I was a Beqa Lagoon Resort a few weeks ago following a week at another resort on a different island--Paradise Taveuni. I would happily return for another visit to Paradise Taveuni; I would not return to BLR.
I dived in Beqa Lagoon (from the main island) 22 years ago. I was quite saddened by the amount of deterioration of the coral there. I went back to check my log book to make sure I wasn't imagining the difference. Back then I wrote about spiraling around the bommies, looking at great coral and reef fish all the way to the top. Now on many of them, you won't see any life to speak of until you get to the top 25 feet or so. At one site there was next to no life at all.
At BLR, I ran into two people who were longtime visitors there, going back to the 1990's. Both really liked it there, obviously, but both volunteered that it used to be a whole lot better. They said current ownership has let things slide. I think an example would be their response to an incident.
It rained pretty much every day we were there, and one evening I had to go back to my room at the start of dinner time. The place is spread out, and my room was about 200 yards away from the main area. It was raining, with low, dark clouds, and when I came to the place where I had to walk across a walkway over a long koi pond, I was concerned to see that the walkway lights were out. It was pitch dark. I could make my way across for a while because low palm trees on each side of the walkway meant there were palm fronds on each side at head level.
Then there were no palm fronds, and it was as dark as a cave. I knew the walkway went left, but I couldn't see a thing. There was no hand rail. There was a low rope along the side, and I reached for it for guidance. I stepped too close to the edge and fell in, draped over the rope with my right leg in the pond and my left leg twisted on the walkway. I managed to pull myself up to the deck using the rope, and I crawled on my hands and knees to the end of the walkway. My sandal broke in the fall, my left knee was mildly sprained, and I had an abrasion on the knee.
I returned to the main area using a longer path around the koi pond, and as soon as I told the rest of my group what happened, one of them went to the office and told the staff what had happened to me. We ate dinner, after which there was entertainment--fire dancers. (They were good.) Then the manager came to me to talk about the incident, and she walked with me back to my room, again using the long way around the koi pond. The next day the manager told me that after she left me at my room, she went to the koi pond to look, and she said that it was indeed pitch black, so she went to the maintenance people to do something about it. They said the rain must have tripped a breaker, and they flipped it back to put the lights on.
What's the point of that story? Their office staff was notified early in the evening that the lights over the koi pond were out, it was pitch black out, and a guest had fallen into the pond and been injured. Two hours later, absolutely nothing had been done about it. My experience at Paradise Taveuni convinces me that if we had had a similar situation there, things would have been entirely different. They would have showed that they cared.
