Despite reading, planning and briefing, cruising in strange lands still entails a fair measure of winging it, the unexpected inevitable. Heading to our first real Fijian village, we left Savusavu all geared up for sevusevu only to be bustedbusted. But often, as providence would have it: When a hatch closes, a port opens. At Viani Bay, rather than our anticipated first ever kava buzz - thanks to a character named Jack - it was "reefer madness" instead. Allow me to explain.

Late afternoon on my birthday we dropped anchor in Viani Bay. We were tired from an all day sail and sweaty from this heavy, humid air, but nonetheless - as local custom and protocol requires - we suited up in our sulus, grabbed our kava parcel and precariously headed towards what looked like the village to partake in sevusevu with the chief and request permission to use their locally "owned" (iqoliqoli) waters. Beaching the dinghy, all four of us hiked up our skirts (hilarious!), climbed out as daintily as possible and made our way towards a clump of schoolchildren playing in a wide open field. We must have been quite a apparition, vulagi (visitors) all duded-up traipsing through the scruffy brush. The pre-teens, with their universal indifference, pretty much ignored us, but we naively believed the mom in the adjacent shack who told us that we needed to go to the next village to find the chief. We pulled up anchor, repositioned in the next cove and again went ashore, once again without finding a chief. With our intel failing us despite our earnest effort, we found ourselves all dressed up with nowhere to go. Kava was apparently not in the cards for my birthday.

With sundown upon us, we returned to the boat, dressed down and popped some beers. As the guys readied to fix me a birthday dinner, we spotted a lone figure paddling his panga from the shore to greet us. We had heard we should seek out a guide named Jack in these parts and here he was introducing himself. Jack Fisher is a jovial, bulky, part-Fijian man whose pudgy, ruddy face and undersized sunglasses are barely contained under his broad-brimmed, chin-strapped fisherman's hat. In his fast rambling, mumbled English - which makes him a bit hard to understand - he explained that in this "chiefless" part of Viani Bay, he serves as overseer and manager and has permission to bring us to the fringing reefs. We made arrangements to rendezvous with him the following day for a snorkel and dive on Rainbow Reef. The next morning, Jack - punctual and bearing an overflowing bowl of bananas and papayas - boarded Andiamo and gave David instructions on where to drop our hook just off the reef. We squeezed into our wetsuits, slipped into the water, and swam in the direction where Jack told us - with his favorite expression - to "check it out".

I was utterly blown away! It was so unexpected and exceptional to be snorkeling and to find it was NOT about the fish. The underwater structure was a marine metropolis. Thirty-foot bommies (coral columns) of multi-level, multi-faceted and multi-hued formations. Brain coral studded with "push pin" dots of assorted species: colored speckles punched into the beige base. Broad flat grainy, mushroom fans, colossal branched stag horn coral, piercing fire coral, vibrant blood red crown-of-thorn, and the unique wavy bunches of white SOFT coral. This is the diverse, varied soft/hard, light/dark, high/low dimensional effect landscape architects aspire to construct. And the colors: OMG. If I had been told that an artist with her spray-paint palette had passed through minutes before it would have been totally plausible. I effortlessly floated immersed and mesmerized by the astounding beauty as if encircling a Great Master's work of art - for I was. The complete spectrum of the color wheel sat before me illuminated by the overhead light. Blues: turquoise, periwinkle, cobalt. Greens: lemon-lime, forest and mustard - all side by side. Purples: mauve, plum, rose, lilac and violet. And it wasn't even that sunny! For their part, the fish added a colorful confetti dynamism to the aquatic backdrop. Reallyreally, you had to be there. Rainbow Reef - and then on subsequent days out with Jack - Fish Factory and Cabbage Patch (so named for the coral that looks just like cabbage) - provided some of the best snorkeling I have ever experienced. Utter reefer madness.

As the only boat in Viani Bay, we had Jack to ourselves as our go-to guy for four activity-filled days. Unlike the pricey dive boat operations, Jack (with no boat expenses) was an unbelievable bargain: ours for the equivalent of $20 US, a sandwich and a couple bottles of water per day. When David and I would head back to the big boat for a break from snorkeling, we could really relax knowing Jack was staged in the dinghy feet from the Eric-Rob spearing duo. The guys stayed in the water for hours and each day came back with a prize: dogtooth tuna, grouper ("cod") and kingfish ("walu"). Jack was very appreciative when they gifted the grouper to him as well as the dogfish carcass - head and all - which he brought home to Sofi - his fifth "wife" - for fish stew. {As Jack enjoyed his favorite end of the day treat - David's homemade ice cold Coke - we asked, "Why so many wives, Jack? "..."Oh, the ladies find this life hard; they like shopping and roads". Amen to that!}

Jack also served as our escort on a day trip over to Taveuni, The Garden Island, famous for the Bouma National Heritage Park and Tavora Waterfalls. This time Jack asked if Sofi could come along for the sail to pay a visit to her granddaughter - and presumably to get her fix of shopping and roads. Once ashore in the main village of Somosomo (nojokenojoke), Sofi went her own way, Jack waited at the boat ramp guarding the dinghy against opportunistic, nefarious types and we hopped in a cab with our Indian driver, Kamel, for our drive out to the park. Kamel's cab - like all we had seen in Fiji - featured seats that were completely encased in clear vinyl; despite wide-open windows, we instantly stuck to the seats. Unaccustomed to the speed of car travel and further disoriented driving on the British-influenced left, we reached for our seatbelts - as implored by the "Fasten Your Seatbelts" sign glued to the rear of the passenger headrest - but found them useless, the buckles apparently hidden, trapped and sealed beneath the thick plastic. Our bumpy 50-miunte drive over predominately unpaved roads took us by open ocean vistas, verdant slopes of coconut palms and pineapple groves, a single, neat pre-fab dormitory supplied by the Chinese for their workers building the hydroelectric facility, and dozens of small, ragged, impoverished villages.

At the park, we paid the admission fee and reached the first beautiful waterfall after a short walk on the tree-lined path. As David and I enjoyed the cascade from the bridge, Eric and Rob - boys being boys - climbed up to the ledge under the fall and appeared to us as mere dots in the distance. We continued on, skipping the second fall and choosing the fork to the third and final waterfall. Our hike, initially over groomed, crushed coral, became increasingly difficult and degraded to a muddy base as we advanced, the final approach requiring a rope for balance and footing. Once in the basin of this architecturally lovely, triple-spillover, natural water feature, we chose not to swim but cooled off ever so slightly in the airborne spray while we wolfed down our squashed tuna wraps and limp granola bars. After this rigorous 2.5-hour hike, we were a fatigued and silent fare as Kamel drove us back into Somosomo, where we rounded up a sunburned Jack and a spent but satisfied Sofi. It took two trips in the dinghy to get the six of us, plus Sofi's two large cardboard parcels heavy with supplies, on board for our return sail. She slept the whole way back.

On the following morning we put the finishing touches on our guestbook entry for Jack, returned it to him and squared up our tab. He brought even more bananas and papayas as we reciprocally offered him some of our fresh baked banana-oatmeal-raisin muffins, an extra bag of flour and a special cellophane gift-wrapped soap for Sofi. We shared a genuine, mutual gratefulness for this opportunity to spend these four jam-packed days together. Viani Bay: I will fondly remember it as the Memories that Jack Built. Thankyouthankyou.