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Published: September 15th 2010
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The day before I arrived, the area right in front of Makaira (where I’m staying on Taveuni) was designated a Marine Sanctuary. Roberta, one of the owners of Makaira, and some other local people had been pushing for this for awhile. She is thrilled that it has been approved. She spends a lot of time on the reef right in front of her property. This last March, a big hurricane hit Taveuni - I’ve been hearing a lot from people here about what the island was like before the hurricane hit. I think it’s beautiful here, so I can only imagine what things were like before the damages happened. The reef took a big hit. Roberta and some of the guys who work for her, frequently go out onto the reef to do some coral gardening - taking pieces of coral that are alive but broken off and replanting them. The gardening speeds the reef’s recovery process by about 5 years (it will take up to 20 for it to completely heal!).
Roberta took me out snorkeling today. Pete (who’s wife works at Makaira), Pela and Matheo (who’d both gone with me on my day trip this morning) went out
with us. They planned to show me around the reef and do some coral gardening along the way.
Taveuni is world-renowned for it’s reefs and underwater life so I was very excited to get out on the water. It is really incredible down there! I could definitely see the damage caused by the hurricane, sections of strips of dead coral, places where things had been torn up. But even with all of the damage, there is so much to see! It was beautiful. (Again, I can’t imagine how gorgeous it must have been before the hurricane.) And to think, it’s all just steps out my bure and down the hill to all of this!
We spent a good hour and a half, maybe a little more, exploring the reef. I saw beautiful coral, tons of fish - many which I’ve never seen before, seeing as most of my snorkeling has been done in the Caribbean. Down here, you see a lot of tropical Pacific fish, but also some tropical Indian fish. Pela spotted a huge clam that he pointed out to me. I was so lucky to be out with them because they spot so many things that
I’d miss and kept stopping to tell me what was unique about the different things along the way - which anemones were the rare ones, what was interesting about the different corals. There was one fish that Roberta spotted that huge! I forget the name, but she told me that it is very high up on the endangered species list. Therefore, it’s meat gets sold at an extremely high price on the black market. The fish we saw would be worth about $3000! She laughed and reminded the guys that we’re in a Marine Sanctuary and to not get any ideas.
When we headed back to shore, the sky opened up and we were in a huge rainfall. Taveuni is Fiji’s Garden Island because so much of it is rainforest, so they get a lot of rain here. Pela and I were in the shallow water when the sky dumped on us. The cool ocean water suddenly felt very warm compared to the water coming from the sky. But the rain passed after only about 5 minutes.
I spent a little bit of time just standing on the beach chatting with Roberta. I told her about how my
fascination with Taveuni began, with a book I’d read. She’d read the book too - and it turns out that the property where most of it is set is the property next to Makaira! It’s interesting for me to look around and see the place that I’d read about but now see it through my eyes and my experiences.
While I stood on the beach with Roberta, I saw the plane from Nadi come into the airport. I realized that it was the same scheduled flight that I’d come in on the day before. I can’t believe I’ve only been here for 24 hours - I feel like I’ve already done so much! Even though I’m only here for 5 nights, right now the time seems to stretch out in front of me . . .
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