Fiji Diving Report...

Author: Richard Salkin
Location: Fiji
Date: 5/27/2008 1:23:00 PM

Some concepts just elude me. Like the International Date Line. Sure, I can grasp its significance at some levels but still cant quite wrap my brain around it completely. If you look at a map, one thing is clear: the people who decided where the IDL should go wanted to give the island nation of Fiji a break. If not for a deliberate shift to the east and back again, parts of Fiji would be in the future while other parts would be in the past. Which still just blows my circuitry.

On June 27, with this conundrum weighing on my mind, I boarded a 56-minute flight from Jacksonville to Atlanta, the first leg on a 20,000-mile journey to Fiji and back...

Our grand arrival at Makogai

Along the way there would be whole operas to listen to, whole books to read, whole bowls of kava to drink and underwater colors I hadn't seen since my psychedelic college days. On June 30, on the other side of the planet, with one day unaccounted for, after crossing both the IDL and the equator, I joined 8 of my bestest dive buddies plus a new guy who would quickly take his place among a pantheon of cool dive friends. We met up at the Tradewinds hotel just outside the capital city of Suva.