Here is a very nice review of Matava Island resort by Barbara Winters, a client of us who recently 
spend a week there:
I wanted to surprise my partner for his 40th holiday and decided onFiji. We met when we learnt scuba diving inHonduras 11 years ago, and he became an instructor and I a rescue diver since. Since just over a year we both work at Adreno Scuba Diving centre in Brisbane, but we hardly ever go diving ourselves. So it was about time we got back in the water!
Through the website of Diversion Dive Travel I found a very good package deal: eight days in Eco-Resort Matava, including daily dives with a PADI Green Star Awarded dive centre, all meals included and the second person would go for half price. The fact that we would go to an Eco-Resort, without mass tourism and no families with small kids, made this holiday perfect for us because we love travelling to places where it is still largely unspoiled and peaceful.
After a short flight to Fiji and another one to the small island of Kadavu, we were collected at the airport and brought to the other side of the island. The crew of Mad Dive Centre awaited us and entertained us during the 45 min trip to the resort. We were welcomed by more friendly people and shown our beautiful wooden ‘bure’ (hut). It was surrounded by rainforest and had the best view I’ve seen in my 20+ years of overseas travels! This was paradise!
Critter juntion
Matava is right on the doorstep of the Great Astrolabe Reef. This is the fourth largest barrier reef in the world. It offers colourful soft corals, warm and clear waters and many different dive sites, such as walls, passages to the outer reef, big drop-offs and drift dives in mild currents. There is only a handful of dive operators that go to the reef and you and when we did a shore dive on our first day at Critter Junction, just in front of the resort, we were the only two there. We saw many very colourful and cute looking baby fish and spent a good hour filming and photographing it all. These shore dives are included in the package by the way, which was great.
Outer reef
We had also booked 10 boat dives and most days we went to the outer reef, The Astrolabe Reef has many channels leading from extremely deep water into shallow lagoons and we visited these channels and on more windy days the lagoons. A beautiful dive is Naiqoro Passage, which was a drift dive along a massive coral wall.
We were lucky enough to see some of the finest the Astrolabe reef has to offer: reef sharks, moray eels, colourful angelfish, many different types of clownfish in waving anemones, a banded eel that behaves a lot like a sea snake, tiny nudibranch of only fingernail size, and even a comb jellyfish, flashing its tiny hairs in the sun as it moved past us during one safety stop. But best of all was the Manta encounter at Manta Reef. We saw them feeding, doing barrel rolls in order to get the plankton-filled water to flow through their gills. What an amazing sight and how lucky we were to witness this from up close. I was cheering underwater.
Perfect holiday
As regular backpackers, this was our most luxurious trip ever, but it was worth it: in all respects a holiday we can’t fault. Mainly the friendliness of the Fijians and the staff at Matava made it exceptional and we loved the traditional Kava ceremony they invited us to, and special Lovo feast they served. All other days we had a mix of Mexican, Indian, English and Italian-style food, and it just kept coming, which is amazing considering the remote location and the lack of electricity most of the day. They even made my partner and another guest a birthday cake!
We were also very pleased to see that Matava runs its own organic garden and has many fruit trees in between the bures. The fact that you can leave the resort and explore the island a bit, canoe around the nearby island or walk to the village and swim under a waterfall, makes this holiday all the more adventurous.
Bula!
Tags: Fiji
Some of you might remember when at the end of thee last millenium the first photos of pygmy seahorses appeared all over the dive magazines. It was almost as they discovered a new species. Did you know that the pygmy seahorse was already discovered in 1960!? Of course then there were not many underwater photographer around, the cameras were not so brilliant either and divers were rare.
Originally discovered in the 1960’s by the divers at the Aquarium of Noumea in New Caledonia, Bargibanti’s Pygmy Sea Horse (Hippocampus bargibanti) was described by the then Curator of Fishes at the Australian Museum Gilbert Whitley in 1970. It was just another scientific discovery and not much note was taken.
The first pygmy seahorses in Indonesia were found by the late Larry Smith, then manager of the 
