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Published: August 5th 2008
Blue
blue, blue and more blueThoughts on our first few days in Fiji...
Well, let’s first describe the place a little. Waya is a fairly large island, very steep and mountainous in the middle and green apart from the surrounding dusting of coral sand beaches. There are narrow crusts of reef surrounding it, one of which lies just off the beach outside the octopus resort. At low tide the surface of the reef - all the antlers, brains, branches and other exotically organic shapes are above water apart from where a narrow ship channel allows access to the resort. At high tide you can float above the reef and watch the fish squabbling - at other times egress is via the channel and you can look at the fish where the reef drops off to deeper water.
The staff are pathologically cheerful, grinning, brown Fijians who force a ‘Bula!’ out of you with every eye contact, and the majority of our fellow guests are really friendly and chatty, with a similar outlook on life to ourselves, it seems. The bure is nice and comfortable, but we seem to be sharing the accommodation fee with other visitors -the ubiquitous red millipedes, yellow geckos (everybody say
Hermit crab hunting
catch those pesky critters “cheech-cheech-cheech!!” , sand lizards and ants, and once, a dead cockroach. But that was ok, the ants ate it. One other less obvious visitor seems to be a nocturnal mouse. We only know of this because of a (very neatly trimmed) hole in Jack’s Sour Skittles sweets bag where he’d left it in his open rucksack. Apparently, the mouse didn’t think much of it - the remnants of a green skittle were later found on the chair by Jack’s bed. Poor thing, I almost feel sorry for it: picture its little mousey face screwed up and trying to spit out a mouthful of rancid fizz!
Jack had made a holiday friendship with the son of the manager, Charlie, and they spend quite a lot of time together, most notably crab hunting for the imminent crab racing later this week. The hermit crabs come in all shapes and sizes, but the fast ones are the ghost crabs that run across the sand when you walk along the beach. Along the beach are a couple of rocks that have rock crabs (big greeny black things that have forgotten how to use their claws as defence), and enigmatic little rock hopping fish
that jump into the sea from the rocks as soon as they see you approach, but then jump back on when you leave. It must be very tiring for them, and catching one and putting it on the sand really confuses them (No rock! No rock!).
The offshore snorkelling is as good as the wider sea snorkelling. Ellie and Mark (writing now) went for a Manta Ray snorkelling trip one morning and had a fabulous time. Although Mantas hadn’t been seen over the earlier couple of trips, we were lucky enough to enough around five groups of three or four each. At one point we were in the water with three at a time, billowing around below us like benign duvets. Ellie was thrilled, and I certainly fulfilled one of my ambitions of the holiday - the underwater flying motion of the Manta as it swims, its gaping mouth harvesting plankton, characteristic mouthparts, fluttering underside gill slits and sheer grace makes it a feast for the eyes. Certainly a privilege to witness and I think Ellie really understood that too.
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ROB
non-member comment
looks fantastic
Hi Guys, really enjoying reading your blog. It's 5:30am here just having coffee before heading to the golf course. Fiji looks truly fantastic, the ocean looks so tempting even I fancy a swim looking at it! Keep up the good blogging.