The first shark appears seconds into our descent. It’s just a lemon shark but, to my 15-year-old daughter, Ella Lin, who started the trip with six logged dives and has only seen one (sleeping nurse) shark in Key Largo, Florida, it’s enough for her to grip my hand even tighter as I point it out. As we descend, another lemon shark swims past, along with several tawny nurse sharks and two bull sharks that circle at a distance.

We follow the descent line to a thigh-high, human-made wall of rocks at 65 feet, and take our positions kneeling shoulder to shoulder with the other nine guests. PADI Master Instructor and Beqa Lagoon Resort general manager of diving Brandon Paige is by the feed box, already swarmed by clouds of butterflyfish and red-tooth triggerfish, with dozens more nurses, lemons and the occasional bull coming in for a sniff.

There’s clearly a shark hierarchy here at the Cathedral as Paige begins the feed—only the lemons and nurses approach the bait box. Paige doesn’t feed the bulls because, as we later learn, there are three other shark-dive operations in the area and the bulls travel back and forth. “The nurse and lemons mainly stick to one area, and we’re the only operator that gets the tigers daily at our site,” he says.

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After 15 minutes, a lone 12-foot tiger shark swims in. The divemasters—one lined up behind every two divers, each with a curved staff to gently fend off any overeager sharks excitedly tap their tanks. The tiger clearly knows the routine and makes several passes for tuna heads. I look at the buddies to my left: Ella Lin is engaged though clearly nervous; my wife, Li Yen, (around 80 logged dives) is taking it all in; and just-turned-18-year-old Chloe Mei (also six logged dives at the start of the trip) has wide eyes and a grin so huge it’s tough to keep her regulator in. Five minutes later and the divemasters bang their cylinders again, indicating it’s time to ascend.

Back on board the boat, my American seat neighbor, who’s returned twice already to Beqa specifically for the tiger shark dive, imparts some words of wisdom. “If you think that was great,” he says as he sloughs off his gear, “wait for the second dive. That’s when the real fun begins.”

With all due respect to Disneyland, Fiji is the happiest place on Earth, and Fijians the happiest, friendliest people.

World’s Happiest Place

For us, the fun began a few days earlier when we boarded the Fiji Airways A350 for the 10-hour flight to Nadi, on the west coast of Fiji’s largest island of Viti Levu. When the girls were younger, traveling as a family, especially on dive trips to the Cayman Islands and Bonaire, presented its own difficulties—making sure we had the right medications, gear that would fit our tiny humans and specialty food for our picky eater, all of which my wife and I carried between the two of us.

Now we’re traveling with two teenage girls, and as generous as Fiji Airways is with its baggage policy—a hefty 66 pounds each, good enough for dive gear, musical instruments to donate, and more—my teenagers need an outfit change for every meal, cameras, props for videos. (We overpacked, of course—by day three they’re wearing the same shorts and Beqa Lagoon Resort T-shirt.)

There’s a saying co-opted by many countries’ tourist boards: “Arrive as guests, leave as family.” But it’s never been more appropriate than here in Fiji. With all due respect to Disneyland, Fiji is the happiest place on Earth, and Fijians the happiest, friendliest people on the planet. You may say that’s hyperbole, but it’s even more noticeable in a world today when kindness is often remarkable.

Bula in Fijian means “life,” but in a practical sense it means “hello.” We hear it about 200 times a day, and it never gets tiring. Everyone we meet, from Fiji Airways staff in Los Angeles to a group of construction workers fitting tiles on a roof in 85-degree heat, greets us with a “bula!”—sometimes they say it twice for emphasis—and a massive grin. They ask us how we’re doing, and when I reply wananavu (“excellent”), their smiles triple in size.

All In The Family

Shark feeding may be controversial in the diving world, but it’s a way of life in Beqa. The sharks are family. “The people of Beqa Island believe two things,” says Paige. “One, that they can walk on fire, and two, that they are related to sharks.”

Fiji is chockablock with deities—there’s a chicken deity, an octopus deity and, of course, a shark deity. “This island is related to the shark deity through an ancient marriage to another island,” says Paige. He started the tiger shark dive for the resort in 2015, after introducing shark feeds in Fiji as far back as 1997 as a way of protecting this apex species. “We can’t protect something if everyone hates it,” he says. “If you give people a little bit of knowledge, they gain a better understanding.”

After an hour at the surface, we make our way back down and the scene has shifted. Gone are the nurse and lemon sharks; even the bulls are limited to the periphery, because there circling the box, before Paige has even set up, are three tigers, each bigger than the next.

The next 20 minutes are a chaotic ballet of fins and bodies as the sharks swim up to the box for a tuna head before circling behind and above us and heading back down again. The sharks aren’t pushy, though at one point Paige and two of the divemasters need to get out of the arena because there are eight or nine tigers, some reaching 15 feet—including one girthy female named “Big Momma”—and it’s all hands on deck to keep an eye on the guests.

Related Reading: Why You Shouldn’t Feed Lionfish to Sharks

At the surface, Paige comes over to ask how we liked it. Ella Lin and my wife are stunned into silence, Chloe Mei is buzzing. “Unbelievable,” she says through a massive smile. “That was incredible.”

The four of us revisit the Cathedral the next day with our guide, Tumasi. “I always think it’s good for guests to see the sharks with food in the water and without food,” says Paige. “Many people feel we can only attend the site with food and that the sharks will be aggressive if there isn’t any.”

“We can’t protect something if everyone hates it. If you give people a little bit of knowledge, they gain a better understanding.”

Chloe Mei and I head down with Tumasi, and after two minutes the nurse and lemon sharks that were milling about the feed box disappear into the ether when they realize there’s no food. Chloe Mei and I comb through the sand searching for teeth; she finds four in quick succession. Not knowing she’s already found a tiger tooth, Tumasi “inconspicuously” plants one on a large black boulder for her to find. Back aboard the boat, as Chloe Mei spreads the five teeth across her palm, Tumasi describes each—three tiger teeth, one bull and a lemon—before giving a tiger tooth he found to Ella Lin. The Cathedral continues to give even when there are no sharks.

While the Cathedral is certainly the most anticipated dive, it’s by no means the best. For an encore, Tumasi brings us to Circus Circus. Ella Lin and Li Yen missed out on the thrill of the day’s first dive—they were “sharked out”—but Circus Circus makes up for it. The site is dominated by two massive rocks covered in hard and soft corals and carpeted with every imaginable type and color of anemone and anemonefish. We spend a good amount of time at just 50 feet with an octopus, and I show my girls a beautiful lionfish. Tumasi takes us to the top of the bommies at 25 feet, where, hidden among the hard corals and anemones, he finds a pair of stonefish a few fin kicks away from a solitary yellow-green leaf scorpionfish, thousands of anthias, a tusked wrasse, Picasso triggerfish, a Moorish idol that takes up the entire screen of my GoPro, and a trio of electric clams much like the ones I first saw more than 25 years ago in Indonesia, when I was only slightly older than my girls are now.

Through Their Eyes

The greatest gift we can give our kids is time away from their devices. It’s easy at Beqa Lagoon Resort with two morning dives, an optional afternoon dive, and at least one or two free afternoon/evening activities—a “Fijian ceviche” cooking class, painting bark cloth, fire walkers—a day. Night is reserved for night dives on the house reef or just hanging out under the moon, stars and palm trees, letting the world pass us by.

Our foursome quickly gets into the groove and relishes the time spent together exploring the sites of Beqa as well as the island life. On dives I see common marine animals—anemonefish, lizardfish, dogface pufferfish, and trumpetfish—but the experience is made even cooler seeing them through my girls’ eyes.

We’re encountering life I’ve rarely (if ever) seen before too, including a lettuce-leaf nudibranch and a comet on the Beqa house reef. ET (“Extra Treasure”) has wide, magnificent swim-throughs with soft corals that line the ceiling and plenty of anemones on the top of the wall. My girls are thrilled with blue ribbon eels, fire dartfish, a friendly trumpetfish and wonderful hard corals at Sea Coral Fan. On one magnificent day we dive Galaxy, with its easy swim-throughs and massive sea fans, hawkfish, and endless fields of garden eels; we follow it with a dive on Three Sisters, where I point out two yellow whip coral shrimp, chromodoris nudibranchs, and curtains of fusiliers. Every dive takes me back to my own days as a dive guide, as I hold their hands in mine and point out every single fish I can find.

The island’s wrecks—which I knew nothing about—are divine too. There’s an amazing trawler at John’s Tunnel, which eventually leads to a shallow valley covered wall to floor in soft corals of every color imaginable. At Joe’s Best, we spend our bottom time on an old 120-foot fishing boat that’s remarkably intact. After watching the banded pipefish among the rusted beams, we turn our attention to the gray reef shark circling the boat, a procession of fusiliers, and a large school of barracuda in the open.

A Taste Of Fiji

When we’re not diving, we’re experiencing the island and Fiji’s culture. For us, the best of the afternoon activities is a visit to Rukua RaviRavi School. We arrive to see about 100 kids, ranging in age from 5 to 12, arranged in rows. They proceed to perform popular children’s songs, from “Humpty Dumpty” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to an amusing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.”

We step aside to donate guitars, harmonicas and a recorder to one of the teachers for the school’s music classes, as well as $300 my daughters raised recycling nearly 4,000 aluminum cans and plastic bottles in the months leading up to our trip. Then it’s time to take photos. My daughters join in the fun, first taking up positions in the middle of the boys’ group before being enveloped by the girls. I haven’t heard children’s laughter that loud and boisterous since my own girls were in elementary school. Chloe Mei and Ella Lin are laughing too.

On that final night in Beqa, we enjoy a fire-dancing performance from a professional troupe that tops anything we’ve already seen. On the grassy area in front of the resort’s restaurant, they spin their fire sticks at impossible speeds against a backdrop of the beach and ocean framed by palm trees, all under a dark sky sparkling with starry lights. It’s perfect.

Inspired, Chloe Mei and Ella Lin stay after to put on their own show set to Fijian music while my wife and I go back to the room to pack. The girls turn up one hour later sweaty and tired, but with huge grins on their faces. The staff stayed on to dance with them. “It didn’t even feel like they were staff here, they were our friends,” Chloe Mei says. For one night my girls feel like the center of the universe. Here in Beqa, they, like everyone who’s a guest, probably are.

Farewell To Family

There always comes a time on any trip when we’re ready to go home. We miss our dog Rusty, a local burger, or just get tired of living out of a suitcase. That feeling never comes at Beqa, as it hasn’t at any point during our trip in Fiji. Sadly, time never loses, and it’s time to go.

As our boat departs the beach for the mainland, the staff gather to sing a farewell Fijian song that sounds more upbeat than I feel. A hundred yards offshore I look back and they are still there, waving and singing. It’s truly the first time I’ve left a place and felt that pit in my stomach— that sadness I get when leaving my home and family behind. I turn to my girls, whose faces mirror my feelings, and force a smile. As if the universe feels our pain, it begins to rain for the first time all trip.

For one night my girls feel like the center of the universe. Here in Beqa, they, like everyone who’s a guest, probably are.

Just as there are moments as a parent when I know I’ve messed up, there are also those times I know I’ve done something right. It’s not the TikTok- or Instagram- worthy videos they post to share with friends; it’s the “core memories,” as they say, those experiences that will stay with them forever: building a snowman together in an April snowstorm in Southern California, the New Year’s Eve countdown at a Korean restaurant in Barcelona, a tired march around the walls of La Cité in Carcassonne, southern France.

On the long drive back to the airport, Chloe Mei, off to begin college in a few weeks, slides next to me and puts her head on my shoulders. “So, any core memories to bring to school and beyond?” I ask. “Yes,” she says. “Which ones—the shark dive, the fire walkers, Circus Circus, the kava ceremony?” “Everything,” she says, “the whole trip is acore memory.” “Wananavu,” I say, as I give her a massive hug and never let go.

Related Reading: 8 Best Places for Shark Encounters

Need To Know

OPERATOR Beqa Lagoon Resort (beqalagoonresort.com)

WHEN TO GO There are two distinct seasons: the wet “summer” (November through April), and the dry “winter” (May through October). Don’t be fooled though: Topside temperatures are consistently warm year-round.

CONDITIONS Water temperatures can reach 83 degrees in the wet/summer months, while in the winter it can get to the low to mid-70s. A 3 mm wetsuit is ideal for either season.

TRIP INFO Fiji is quite possibly the most accessible remote dive destination for North Americans. Here’s why: Fiji is 19 hours ahead of the West Coast of the United States. The daily Fiji Airways flight departs LAX at 11 p.m. and arrives in Nadi at 5:30 a.m. two days later. Sleep on the flight and you should have minimal jet lag. The drive from the airport to Pacific Harbor takes 2.5 hours, then it’s a 30-minute boat ride to Beqa Lagoon Resort, where you’ll be diving the house reef that afternoon.