In contrast, Pacific Pearl resort is excellent -- great rooms, cheap unlimited internet, excellent food at the two in-house restaurants. The chefs put up fairly decent Fijian buffet (with excellent fresh Wahoo, and local salads including Kokoda, as well as other international fare (Italian, Indian).
We did two days of diving at Mana, with Aqua Trek at sites called Supermarket, Sand cay, Barrel Head and Image . At Beqa, we dived on three days with Beqa Adventure Divers. The diving in Mana is all reef dives off of boats, perhaps 10-15min from the resort. The reefs are mostly hard coral with the usual Pacific reef fish and the occasional reef shark. Nothing spectacular, and in my opinion, not close to what one gets in other places much easier to get to from HK. In Beqa, we did two days of shark dives and one day of wreck+reef dives. Shark dives here involve shark feeding -- there is a group of ~10 divers, two dive masters who do the feeding (Papa and Russi), and approx five more DMs weilding aluminum prods to maintain order if the sharks approach the divers aggressively. Divers stay more or less stationary during the feed sessions. These dives were definitely pretty interesting; we saw four species: Bull sharks, White tips reefs, black tip reefs, and grey reefs.
Despite Fiji's reputation as the soft coral capital of the world, you can only see soft coral in some parts -- there is mostly only hard coral at all sites in Mana and Beqa. Having done the trip, if we go again, we'll probably just spend all our time doing shark and reef/wreck dives in the Beqa region.
Below are the thumbs for some of the images from the trip; click on the thumb to see a bigger image in a new tab. All images were taken either with my Olympus E-PL1 camera driving a single Inon Z220s strobe in slave, or with Kitty's Canon G12. At the bottom is a youtube video compilation of the shark dives taken by Kitty.