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| Tom Moody |
Tom Moody is a man who knows his own mind.
“I like islands, I like tropics, I like remote,”he says. These were the simple elements he sought when he left his wife and teenaged daughter behind in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for Fiji in the fall of 1982. After weeks of scouting he caught wind of the island of Namenalala, and hitched a ride on a fishing boat to check it out. About half an hour from the town of Savusavu on the island of Vanua Levu, he spotted Namenalala. It looked like a green dragon with its long tail and high spine, keeping a lazy eastward gaze.
Moody spent two hours scouting Namenalala’s 107 acres. He found steep hills, rocky shores, and a complete absence of freshwater. In short, there were reasons why people had left this place alone. Moody got back on the boat but Moody peered over the edge at the coral reefs down below as the driver started toward town. “Can we just stop here for a few minutes?” he asked. He affixed his snorkeling mask over his narrow hazel eyes and flopped over the side. With a big breath he dove down into a pink, green, and blue forest. He was met by a trove of soft corals, feather stars, and sea slugs; there was more to look at than he could possibly take in. By the time he surfaced, he knew that he had found what he was looking for. Little did he know then this Eden would one day become one of Fiji’s last remaining pristine reefs.
Moody was not a middle-aged man in the throes of a midlife crisis. He was not trying to escape from a suburban life gone dull. In fact, he had lived the island life before, on Pidertupo Village, a three-acre island in the San Blas archipelago off Panama’s Caribbean coast. He and his wife Joan first came to Pidertupo in 1966 at the end of a five-year quest to find an island they could call their own. He had loved and then lost this life, and was in Fiji to try to rebuild it.
Read full article here: SAGE – Leaving Paradise Behind
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