater bounded by an immense barrier reef, the lagoon shelters 14-square mile Beqa as well as a scattering of tiny islets, each with its own fringing coral reef. Here and there are bommies, large coral mounds that rise from the ocean floor to within a few feet of the surface. According to Joel, we’ve come to a region that is astonishing for its biodiversity. “In the Caribbean,” he says, “there are around 500 species of fish and 68 of coral. In the South Pacific, there are probably 3,000 species of fish and 700 of coral.” Fiji, in particular, has been called the soft-coral capital of the world.
In order to get in as much time on the reef as possible, we’ll head out mornings and afternoons on the Blue Surveyor, the resort’s sturdy, newly-purchased (though far from new) dive boat. Each trip will be to a different reef that Joel has scouted personally. This last is important. “I never trust what anyone tells me about a reef,” he explains to me later. “I listen to everybody, but then I go see for myself.”
Between boat outings, we’ll be free to explore the reef just offshore — or just to relax. (There isn’t much else to do on Beqa, truth be told. Apparently, you can hike to a waterfall, but between the coral reefs and the hammocks, we’re all just too busy.)
Every evening before dinner, Joel will present a brief lecture and slide show on reef life, designed to sharpen our observational skills. We’ll also be free to browse though the 80-lb. knapsack of fish books he and his assistant Sue Kinder have hauled here for our edification.
Everyone settles quickly into a divine routine. Most days we go on two snorkels in different spots in the lagoon, with a marvelous lunch in between at the resort. But a few days into our stay, we head out on the Blue Surveyor for an all-day, two-snorkel-plus-picnic excursion. The day has dawned gray and cloudy, but before anyone even gets wet, the sun breaks through and brightens both the vista and our outlook. We anchor first off tiny, uninhabited Stewart Island, where we’ll explore the extensive fringing reef. I’d been wishing I’d paid more attention to the caution about water temperature (between 74 and 78 degrees) in our trip literature. Joel concedes that it’s “a bit cooler than the Caribbean,” but points out that Fiji is just far enough from the Equator that there’s no malaria. Once I borrow a heavier wet suit from the dive shed, this seems a prudent tradeoff.
We are accompanied by Manassa, Marlin Bay’s dive guide. A laughing, handsome Fijian with a gorgeous, sculptured build, Manassa is a born encourager of those who would fret. Is the complexion of the water a dismaying cobalt? Are whitecaps ruffling the surface? Will we be cold? Will it be rough? Not according to Manassa. “It’s beautiful, it’s wonderful, it’s marvelous,” he tells us, and we soon make this our group mantra. He is a great favorite, especially of the women, whom he calls “my mermaids.”
With Manassa’s encouragement, I make up my mind to do some serious mermaiding: I’m determined to finally learn how to dive down. Snorkelers who free dive, as this is called, can survey the entire first 15 or 20 feet of the reef, where most of the growth is found. The necessary skill of equalizing my ear pressure I’ve long since mastered, but a certain ineluctable buoyancy has always bound me to the surface. The answer, according to Manassa, is weights. Obediently, I strap on a 6-lb. weight belt and slip into the water. I jackknife my body, point my fins to the sky, and I am down — into a new dimension of the reef. Eye to eye with the fish, I turn and look up at the snorkelers slowly swimming above like grazing animals.
Before we leave Stewart Island, my lifetime total of shark-sightings climbs from one to three. I am the first to spot a leopard shark sleeping on the bottom while it’s being cleaned by tiny, darting remora fish. As everyone cruises by to check it out, the leopard shark stays satisfactorily immobile about 15 feet down. We also glimpse what Joel later is pleased to call “a nice little whitetip.” Sharks of the latter species are “like puppies” he insists, and he reads aloud a passage from one of the fish books which calls whitetip attacks on humans rare. Anya, a lively psychologist from the Bay Area, fails to find this entirely reassuring. “It says ‘rare,’” she points out. “It doesn’t say never.”
However you feel about them, sharks are unforgettable — each close encounter seems to stamp itself indelibly on some ancient part of a person’s brain. The same is not true of underwater scenes that are merely breathtakingly beautiful. The day’s second snorkeling stop is an enormous open-water reef with a profusion of rainbow-hued hard and soft coral — bright purple sea fans, red and yellow sponges. Within the reef structure are mazes, passageways, and coral chambers. Some are so small you can only peer in at the opulent, jewelbox settings, as if across a velvet rope. Others are large enough to enter. Glimpsing a school of yellow-striped jack in one room, I swim in to join them. Together, we circle the coral enclosure — suspended in a strange and timeless dream.
But once out of the water, I find the experience impossible to hang on to. This failure of recall is perfectly described by Connie, a novelist from Palo Alto, in a postcard she sends to a friend: “Often I have told myself to memorize a certain perfect scene of, say, lavender hard coral, some waving golden soft coral, a blue and yellow and white striped fish followed by a flood of minnows with electric blue dots on their backs. Then I come up onto the boat . . . and the memory fades like a dream. I can remember that there was something lavender, there were stripes and some bright blue dots, but the scene itself is gone.”
Glorious as our day on the water has been, there’s more enchantment awaiting us ashore. Before dinner, we are to witness a demonstration of Fijian firewalking on the Marlin Bay grounds. We’ve been hearing about this ceremony from Manassa, who happens to be a member of the Sawau, the famous Beqa tribe that performs the firewalking ceremony. Manassa himself does not participate, he tells us, as he objects to the period of celibacy that traditionally must precede the rite. (“Four days!” he exclaims, although later I’m told that two weeks is actually the prescribed interval.) Of the nine villages that dot the shores of Beqa, four are inhabited the members of the firewalking tribe, including Manassa’s home village of Rukua, a half-mile down the shore from the resort.
Long ago, legend has it, the men of the tribe captured a little eel that was really a god. Bartering for its freedom, the eel revealed the secret of how to walk across fire (stones heated by fire, actually) and this legacy has been handed down. The firewalkers of Beqa, celebrated throughout Fiji, now perform mainly to earn money. No trances or religious rituals are involved, according to Ken, a lanky, dignified man who, in addition to being Marlin Bay’s bartender, is a member of the firewalking tribe. (His business card reads: “public relations director, office manager, firewalker, bartender.”) No training is necessary — it feels like walking on grass, Ken claims — but you have to be part of the tribe. “It’s in the blood,” he says.
That evening 15 young men arrive at Marlin Bay from Rukua. They outfit themselves in black and yellow grass skirts and fern ankle garlands, just as the eel directed. Circling an eight-foot pit where a wood fire has been burning for some time, they push aside the logs to expose a bed of large volcanic stones. One by one, as the chief calls their names, the men stroll calmly and slowly across the hot stones. The performance has a casual, improvisational feel, and there is considerable joking between turns. One ham named Bill even stops in mid-walk to face the audience; he grins, waves, and calls out the traditional Fijian greeting, “Bula!” “Bula!” we shout back, truly impressed.
So how is it done? No one will say. All they’ll do is repeat some version of the little eel story. (In answer to my questions, Manassa offers, “It’s from another part of the world — the spirit world.” A gracious woman who tends the resort’s gardens, and who is known as Aunt Mary, says, “Sometimes you think a legend is just a story, but it happened.”) Yet the stones are scorching hot; I touched one. Rena, the maid who cleans our bure, is married to a firewalker; his feet are no more calloused than the next villager’s, she says. Since there is no firewalking equivalent of the fish book to consult, the mystery persists.
Most of the workers at the resort are drawn from a few surrounding villages of fishing and farm families. (Beqa is too remote for islanders to commute by boat to Vitu Levu for jobs.) The men and women who cook our delicious food, wait on tables, clean the bures and do other jobs are open and easygoing, curious and friendly. They get on a first-name basis with you right away, the remembering and use of first names being a Fijian rule of politeness. I ask Rena how to account for the impressive memory for names among Fijians; she theorizes it has to do with the villagers’ collective way of life. Land is held in common by the clans or tribes, and any individual’s windfall is usually shared around.
When Sunday comes, I pass up the morning snorkel to attend church. This is not a choice you’d find me making back home, yet I am eager to slip away from the resort and set foot in a Fijian settlement. Ken has offered to escort those interested to services in his village of Rukua. The only other takers are Janet, a retired journalist from Florida, and her husband Frank, a retired lawyer whose father piloted a Marine Corps supply barge in these islands during World War II. Among other things, the three of us are drawn by the prospect of hearing some of the Fijian singing, known for its uncanny loveliness.
Rukua is about a 15-minute walk down a narrow forest footpath. Ken leads the way, looking extremely elegant in his traditional tailored sulu, a long wrap-around skirt made from suit material. As we follow single file, he points out the makings of an abundant tropical buffet: papaya, mango and avocado trees, breadfruit and tapioca plants. We pass a brightly painted wooden fishing boat under repair, and a row of fronds from the pandam bush laid out to dry — probably destined for a firewalker’s skirt.
Rukua is home to about 350 people, most of whom live in unlovely cement-block houses topped with tin roofs. Thanks to firewalking prosperity, these have gradually replaced the village’s thatch bures, which, though beautiful, were highly vulnerable to storm damage. At the center of the village — rather like a hallucination — stands a pristine Methodist church of cream-colored stucco. Each village family contributed funds toward its construction, and the lali, the communal drums that once summoned the men to tribal wars, now call the devout to Sunday services.
The minister is 79-year-old George Momo, who on the day we visit welcomes us in English, and then preaches in Fijian on the subject (I am told) of Elijah and honesty. Listening to the sermon, I ponder the singular achievements of the Christian missionaries in Fiji. So bloodthirsty was this place that the first white explorers called it the Cannibal Islands, and Melville used it for Quequeeg’s home. (On display at the Fiji Museum in the capitol of Suva are authentic wooden cannibal forks, replicas of which are a popular souvenir item. ) There being no greater distinction than converting cannibals, the missionaries proselytized tirelessly, and by the mid-19th century the tribal chiefs had begun accepting Christianity. Only one missionary was eaten in the process.
George Momo ends his sermon with a robust Amen as a rooster crows as if on cue outside. In the choir stalls, 20 red-robed choristers rise for the recessional hymn — and sing in close harmony so beautifully that we feel shivers.
Ken later tells us that during World War II, Pastor Momo, then a teenager, was among the Fijians sent to the Solomon Islands to teach jungle warfare to U.S. Marines. I am impressed, having read in a history of Fiji of these famous jungle warriors (so proficient and stealthy were they that a U.S. war correspondent dubbed them “death in velvet gloves.”) After the service, Momo urges us to sign the church guest book, most recently inscribed by a visitor from Marlin Bay who listed her occupation as “soap opera star,” and who shared information on how to obtain her autographed photo.
I’d already heard of this minor celebrity from Aunt Mary, Marlin Bay’s landscape gardener. During the actress’s visit, which preceded ours by several weeks, she’d lectured Mary about Fiji flora as the source of New Age remedies. Although I don’t follow developments in alternative medicine, even I had heard of kava, a mildly narcotic South Pacific herb that has hit the big time as an anti-anxiety nostrum. The month I left for Fiji, I read in Newsweek about a recent popular health book called Kava: Nature’s Answer to Stress, Anxiety and Insomnia, and Anya informs me that in San Francisco her psychotherapy patients ask if they should try kava instead of Buspar for nervous symptoms. The stuff’s sold everywhere from health food stores to K-mart; there’s even a kava website.
Here on Fiji, kava is the national drink. Prepared as an infusion of the dried root of the pepper plant, the chalky liquid is shared around on all communal occasions, both the ceremonial and the purely social. Standing beside a coconut palm on the Marlin Bay grounds, Aunt Mary told me that because of the international demand, the price of kava is fast becoming exorbitant. Farmers who had been getting $35 a kilo have begun hoarding their kava in the belief that prices will rise to $300, she says. If all this should lead to kava shortages in Fiji, Mary won’t be heartbroken. Kava drinking is largely a male prerogative, and in her view, “The men do it too much and they get lazy, and the women end up doing all the work.”
Mary’s denunciation makes me all the more inclined to try kava — strictly in the spirit of amateur science. As a foreign woman I am free to indulge, and there’s no lack of opportunity. Almost every evening, a group of local men comes to the resort to gather around a mat on the floor, drink kava and make music. They always offer a bowl to anyone who seems interested, and eventually I accept. It’s conceivable that this stuff holds promise as a local anesthetic: it numbs your mouth and tongue, like a dose of novocaine that is wearing off. Kava may be deeply important in Fijian culture, but unless I missed something, it delivers no more natural high than smoking a banana skin.
For an experience that is reliably mind-altering, I prefer floating in a dark sea. Most of us on the Sea for Yourself trip are hoping for a night snorkeling excursion, and we’ve brought dive lights, as instructed. Joel scrupulously has made no promises, however. Conditions have to be right, he says somewhat mysteriously. And then one night they are. The tide is high and the moon is full and bright as the Blue Surveyor drops anchor at Kula Bay. While we zip into our wetsuits, Joel and Sue tape tiny red lights to the tips of our snorkels — the better to keep track of us in the water.
After we’re in full gear, however, I notice an unusual amount of dallying on deck — unspoken acknowledgement that even under Joel’s watchful eye, the prospect of a nighttime plunge into a black ocean is unnerving. Once we’re in, though, the thrill prevails. Like the streets of Paris, the reef takes on a different and more fantastic character after dark. Unfamiliar creatures emerge shedding daytime disguises. Our spots cut through the darkness like stage lights, magnifying the dramatic effect.
I stay close to Manassa as we explore the moonlit reef — partly for my comfort level, but mainly because I have faith in his observational powers. This confidence is soon rewarded, as he points out first a ruby-red starfish and then a spiky porcupine fish. It puffs itself up mightily until it looks like something Alice in Wonderland would have used for a croquet ball. From the corner of my eye, I spot a reef shark cruising off into the darkness. Manassa shows me a crinoid fluttering through the water; these insubstantial beings look more like dryer fluff or Christmas tinsel than something you’d find in a fish book. Later, Joel tells me they’ve been around unchanged for some 400 million years.
The most wondrous sight, the marine creature that moves me above all others, is an octopus. A delicate shade of pistachio when first glimpsed, it drains color under our lights until it is entirely white. I recollect hearing that the octopus is a surprisingly brainy creature. Mild-tempered, too. This one looks supremely graceful as it glides along the reef, tentacles undulating with lava-lamp fluidity. Its gooey invertebrate body strikes me as both surpassingly strange and incredibly vulnerable, like an oyster without a shell. I am in love.