It’s as though the land is drinking the ocean. The tide is receding so fast that water pours off the reef, splashing over the backs of turtles and the passing fin of a shark. In just a couple of hours, around 400 square kilometres of reef will be exposed.
Sir David Attenborough has called Montgomery Reef “one of the greatest natural wonders of the world”, and here, in a Zodiac in a channel that splits the reef, it’s like watching a submarine the size of a mini-continent surfacing from the Indian Ocean.
When the setting is the star of the movie, that’s a locale worth visiting. Turtle Island, a private luxury resort island in Fiji’s Yasawa chain of islands, is just such a place.
It is the location for one of the most recognised tropical island films, Blue Lagoon, released in 1980 and starring Brooke Shields, Christopher Atkins and the late great Leo McKern , and an imagined nirvana for the stressed and overwhelmed taken with the notion of a Robinson Crusoe life, away from care and woe.
As I zip, in fact, as I zipline through the canopy of a Phuket jungle an old ditty comes to mind, “He floats through the air with the greatest of ease, this daring young man on the flying trapeze.”
I’m neither young nor daring but am absolutely moving through the air with great ease, if not speed, flashing along a cable strung between two ancient ironwood trees. The apparatus that allows this – a pulley attached to both the cable and a harness I’m wearing – used to be called a “flying fox” but in recent times the adrenaline thrills industry has sexed-up its name to “zipline”.
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