Waitavala Water Slides
"A twelve-year-old told me, with real concern in his voice, that I was going too slowly, and then demonstrated by hurling himself down the rock like it owed him money."
A natural rock waterslide on Taveuni where the local kids' favourite afternoon activity happens to be free, spectacular, and open to anyone brave enough to sit down.
Waitavala sits a short walk uphill from Waiyevo, Taveuni’s main settlement, and I found it almost by accident, following the sound of shrieking down a side track off the main road while I was actually looking for a place to buy a phone card. What’s there is a long, smooth channel of volcanic rock, worn glassy over God knows how many centuries by a stream that drops through a series of natural chutes into a succession of pools, and what the local kids do with it, on any given afternoon, is turn it into the best free waterpark on the island.
There’s no entry fee, no lifeguard, no sign beyond a faded one warning that you use it at your own risk, which is entirely accurate and exactly the point. I sat at the top pool for a while watching technique before attempting anything — the trick, it turns out, is to lie back with your arms crossed over your chest and let the water do the steering rather than trying to control your descent, which is precisely the instruction a kid named Eroni gave me, unprompted, after watching me flail down the smaller lower slide looking, by his account, “scared of the rock.”
The upper slide is considerably longer and faster than the lower one, dropping maybe fifteen metres over a stretch of rock polished to the texture of wet glass, and it took me three attempts and one badly scraped elbow before I managed the position Eroni had described. Lia, sensibly, filmed rather than participated, though by the end of the afternoon she’d been talked into the lower, gentler slide by a girl who couldn’t have been older than eight and who held her hand the entire way down as though she were the one in charge of Lia’s safety, which, functionally, she was.
What struck me most was how entirely unmonetized the whole scene was. No one was selling tickets, renting mats, or hovering with a camera for a fee. It was simply the neighbourhood swimming hole, and we happened to be allowed to use it too.
When to go: Best after a few days of rain, when the water flow is strongest and the slides run fastest — ask locally, as dry spells can leave the upper chute too shallow to be much fun. Go in the afternoon when local kids are usually there, both for the company and because they’ll show you the safest line down.