Bula!
So, my fiancée and I just returned from an amazing week at Beqa Lagoon Resort (June 5-12). As others have said here in various threads about BLR and Fiji, the trip to get there is certainly not a short one – from Denver we flew to Los Angeles, spent a few hours grabbing dinner and then drinks in the Tabua Club lounge (more on that later) and then boarded the dreaded 10 hour Air Pacific flight to Nadi. I had been concerned about our carry-on weight on AP as they only allow 7kg and we both refuse to check our regs/bc’s/computers, but Amy had no issues with the airline folks and her Akona roller or my Dive Caddy backpack – in fact it didn’t seem like they were paying much attention to it, and I didn’t see the usual US domestic trip last-minute scramble to find overhead space on the plane – seemed like most people had smaller bags in general so it all worked out.
Economy for 10 hours when you can’t sleep on planes is interesting. On the bright side it gives you time to think (mostly about how to get away with murdering the girl kicking your seat from behind you for 10 hours or how to climb over the sleeping guy in the aisle seat to get to the bathroom), but the Air Pacific people were friendly, the food was decent and unlike reports I read on Trip Advisor the plane didn’t seem at all run down or dilapidated. One shocker to me was the lack of individual air conditioner thingies but I have a feeling that was the universe’s way of preparing me for a week in the South Pacific.
We arrived in Nadi around 5:30 am where we were met by a BLR representative (Isaac, I think?) who gathered the two of us and a BLR group from Phoenix that flew in on the same flight and ushered us into a van. Besides avoiding a more serious case of jet lag, one of the big advantages of flying in that early is that we got to see the sunrise as we drove from Nadi to Pacific Harbor – hard to put it into words but I couldn’t really come up with a better way to start a vacation then seeing that. Maybe people on the water are used to such things, but coming from a landlocked state it just added a welcome emphasis of how far we had come to it all and a magic sense of it all.
Halfway to Pacific Harbor we stopped for a bathroom break and the obligatory shopping stop at Jacks in Sigatoka. Beautiful wood work although the salespeople are definitely on the predatory side. One of the things we took advantage of is that they will pack up anything large you buy and have it waiting at the Jacks in the Nadi airport for you to take home as a checked-in bag, which saved me about $300 in shipping (we got our Christmas shopping and redecorating done. For the next 6 years.). Back on the bus and soon enough we were hopping on board one of BLR’s dive boats for the 45 minute trip to Beqa.
The water in front of the resort is too shallow even at high tide for the dive boats to approach the shore, so a few hundred feet out you moor, switch to a smaller boat and then wade in. We waded in to several members of the BLR staff singing to us as they escorted us into the main lodge. There we met Mark Propert and his wife, the managers of the resort and a couple I really cannot say enough about. From the start Mark really set a friendly, warm tone about how different what we were going to experience was and he couldn’t have been more accurate. After the brief welcoming and informational speech he let us know when lunch would be served and what bures we would be in and then we were off to see the lodging.
Wow. Granted I didn’t get to check out the non-oceanfront bures, but the oceanfront housing is amazing. We had a beautiful private garden with a hammock perfectly strung between two trees with an oceanfront (and sunset-aimed) view, cold dipping pool … just gorgeous accommodations. One of the things that stunned me is how beautiful the wooden sculptures in the room were. I think the biggest shock, though, was Mark explaining to us that while the bures have locks most people don’t use them. It’s little things like that (well, and the palm trees, amazing diving, lack of having to do dishes and 1,001 other things) that let you know you are definitely not home =) Sadly I’m so used to the lock n’ close mentality that I locked my fiancée and I out of the bure 3 times in the first two days.
The staff at the resort was extremely welcoming. By the third day the people working at the resort that we saw regularly would greet us by name, knew our bure number (granted, that may be mostly because I’m the idiot who locked himself out of the no-need-to-lock bure 3 times) and always had a genuine smile for us. I thought about it for a bit during the week there and realized that the difference was the familiar tone about it all. To explain that, I’ve stayed in plenty of places over the years that address you by name as a personalized service but they use the last name. Having a resort full of people calling me by my first name totally changes that dynamic from something subservient and formal to a nice friendly place … so instead of being served (which you are), you feel like a guest of people who are happy to have you there, if that makes sense. Mark mentioned it at the start but you really do feel special at BLR, like a member of the family, and I think it was the subtle things like that that create that atmosphere.
After an amazing lunch (fish kabobs if I remember right) we went to do a checkout shore dive. Before I forget, the food -- I thought every meal was pretty damned good. Each morning there's a lil' sheet with checkboxes for what you want for lunch and dinner, with vegetarian and two other choices for each meal. Don't forget to check off the soup and dessert in the dinner section! I love fine dining and would put BLR's food up against some pretty good places I go regularly -- the fillet one night in particular was shockingly good and would easily stand up against one from the top steakhouses I've been to.
Back to that checkout dive ... shore diving was mixed for us. Understand that I’m not complaining – I dive locally in cold water with 5-10’ vis on a good day and I’m always just happy to be blowing bubbles, but I had hoped for slightly better shore-diving. Visibility was maybe 30’ and most of the coral seemed pretty decimated – my understanding is that the recent cyclones have done a number on the reefs close to the resort, but regardless it wasn’t what we were expecting. Over a few days of shore dives in the afternoons however we found several diamonds in the rough while just exploring different directions. There’s a white post to the right of the dive boat moorings if you are looking from the shore in front of the dive shop that marks the corner of a large reef, and we found that aiming towards that put us over the top of some huge anemone beds full of clown fish. We also spotted a few baby lionfish, two rays and a snake that I believe was a banded krait, which was a first for me.
Something we discovered by accident while exploring shore diving at Beqa is that the surface swim back to shore over the reef is gorgeous – vivid colors, better vis and just a fun way to end a dive. Also we were informed that if you go left from the shore there are two resident sharks (white-tips, if I remember right), but we never explored that direction. Next time!
Sunday morning we woke up 2 hours early from the jet lag, dozed for a while and then headed to the main building for a wonderful breakfast (if you like pancakes or French toast you’re in for a treat) and then off to the boats. The way BLR works is that the dive shop has a room for each boat (three total) where your BC and mesh bag are stored. Weights are kept on the boat, which is important to know because while they bring your gear back to the dive shop each day to clean and hang up to dry they leave the weights on the boat unless you ask them not to (shore dives, afternoon boat dives, night dives). Divers meet up at 7:45 am (unless another site requires an earlier departure so you won’t miss lunch) on the shore, hop in a little boat to get to your assigned dive boat and your gear is already set up.
Dive briefings were fairly thorough and not too “hand-holdy.” Site map drawn on a whiteboard, profile, notable things common to the site, etc.The DM’s didn’t seem to mind if you wandered off but given the smaller size of most of Beqa’s highlight reel stuff to see they are pretty good at finding things – I’m usually pretty good at spotting things but with so many colors you get a bit bewildered, and left to my and my buddy’s own devices we would have missed quite a bit, including the blue ribbon eels we had hoped to see on this trip (and did, thanks to them being pointed out). So lesson learned, dive what you want but pay attention to what the DM's pointing out!
Speaking of spotting stuff there was a shark on virtually every dive we did. Being me I saw none of them (too focused on the camera and my immediate field of view), but worth mentioning so you know to keep your head on a swivel and can avoid the post-dive trauma of finding out you missed seeing the sharks AGAIN. Mutter.
I won’t go into specifics for each dive outside of a few highlights. Our first dive was at Fantasea and our boats’ consensus was that it was the best site (besides the shark dive, of course) all week. Gorgeous coral, about 60-70’ vis and more tiny critters than you could grasp in just one dive. We went back on Friday when picking a second morning site, in fact. We also dove two wreck sites, the second of which (at XYZ) had a huge eel poking out of a hole underneath the keel in the middle of the ship. What else … we dove a wreck at night which was something I’ve always wanted to do – although the night dive itself was fairly bland in terms of creatures (had a close encounter with a lobster, but other than that nothing too notable), the experience of exploring the outside of a sunken ship in the dark is just way too cool to describe.
Random list of critters we saw: lionfish, scorpionfish, garden eels, blue ribbon eels, tons of anemonefish, lobsters, shrimp, a ridiculous assortment of nudibranches of every size, shape and color, rays, sea snake, sharks (well not ME, of course, but I was informed by an increasingly gleeful boat of fellow divers through the week of having missed them), puffer fish. I’m sure I’m forgetting roughly 200 types of fish and other things but I’m not much for the naturalist diver bit, I just enjoy it all for what it is. I’d list off all of the amazing coral as well but after 30 minutes trying to identify the first one I pulled up in my pictures online suffice it to say there’s a lot and it’s laughably colorful.
One thing about BLR diving that I had not experienced before is how to truly appreciate a safety stop. Every site we went to had a mooring at the top of a coral head and the last minutes of the dive were spent seeing the most colorful and lively parts of most of the dives
Other sites we dove included Blue Wall (our boat requested it as it’s outside the usual sites BLR goes to, apparently), Gee’s Rock, Seven Sisters, Three Thieves, Beetle Cove, Carpet Cove and several others.
What else about the boat dives … all of the sites we dove off the boat were about a 30-40 minute boat ride from the resort. Oh – the resort is happy to set up additional dives for you with a few hours notice. I think Mark said the minimum was 6 people, but given that different groups came in at different points during the week (and all with different schedules) they were happy to accommodate getting you in on another group’s afternoon or night dive if you can’t find enough people to put together your own excursion. They are also willing to take you to pretty much anywhere you want to dive around there – our crew veto’ed a second trip to Seven Sisters (for whatever reason none of us liked that site on our boat) and did a wall dive (Blue Wall) on our last day and then Fantaseas, for example. I think we experienced at least some current on every dive but it was nothing too troubling and generally only on one side of the coral heads you invariably are circling at each of the sites.
The shark dive! So one of the big draws for that end of Fiji is the shark dive put on by Aqua-Trek. Every night leading up to our day for the shark dive we watched the DVD of that days dive with increasing anticipation of this, so on the day we went everyone was pretty excited. Pulling up to the site (named “The Bistro”
we were treated to a huge school of remoras swimming along the surface. For the shark dive you get the briefing, gather up on the surface and then drop to the site. Two dives, the first at 85ish feet and the second in the 60’s. As you get down there you see this massive horde of fish swirling around in front of you like a, well, a fish tornado? Hard to describe … it was like a giant bait ball in some ways, just this swirling vortex of several varities of fish -- you’d kind of have to see it (there are vids on YouTube) to appreciate it. When everyone’s in their spot and the people with the coolest-looking cameras are tucked away on the side the DM’s open up the garbage bins full of dead fish and it begins. Tons of nurse sharks, reef sharks, the fattest bull sharks I’ve ever seen and huge lemon sharks. There are three tiger sharks that apparently frequent the dives (one showed up for the previous day’s trip) and are a big draw at this site. We didn’t get to see one, unfortunately, but quite honestly it didn’t really matter.
This is supposed to be a high-anxiety adrenaline dive but I dunno – I suppose if you have a fear of sharks it would get the blood boiling, but between being huddled up on the rope line shoulder-to-shoulder with 20 or so other divers it just didn’t seem too scary to me. Definitely a cool experience but the number of people in the water was a bit much and kind of scary when we saw the lack of diving skills from people on the non-BLR boat that day. The DM’s kind of herd you to the boats and back and we watched one diver repeatedly drop back down to check something out, easily 3-4 times back to 80’ while we were hovering at the safety stop over the wreck at the mooring. We wouldn’t have even noticed the guy doing that except the DM for their boat had the most annoying underwater sound device I have ever heard – some sort of metal tube rattler device that, due to a lot of the other boats’ divers swimming like they had never had scuba gear on before, was being rattled constantly. Shika-shika-shika … grr.
So, my fiancée and I just returned from an amazing week at Beqa Lagoon Resort (June 5-12). As others have said here in various threads about BLR and Fiji, the trip to get there is certainly not a short one – from Denver we flew to Los Angeles, spent a few hours grabbing dinner and then drinks in the Tabua Club lounge (more on that later) and then boarded the dreaded 10 hour Air Pacific flight to Nadi. I had been concerned about our carry-on weight on AP as they only allow 7kg and we both refuse to check our regs/bc’s/computers, but Amy had no issues with the airline folks and her Akona roller or my Dive Caddy backpack – in fact it didn’t seem like they were paying much attention to it, and I didn’t see the usual US domestic trip last-minute scramble to find overhead space on the plane – seemed like most people had smaller bags in general so it all worked out.
Economy for 10 hours when you can’t sleep on planes is interesting. On the bright side it gives you time to think (mostly about how to get away with murdering the girl kicking your seat from behind you for 10 hours or how to climb over the sleeping guy in the aisle seat to get to the bathroom), but the Air Pacific people were friendly, the food was decent and unlike reports I read on Trip Advisor the plane didn’t seem at all run down or dilapidated. One shocker to me was the lack of individual air conditioner thingies but I have a feeling that was the universe’s way of preparing me for a week in the South Pacific.
We arrived in Nadi around 5:30 am where we were met by a BLR representative (Isaac, I think?) who gathered the two of us and a BLR group from Phoenix that flew in on the same flight and ushered us into a van. Besides avoiding a more serious case of jet lag, one of the big advantages of flying in that early is that we got to see the sunrise as we drove from Nadi to Pacific Harbor – hard to put it into words but I couldn’t really come up with a better way to start a vacation then seeing that. Maybe people on the water are used to such things, but coming from a landlocked state it just added a welcome emphasis of how far we had come to it all and a magic sense of it all.
Halfway to Pacific Harbor we stopped for a bathroom break and the obligatory shopping stop at Jacks in Sigatoka. Beautiful wood work although the salespeople are definitely on the predatory side. One of the things we took advantage of is that they will pack up anything large you buy and have it waiting at the Jacks in the Nadi airport for you to take home as a checked-in bag, which saved me about $300 in shipping (we got our Christmas shopping and redecorating done. For the next 6 years.). Back on the bus and soon enough we were hopping on board one of BLR’s dive boats for the 45 minute trip to Beqa.
The water in front of the resort is too shallow even at high tide for the dive boats to approach the shore, so a few hundred feet out you moor, switch to a smaller boat and then wade in. We waded in to several members of the BLR staff singing to us as they escorted us into the main lodge. There we met Mark Propert and his wife, the managers of the resort and a couple I really cannot say enough about. From the start Mark really set a friendly, warm tone about how different what we were going to experience was and he couldn’t have been more accurate. After the brief welcoming and informational speech he let us know when lunch would be served and what bures we would be in and then we were off to see the lodging.
Wow. Granted I didn’t get to check out the non-oceanfront bures, but the oceanfront housing is amazing. We had a beautiful private garden with a hammock perfectly strung between two trees with an oceanfront (and sunset-aimed) view, cold dipping pool … just gorgeous accommodations. One of the things that stunned me is how beautiful the wooden sculptures in the room were. I think the biggest shock, though, was Mark explaining to us that while the bures have locks most people don’t use them. It’s little things like that (well, and the palm trees, amazing diving, lack of having to do dishes and 1,001 other things) that let you know you are definitely not home =) Sadly I’m so used to the lock n’ close mentality that I locked my fiancée and I out of the bure 3 times in the first two days.
The staff at the resort was extremely welcoming. By the third day the people working at the resort that we saw regularly would greet us by name, knew our bure number (granted, that may be mostly because I’m the idiot who locked himself out of the no-need-to-lock bure 3 times) and always had a genuine smile for us. I thought about it for a bit during the week there and realized that the difference was the familiar tone about it all. To explain that, I’ve stayed in plenty of places over the years that address you by name as a personalized service but they use the last name. Having a resort full of people calling me by my first name totally changes that dynamic from something subservient and formal to a nice friendly place … so instead of being served (which you are), you feel like a guest of people who are happy to have you there, if that makes sense. Mark mentioned it at the start but you really do feel special at BLR, like a member of the family, and I think it was the subtle things like that that create that atmosphere.
After an amazing lunch (fish kabobs if I remember right) we went to do a checkout shore dive. Before I forget, the food -- I thought every meal was pretty damned good. Each morning there's a lil' sheet with checkboxes for what you want for lunch and dinner, with vegetarian and two other choices for each meal. Don't forget to check off the soup and dessert in the dinner section! I love fine dining and would put BLR's food up against some pretty good places I go regularly -- the fillet one night in particular was shockingly good and would easily stand up against one from the top steakhouses I've been to.
Back to that checkout dive ... shore diving was mixed for us. Understand that I’m not complaining – I dive locally in cold water with 5-10’ vis on a good day and I’m always just happy to be blowing bubbles, but I had hoped for slightly better shore-diving. Visibility was maybe 30’ and most of the coral seemed pretty decimated – my understanding is that the recent cyclones have done a number on the reefs close to the resort, but regardless it wasn’t what we were expecting. Over a few days of shore dives in the afternoons however we found several diamonds in the rough while just exploring different directions. There’s a white post to the right of the dive boat moorings if you are looking from the shore in front of the dive shop that marks the corner of a large reef, and we found that aiming towards that put us over the top of some huge anemone beds full of clown fish. We also spotted a few baby lionfish, two rays and a snake that I believe was a banded krait, which was a first for me.
Something we discovered by accident while exploring shore diving at Beqa is that the surface swim back to shore over the reef is gorgeous – vivid colors, better vis and just a fun way to end a dive. Also we were informed that if you go left from the shore there are two resident sharks (white-tips, if I remember right), but we never explored that direction. Next time!
Sunday morning we woke up 2 hours early from the jet lag, dozed for a while and then headed to the main building for a wonderful breakfast (if you like pancakes or French toast you’re in for a treat) and then off to the boats. The way BLR works is that the dive shop has a room for each boat (three total) where your BC and mesh bag are stored. Weights are kept on the boat, which is important to know because while they bring your gear back to the dive shop each day to clean and hang up to dry they leave the weights on the boat unless you ask them not to (shore dives, afternoon boat dives, night dives). Divers meet up at 7:45 am (unless another site requires an earlier departure so you won’t miss lunch) on the shore, hop in a little boat to get to your assigned dive boat and your gear is already set up.
Dive briefings were fairly thorough and not too “hand-holdy.” Site map drawn on a whiteboard, profile, notable things common to the site, etc.The DM’s didn’t seem to mind if you wandered off but given the smaller size of most of Beqa’s highlight reel stuff to see they are pretty good at finding things – I’m usually pretty good at spotting things but with so many colors you get a bit bewildered, and left to my and my buddy’s own devices we would have missed quite a bit, including the blue ribbon eels we had hoped to see on this trip (and did, thanks to them being pointed out). So lesson learned, dive what you want but pay attention to what the DM's pointing out!
Speaking of spotting stuff there was a shark on virtually every dive we did. Being me I saw none of them (too focused on the camera and my immediate field of view), but worth mentioning so you know to keep your head on a swivel and can avoid the post-dive trauma of finding out you missed seeing the sharks AGAIN. Mutter.
I won’t go into specifics for each dive outside of a few highlights. Our first dive was at Fantasea and our boats’ consensus was that it was the best site (besides the shark dive, of course) all week. Gorgeous coral, about 60-70’ vis and more tiny critters than you could grasp in just one dive. We went back on Friday when picking a second morning site, in fact. We also dove two wreck sites, the second of which (at XYZ) had a huge eel poking out of a hole underneath the keel in the middle of the ship. What else … we dove a wreck at night which was something I’ve always wanted to do – although the night dive itself was fairly bland in terms of creatures (had a close encounter with a lobster, but other than that nothing too notable), the experience of exploring the outside of a sunken ship in the dark is just way too cool to describe.
Random list of critters we saw: lionfish, scorpionfish, garden eels, blue ribbon eels, tons of anemonefish, lobsters, shrimp, a ridiculous assortment of nudibranches of every size, shape and color, rays, sea snake, sharks (well not ME, of course, but I was informed by an increasingly gleeful boat of fellow divers through the week of having missed them), puffer fish. I’m sure I’m forgetting roughly 200 types of fish and other things but I’m not much for the naturalist diver bit, I just enjoy it all for what it is. I’d list off all of the amazing coral as well but after 30 minutes trying to identify the first one I pulled up in my pictures online suffice it to say there’s a lot and it’s laughably colorful.
One thing about BLR diving that I had not experienced before is how to truly appreciate a safety stop. Every site we went to had a mooring at the top of a coral head and the last minutes of the dive were spent seeing the most colorful and lively parts of most of the dives
Other sites we dove included Blue Wall (our boat requested it as it’s outside the usual sites BLR goes to, apparently), Gee’s Rock, Seven Sisters, Three Thieves, Beetle Cove, Carpet Cove and several others.
What else about the boat dives … all of the sites we dove off the boat were about a 30-40 minute boat ride from the resort. Oh – the resort is happy to set up additional dives for you with a few hours notice. I think Mark said the minimum was 6 people, but given that different groups came in at different points during the week (and all with different schedules) they were happy to accommodate getting you in on another group’s afternoon or night dive if you can’t find enough people to put together your own excursion. They are also willing to take you to pretty much anywhere you want to dive around there – our crew veto’ed a second trip to Seven Sisters (for whatever reason none of us liked that site on our boat) and did a wall dive (Blue Wall) on our last day and then Fantaseas, for example. I think we experienced at least some current on every dive but it was nothing too troubling and generally only on one side of the coral heads you invariably are circling at each of the sites.
The shark dive! So one of the big draws for that end of Fiji is the shark dive put on by Aqua-Trek. Every night leading up to our day for the shark dive we watched the DVD of that days dive with increasing anticipation of this, so on the day we went everyone was pretty excited. Pulling up to the site (named “The Bistro”
we were treated to a huge school of remoras swimming along the surface. For the shark dive you get the briefing, gather up on the surface and then drop to the site. Two dives, the first at 85ish feet and the second in the 60’s. As you get down there you see this massive horde of fish swirling around in front of you like a, well, a fish tornado? Hard to describe … it was like a giant bait ball in some ways, just this swirling vortex of several varities of fish -- you’d kind of have to see it (there are vids on YouTube) to appreciate it. When everyone’s in their spot and the people with the coolest-looking cameras are tucked away on the side the DM’s open up the garbage bins full of dead fish and it begins. Tons of nurse sharks, reef sharks, the fattest bull sharks I’ve ever seen and huge lemon sharks. There are three tiger sharks that apparently frequent the dives (one showed up for the previous day’s trip) and are a big draw at this site. We didn’t get to see one, unfortunately, but quite honestly it didn’t really matter. This is supposed to be a high-anxiety adrenaline dive but I dunno – I suppose if you have a fear of sharks it would get the blood boiling, but between being huddled up on the rope line shoulder-to-shoulder with 20 or so other divers it just didn’t seem too scary to me. Definitely a cool experience but the number of people in the water was a bit much and kind of scary when we saw the lack of diving skills from people on the non-BLR boat that day. The DM’s kind of herd you to the boats and back and we watched one diver repeatedly drop back down to check something out, easily 3-4 times back to 80’ while we were hovering at the safety stop over the wreck at the mooring. We wouldn’t have even noticed the guy doing that except the DM for their boat had the most annoying underwater sound device I have ever heard – some sort of metal tube rattler device that, due to a lot of the other boats’ divers swimming like they had never had scuba gear on before, was being rattled constantly. Shika-shika-shika … grr.
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