Natural Selection : Exploring tiny, ecologically intact islands in this South Pacific corner by kayak and on foot

Perhaps it was those smiling eyes--part Irish, part Fijian--or his heart-melting charm. But when Keni Madden whistled softly, I’ll be darned if the little hermit crabs we had just plucked from the beach didn’t pop right out of their shells to have a look.

Madden lives in a magical paradise and he knows it. I met him at his robin’s-egg-blue cottage perched on a hilltop on the Fijian island of Taveuni. We had a date to go kayaking for the day. After stacking the philosophy book he was reading onto a pile of British literature in his cottage, he grabbed some paddles from the porch and we were off.

While I surfed my kayak over rollers breaking across a reef, Madden paddled in to the local seaside Indian grocery to buy us a lunch of chapatis stuffed with spicy lentils. When he returned, we set off for Honeymoon Island, west of Taveuni.

The liquid turquoise beneath our boats was clear through 60 feet. A harmless blue and white banded sea snake floated by and flying fish took to the air ahead of our bows. All of this occurred as Madden regaled me with tales of his adventurous youth growing up on a tiny island just off Taveuni; of having to paddle in for groceries and the inevitable consequences of staying too late and being caught in the dark or in a storm.

After two hours we arrived at Honeymoon Island and had it to ourselves: a tiny horseshoe-shaped sliver with a thumbnail of white sand beach. We broke out the chapatis, and Madden cracked open fresh coconuts so we could sip the sweet milk inside.

In late afternoon we strapped on masks and fins and snorkeled a circle around the island, drifting above a rainbow panorama of purple lace sea fans, orange sponges and giant clams whose iridescent green mantles shimmered in the shards of sunlight probing the shallow reef. Tiny forests of pink anemones waved in the current as they sheltered families of striped orange clown fish. Hundreds of neon blue chromis flitted between the fingers of delicate coral mazes. As the gentle surge of the sea swayed me, I felt the tension of the outside world slip away. I was back in Taveuni after 14 years and almost nothing had changed.

*

The eight-seater prop plane that flew me in three days earlier had been packed to the ceiling with packages, crates of fruit and bags of flour. A rotund Englishman sweating profusely in his beige safari suit flopped into the seat beside me and peered about. “Good,” he concluded. “No chickens today.” One of those characters you always seem to run across in odd corners of the tropics, he told me that he left Boston on a round-the-world yacht trip eight years before, sailed as far as Fiji and never left.

It warmed my heart to see that Taveuni’s airstrip at Matei was still unpaved. The terminal remained two simple huts with corrugated iron roofs: one for Sunflower Airlines, the other for Air Fiji, the airline that chauffeured me in from Nadi International Airport on the main island of Viti Levu. I had flown northeast of Viti Levu to the third biggest in the Fijian island chain of 330; back in time, too, to Taveuni’s simple lifestyle.

I had come in search of a natural holiday in the tropics: hiking, bird-watching, kayaking, snorkeling, scuba diving and living in thatch-roofed bures (traditional Fijian cottages) in resorts where the power is turned off at night and on again in the morning. No TV or radio, no air-conditioning or e-mail, not a paved road in sight. We call it eco-tourism. Fijians call it life.

Taveuni is a 166-square-mile volcanic island so rugged that the main road can only partly encircle its oblong shape. The eastern side is steep and cliff-lined, with waterfalls tumbling out of the jungle and into the sea. It is covered with vast virgin rain forest stocked with creatures no longer found on other Fiji Islands because the mongoose, used to kill rats elsewhere, was never introduced here.

As a result, Taveuni has a huge repertoire of birds--all the species found in Fiji--including several, like the orange-breasted dove and a parrot the locals call the kula, that are not found anywhere else.

Joachim Kiess, owner of Maravu Plantation Resort on Taveuni, my first lodging of the trip, loads me into his Jeep to show me the bird life high in the jungle forest of Des Voeux Peak, one of the tallest in the islands. As we bump our way along the shoreline road that runs down the western edge of the island, Kiess, who is also a real estate broker in southern Germany, tells me how he, his wife, Angela, and their two children came to live half of the year in Taveuni.

“We were staying at Maravu while we looked for a vacation house on the island,” he said. When they learned, one day over lunch, that the resort was for sale they bought it. “Why not?” he laughs, with the sheer bliss of a man reborn in paradise. That was six months ago, and he now uses every excuse to explore his new home.

We pass a marker for the international dateline and the old Wairiki Catholic Mission. We wind slowly through the village of Somosomo, the island’s main town. It is a quaint collection of pastel clapboard shops, houses with ginger root drying on sheets of corrugated iron on the front lawn and the waterfront Cannibal Cafe. “We’d love to have you for dinner,” the sign out front announces.

Kiess’ Jeep makes it up the steep access road to within half a mile of the radio towers at the summit of Des Voeux Peak, and we scramble the rest of the way on a hill track of marble-like, reddish volcanic cinder. Mist swirls around us, cool relief from the humidity at sea level, and I hear owls hooting in the distance. When we stand very still for a few moments, a shrieking flock of bright green-and-yellow parrots with red chests flits through the trees.

From the 3,600-foot peak, we have a panoramic view of the surrounding islands and can just catch a glimpse of Lake Tagimaucia filling a volcanic crater 1,100 feet below, its waters partly obscured by rafts of floating vegetation. It is an arduous two-hour hike to the lake through dripping, waist-high jungle and the trail is often difficult to follow. What wasn’t hard to find were the legendary tagimaucia flowers, which grow in only two places in Fiji and flower only around Christmas, the time of my visit. And so I am privy to these rare floral hearts, tucked into the tangle of green rain forest, each split open to reveal a tumble of white tear blossoms. Despite numerous attempts, the flower has never successfully been replanted in any other location.

Maravu is a 54-acre plantation resort with 10 bures, many of them with delightful private outdoor showers surrounded by walls covered in bougainvillea. Elegantly decorated in wicker, the comfortable thatched cottages have modern conveniences but low-tech air-conditioning: lofty thatched ceilings keep rooms naturally cool as trade winds breeze through louvered windows.

The resort offers horseback riding and mountain biking through the forests. Angela Kiess takes me on a hike of the property, a working plantation that produces copra for coconut oil. She proudly shows off the herb garden and the coffee plants whose beans the family harvests, roasts and serves at breakfast. Dinner is on the open veranda.

*

It’s not only the lush landscape that makes Taveuni a favorite spot for hikers and campers, but the surrounding pristine water has made it a magnet for scuba divers from around the world. Between Taveuni and its neighboring island of Vanua Levu, four miles away, lie the Somosomo Straits, a narrow torrent that rushes back and forth with the coming and going of the tides. Sea animals thrive in the current’s rich environment, creating colorful displays rarely seen elsewhere.

Long and lean, Fijian Tyrone Valentine looks every bit the windsurf instructor he is, at the helm of the 40-foot catamaran the Lelewai 11, but his first love is being a dive master for Dive Taveuni Resort. Dive Taveuni received “Rodale Scuba Diving” magazine’s 1994 reader’s choice award as one of the top five dive resorts in the world and the magazine’s 1995 award as one of the top two in the Pacific. Valentine’s experience in this temperamental area is vast. In a glance at the tide tables, his watch, the direction of the boat flag and the water, he can tell exactly when and where to dive with minimal current.

Our first dive is to the famed Great White Wall underwater cliff. Descending to 60 feet, we continue down and emerge at 90 feet through a hole in a vertical wall that is covered as far as I can see with a swaying carpet of white, soft coral. It’s a snow-covered landscape turned on its side. On other dives there are caverns of purple soft coral, or grottoes of sunshine yellow, deep red, pink and peach.

Dive Taveuni Resort was started more than 20 years ago by a New Zealand couple, Ric and Do Cammick. Their dive mecca, perched on a cliff top, is a small, well-run establishment that serves excellent Indian, Fijian and continental meals on a patio overlooking the straits. Tea and homemade cookies were brought in the afternoon to my bure at this, the second lodging of my trip.

The Cammicks are crusaders about preserving the natural state of their adopted home, and they are spearheading a movement to get the underwater gardens of Somosomo Straits declared a marine park. They already have had great success with land preservation on Taveuni.

*

Riding with taxi driver Tomasi Lawakeli is like touring with royalty. He grins broadly and waves to a constant stream of schoolchildren identically clad in blue uniforms shouting, “Tomasi! Tomasi!” from the roadside, as his rusted Toyota passes by. Lawakeli is taking me to Bouma Falls, on the eastern side of the island near the end of the road. We check in with the park office and hike along a trail that will take us to the first of a series of waterfalls on the main route, through lush groves of banana trees, tree ferns, papaya trees and wild ginger blossoms in pink and white. We can hear Bouma Falls, a 75-foot cascade into a pool, long before we reach it on the 25-minute walk. I strip down to my bathing suit and swim in the cool waters.

To get even farther off the beaten track, I join a group of Fijians on the beach near Matei airport for the 15-minute boat trip to Matagi, a tiny island six miles off Taveuni, and my third, and last, resort stop. On Matagi there is just a single cluster of bures tucked into palms and jungle that rambles right down to a long strip of white sand. I rinse the sand off my feet in twin clamshells set at the door of my bure and tie on a sulu, a Fijian sarong. The traditional beating of the drum announces dinner and I follow ocean-side torches to the main bure. Kerosene lanterns have been hoisted high, their soft yellow light flickering across the woven cane ceiling.

A long leisurely affair that lasts well into the balmy night, dinner at the Matagi resort is stoked with good Australian wine and the kind of convivial conversation that flows with interesting dining companions that include mountaineering instructors from Alaska and a New Zealand opera singer. Also present are the resort owners, Noel and Flora Douglas, who have opened their 240-acre private island to 24 guests at a time.

The peace and quiet must have gone to my head because after dinner I do battle with a stringed monster swaying invitingly on the veranda, determined that the idyllic location should be savored from such a hammock. Finally settled, I listen to the soft hiss of sea on sand and think of Keni Madden’s favorite story:

“This man comes from America and tells me I should keep my kayaking and horseback-riding business open year-round, that I could make a lot of money from it,” relates the savvy Fijian who spends six months of the year in Fiji and the other six with his wife in San Francisco, where she runs a landscaping business. “I asked him, ‘Why would I do that?’ He answered, ‘So that you can get yourself a little spot and retire, of course.’ ” Madden laughs. “So that I could save enough money to buy a cottage by the beach on a tropical island and spend my days paddling a kayak and riding a horse. . . .”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK: Fiji Finds

Getting there: Qantas and Air Pacific fly nonstop from LAX to Nadi, Fiji; Air New Zealand flies direct, with one stop but no change of planes. Advance-purchase, round-trip fares start at $1,100. Air Fiji and Sunflower Airlines fly between Nadi and Taveuni. Round-trip fares start at $210.

Where to stay: Dive Taveuni, PA Matei, Taveuni, Fiji; tel. 011-679-880-441, fax 011-679-880-466. Rates: $160 per person double occupancy. There are only six bures, so book early.

Maravu Plantation Resort, PA Matei, Taveuni, Fiji; tel. 011-679-880-555, fax 011-679-880-600. A deluxe double bure is $150.

Matagi Island Resort, Box 83, Waiyevo, Taveuni, Fiji; tel. (800) 362-8244, fax (714) 379-8061. Beachfront bure rates, $175 per person for a deluxe double.

Diving: Keni Madden rents kayaks for a day or half a day for about $5 an hour. He also leads 4- to 10-day kayaking expeditions for Wilderness Travel. Rates vary, but a 10-day trip is about $2,300 per person for land costs only. Contact Wilderness Travel, 801 Allston Way, Berkeley, CA 94710; tel. (800) 368-2794.

For more information: Fiji Visitors Bureau, 5777 W. Century Blvd., Suite 220, Los Angeles 90045, (310) 568-1616; fax (310) 670-2318.

--M.P.