Fiji's Future | Part 2

Ecotourism is on the rise in Fiji

By Marc Ethier and Lisa Archer
For Friends of the Earth

Continued from Part 1

A maxim for Fiji, the largest archipelago in the Central Pacific, might go something like this: As the resorts go, so do the villages. Tourism isn't just the top industry in the Yasawas, it's the only game in town. Most resorts take 90 percent or more of their staff from among the locals. In places like Naviti and Nacula islands, besides fishing, there simply aren't any opportunities for villagers to earn a living, and feed their families.

So it's in everyone's interest to make these resorts money-making enterprises -- of course -- but also enterprises that will last. Several practices make Manta Ray, a two-year-old accommodation on Naviti owned and managed by Australian Ryan Irvine (see video), stand out among the competition. Most of the resort's water is taken from desalinated ocean water. No air conditioning is used, and fans are used only sparingly. The privies and private bures use only composting toilets, and strong efforts are made to educate visitors and protect the reefs and marine life under Manta Ray's purview.



These practices have made Manta Ray a model for the University of the South Pacific, in Suva, to show how to run a resort. "We've built it to a level where it's probably one of the top environmental resorts in Fiji right now, and we're still going, we haven't finished yet," Irvine says. "We don't have water, so we had to think of other means of getting water and treating waste. And we've got a recycling center, and we've gotten the local people here to get involved with that."

Manta Ray is still behind the times in one aspect: it uses diesel fuel for electricity. According to Irvine, there are no plans to switch to solar. He says costs are prohibitive.

Yet at Oarsman's Bay, in the far north of the Yasawa chain, solar power is used for the showers, whose heat is a considerable portion of the resort's demands. Alison Bone (see video), who manages Oarsman's under an agreement with its financier, Richard Evanson (owner of nearby Turtle Island), says that's just one way in which Oarsman's looks to the long-term benefits of Nacula's natives. "It's all about trying to keep the money in the community, which is what's happening with a lot of the resorts out here in the Yasawas: They are community-owned, community-run, so the community benefits."



The community always benefits when its environment is healthy. Recognizing the importance of the coral reef to the way of life in and around Oarsman's Bay, the island's chief recently placed a Tabu (pronounced "tambu") on the bay, including all the sea life and the water itself, forbidding any kind of fishing or the desecration in any way of the biota. He came to understand, Bone says, that some of the islanders' traditional ways had to be changed in response to modern reality -- and that this change could in fact help, not harm, his people. "He saw that he needed to generate some income to improve the lives of his people, and to provide education for everybody, and the health of the bay was vital to that," Bone says. "He could have leased the land to Sheraton or Hilton and probably gotten millions of dollars for it, but the money would have gone straight out of the community. The development here, instead, has been small-scale, with a focus on sustainability. It's about trying to maintain a balance. Of course there is going to be an impact. ... We've started recycling. We've started composting. But it's hard out here, because people are slow to change."

Change is slow in Fiji, yet inexorably it comes. Everywhere, the change to a more sustainable economy is sweeping like an ocean wind. On Viti Levu, Fiji's main island, second-growth forests like Colo-i-Suva thrive just outside major metropolitan areas; the nearby Raintree Lodge has earned widespread acclaim as a destination hotspot. It lies next to an old water-filled quarry, offering canoes to paddle around the makeshift pond. All food is locally grown and harvested.

Back on Taveuni, accommodations like the Waimakare Camping Ground use only natural materials and take advantage of their setting along a mountain spring. Boasting a rock pool formed by runoff, Waimakare intentionally seeks fewer customers to avoid overburdening the land. It is owned by villages on the island's western side with familial ties to the people of Bouma, and serves as the potential base for a planned connecting route over the mountains to the territory of their brethren, one that will link to the Vidawa track. It may take a few years, but once completed such a path would serve as an additional source of income to the campgrounds and other minor tourist attractions now dotting the coast.

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Aisake Talemainakorovou, lead guide emeritus for the Vidawa Rainforest Hike, was part of an effort a couple years ago to establish that overland track. It proved too difficult, largely because cooperation between tribes could not be established. Aisake says things are different now, times have changed and he hopes that the cooperation of Taveuni's clans will soon make the track a reality.

He still gets around to where such a track might lead. On the days when he doesn't need to lean on a crutch -- the good days when his legs let him get around without pain -- Aisake still wields a mean machete. The Vidawa guides who have learned from him, and who have assumed maintenance of the trail and business that promise to be his legacy, see the marks of his coming and going and marvel at the old man who still ambles around the steep hills of Bouma. He isn't as able as he once was, they say, but there's little he can't do, and his faculties are not so bad that he can't still identify any birdcall over the murmur of wind in the treetops and the purl of running water, or spot the slightest flutter in the fronds that signifies the rare orange dove, or koki, Fijian parrot.

Aisake has grey hair now and a wizened countenance but his smile, as he relaxes in the shadow of the misty mountains towering over Bouma, is contagious. And his back is straight and proud.

Aisake knows success of the Vidawa Rainforest Hike will help safeguard the land he has traversed and loved all his life. He knows the business, which grows yearly, will be well run by local villagers when he is gone because they are all guides he has trained. He knows they will make every effort to follow his example and resist the pressure to sell the land, compromise the biota, mortgage the future for temporary profit. "We know now how to protect the trees and protect the land," he says.

"We have learned from our mistakes."

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