The Modern Nomads

We began our travels on Fiji’s main island at the Volivoli Beach and Dive Resort. Located on the northernmost tip of Viti Levu, this family run dive resort was our home for seven days.

After landing in Nadi, we were greeted by our driver and got packed up to head to the resort. I will note that you will have a two-and-a-half hour drive through Fiji to get to Volivoli. I was super excited to get there so this drive seemed to take forever, especially after getting directly off a flight, but I can say that the drive was beautiful. We crossed through many rural Fijian villages, farmland with fields of sugarcane for as far as you could see, as well as picturesque coastline views. Oh, and let’s not forget the occasional random cow grazing on the side of the road.

The closer we got to the resort the more we realized how remote we were. This became very apparent when our driver asked us if we needed to stop for anything as that would be our last place to do so and that we had another hour or so left! We finally arrived and it exceeded every expectation we had!

The Resort Life

With over 32 rooms, each with magnificent ocean views, Volivoli is the definition of tropical paradise. Our villa was perched at the top of the hillside with garden like pathways leading to the beach area that had a sunset bar and the restaurant and pool with swim up bar. Like our own little private cottage, we had a full sitting area, mini kitchen and front porch with lounge chairs to enjoy the ocean and mountain views.

We had all meals included in our package at the resort and we were fed like kings and queens. The food was beautifully prepared and served in abundance. By the end of the week we had to almost share the meals we were so full! But kudos to the chef! Everything out of the kitchen was magnificent!

The resort offers activities outside of scuba diving but we focused on diving for this trip so I won’t be able to give much insight on the other activities offered. But with that being said, there were guests that enjoyed their time at Volivoli that did not dive.

The Best Sunset’s you will ever see!

I will just let this picture speak for itself!

Eat, Sleep, Dive, Repeat

Our stay at Volivoli was focused on diving and that is what we did, we dove all 6 days we were there! And there is nothing better than diving at a “Dive Resort”. Once we got our gear to the dive shop they handled everything else. Every day our gear was already on the boat ready to go. It doesn’t get much better than that!

We weren’t sure what to expect on our dives in regards to marine life but there was plenty of beautiful coral and lots of fish life! Our favorite or most memorable part of diving in this area was geographical terrain on the dive sites, it was absolutely gorgeous! The only thing lacking was an abundance of sea creatures or big stuff. Not that we didn’t see any, just mentioning as that was not the highlight of the diving here for us. But that is one of the joys of diving, every place in the world is a little different from the last.

The area we did most our dives from was referred to as the Marine Park. This area was about a 45 minute boat ride from the resort and majority of our dives had a fairly decent current or were simply a drift dive. The nice thing about drift dives is you can just sit back and enjoy the dive but there were a couple of that were definitely tougher dives than the rest. We had a pretty experienced group of divers on our boat so that wasn’t an issue for us but I could see where they may not have been as enjoyable for the un-experienced diver.

The boat captains, dive masters and additional crew were great. Extra kudos to Pola, he was our boat captain for the last few days and he was especially considerate to us ladies on board. He made sure we always had the best seat on the boat, and always seemed to take that extra step! He even took the time to drive us up to Bird Island because he knew I wanted to get some pictures of it.

This entire area, we learned, is now part of the Vatu-i-Ra Conservation Park which was established to protect the biodiversity of both its marine and terrestrial ecosystems. You can read a little more about that below. This area was also devastated by Tropical Cyclone Winston in 2016. But in all honesty, we wouldn’t have even know the dive sites we visited were affected as the reefs of Fiji’s are steadily rebounding.

Vatu-i-Ra Conservation Park

Vatu-i-Ra Conservation Park is located on the Fiji’s Suncoast between the two main islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu.The Vatu-i-Ra Conservation Park encompasses Vatu-i-Ra Island and over 100 km² of reefs, lagoons, terraces and pinnacles off the northern coast of Viti Levu. The Conservation Park was established to protect the remarkable biodiversity of both its marine and terrestrial ecosystems.

We love to see that efforts are being put into helping protect and preserve our marine life and oceans. We see this in so many of the places we travel. This is important not only for the tourism industry which is vital to so many developing countries like Fiji, but at a fundamental level, the health of marine life affects the nature of our planet. The ocean is the largest eco-system in the world and protecting its future will help protect a sustainable future for us all.