And so it begins...

January 29, 2005

OK, I'll start at the beginning, that seems logical.
The world is a very big place and getting from one side to the other is, quite literally, a pain in the a**. After 23 hours flying and mislaying January 28th somewhere over the Pacific Ocean I arrived, bleary eyed, in Fiji to be greeted at six in the morning by some fairly enthusiastic guitarists and shouts of BULA!
After a quick freshen up in a hotel, myself and 12 others headed off to the Mamanuca (pronounced Mamanutha) Islands which lie to the west of Viti Levu. Our expedition site, Raviniake, shares Qalito Island (also known as Castaway Island) with the, apparently, world famous Castaway Resort.
We arrived just in time for lunch, prepared every day (except Sundays) by a local woman, and happily chowed down on rice, dahl, noodles and bread ... blissfully ignorant of the fact that this would make up our lunch every day for the rest of our time at Raviniake.
After the overload of carbohydrates Richard, expedition leader, gave us a tour of our new home and quickly set the tone of the place by indulging in a little toilet poetry: If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down. This is not just the ramblings of a slightly disturbed man but a little rhyme to remind us of Raviniake toilet ettiquette.
I feel this may need some explanation. Qalito has no natural water source, meaning no fresh water for us to live off. This is bad. This means every few months water is shipped in on a barge and stored in huge tanks on site. Water conservation is therefore very important and we can't waste precious fresh water on trivial things like flushing toilets! Toilet flushing is therefore carried out with sea water and to prevent huge amounts of salt water collecting in the septic tanks is reserved only for special occasions ... like after taking a dump.
Indoor showers were also restricted to one a day lasting no more than 60 seconds but we had an outdoor rainwater pump we could use as often as we liked.
Next came the dangerous animals lecture warning us of the dangers of stone fish and banded sea snakes and an unexpected one, the Linkia levigata or blue starfish. Starfish are cute squishy things with lots of legs, they can't be dangerous - right? Wrong - relieving yourself in the water near one causes it to release poisonous barbs.
Continuing along the theme of throwing us trembling newbies in at the deep end we were tossed out to sea (in the rain I might add) and made to swim and tread water for 10 minutes for our PADI Open Water course.
Utterly shattered we were then left to enjoy the Saturday night festivities, minus the alcohol though as we would be diving first thing the following morning.
And so it began...