Fiji is great but…

Fiji is great but…

fantastic scenery in Fiji

When I moved to Hong Kong, I quickly learned all the benefits of living in a new country. There’s so much to explore, the people, work culture and food are different and you realize there was a lot you assumed was “human behavior” but it was really very local. You also realize there was so much you took for granted and it was more precious than you could have imagined.

But I only knew I was moving to Asia less than a month in advance and there was no time to build any expectations, it was all a bit of a rush. Now, the Fiji trip was a completely different story, we planned it around 9 months in advance, read reviews of the liveaboard, the dive sites, hotels and some of our friends even went on the exact same trip while we were sorting it out, so we knew exactly what to expect. Or so we thought.

Of course our parameters for comparison were our recent experiences and the Philippines are the place we visit the most – actually that’s the only country we had dived in 2014 before that trip. We really like going there because hospitality is great, food is delicious and the dives (ah, the dives!) are absolutely top notch.  One of our friends who recently went to Brunei ended her trip with a picture of a dry bag that read “It’s more fun in the Philippines”, their board of tourism logo. I didn’t doubt it for a minute.

So when we arrived in Fiji, I must say that my expectations were almost all wrong. I thought it was a top tourist destination with high end hotels and excellent service and I couldn’t have been more wrong. Hotels are run on a best effort basis, management can be considered well-intentioned-amateur at best. Service is laughable; employees behave like everyone is 14 years old and working for their parents. Common sense is a rare asset and although their cuisine is tasty, finding someone who cooks well seems challenging. None of that translates into discounts on prices vis-à-vis their neighbors, though: hotels and restaurants are quite expensive. The only reason to explain that is their beautiful natural landscape and relative scarcity of rooms and tables.

 

The liveaboard, on the other hand, was the best run operation we have experienced so far. The Fiji Siren is better than their sister operation in Komodo by more than a comfortable margin. The dive director was great, the crew was impressive (where are these guys on land?) and we really felt like we were on holiday, they really made sure we were taken care of. The food was delicious (and I mean, can’t anybody cook like that on land?)  and the dives were really well organized (the dives we did from the land-based operations were a mess). There must be a connection between Fijian success and ships that some anthropologist is yet to explain.

This was a great crew, absolutely the best!

The highlights for diving were Gao, more specifically the Ningali Passage;  Grand Central Station in Namena and Beqa Lagoon (the latter was done from a resort). None of them had great visibility – we were told there was a coral spawn just a few weeks prior to our arrival and the seas were a bit rough – so while that indeed made taking the photos a bit more difficult, it didn’t compromise the fun.

And neither did the poor hotel management, or the mess that were the land-based diving operations, or the slow, borderline rude service in the restaurants, or the fact that logistics are complicated, everybody is late and Fijian time is different (if they say something starts at 9, it really starts at 10). Fiji has something quite unique, a lot of exclusive marine life, quite untouched, abundant nature. But I think they are pushing their luck as far as they can.

You see, I am from an Emerging market and I know value creation and building for posterity from just taking advantage of a natural advantage. The Philippines have yet to develop their infrastructure, but they have a strong, well-developed, well-trained hospitality industry. Indonesia, in all its diversity, has created clusters of tourism (Bali being the most notorious) with world-class service. These things last, they are an asset. Fijians rely solely on their blessings.

In the end, Fiji was really a lot of fun – so much so that it might justify making a dry bag saying “It’s even more fun in Fiji” to poke fun at the Philippines. But that’s certainly not because of the Fijians.