Last last last last weekend I took the beginner scuba course up at Safari Lodge. It was awesome beyond great!!! The weekend greatly surpassed my expectations, and those were already really high. There were 5 of us up there, all together. It was a beautiful awesome spot with great awesome people and superb diving. (One of the top two places in Fiji to dive)
Nananu-I-Ra island has the most healthy coral I have seen so far in Fiji, it’s colourful and awesome pleasing to the eye. My plan before I left Fiji was to get certified here, and while I’ve been here I decided that I wanted to do it somewhere where there was no pool and had awesome diving, so I could save money in the long run.
I was a bit nervous (ok, a lot nervous) about some of the skills I knew I had to do, like take my mask off with my eyes closed (contacts suck) and not scraping myself on the bottom. It all turned out okay, though! I did the course with two friends, Liz and Alden. Christine (from SFU) did her advanced course at the same time. They were all just as excited as I was! Kat was there as well, and you can read about her Safari Lodge adventures here.
The coolest things I saw were a big coral fan, a plethora of giant clams and huge schools of fish (mmm sardines). Everything else I (technically) have seen before while snorkelling (you can see A LOT from just snorkelling) but it was way more awesome cooler and a lot easier to do while diving.
The divemaster took down a camera with us so we have lots of awesome pictures.
I found diving very easy after the first two dives. It took me a while to figure out how many weights I needed and I was over-weighted the first 3 dives. I would go from floating at the top to rocketing down to the bottom, and vice versa. We decided that I have dense bones and Liz is actually a bird (hollow bones)!
A zillion pictures after the break….
three piece 
sideways fish