Taveuni's Great White Wall, and getting the tide right

Fiji is called the soft coral capital of the world, and the single most famous dive in the country is a vertical wall off the island of Taveuni called the Great White Wall. It is exactly what it sounds like: a sheer drop-off blanketed, top to bottom, in white soft coral.

The catch is that you cannot just turn up. The white corals only open and glow when the tide pushes current across the wall to feed them, so on the wrong day you make the whole dive and see grey. We came on Christmas morning and got lucky with the tide.

You reach the wall through a tunnel in the reef. You drop down and swim into the rock, into a dim swim-through packed with fish sheltering from the sun, and then the tunnel spits you out at depth onto the face of the wall, and there it is: white, endless, falling away below you into deep blue further than you can see. It genuinely looks like snow.

The same reef, the Rainbow Reef, has more than this one wall. After the white we drifted along ledges of orange and purple soft coral with clouds of fish over them, the colours Fiji is famous for. But it is the white wall you remember, the strangeness of a cliff face the colour of frost in warm tropical water.

If you dive and you are in Fiji, build a day around this one, and ask the dive shop to put you on the wall at the right tide. Time it well and it is one of the best dives in the world. Time it badly and you swim past the best thing in the ocean without ever seeing it bloom.