Its Raining Rain

I left you with half a story and a glut of photos last time I found a PC fast enough to cope with Blogger. Things are a little hit and miss here in Fiji. Though I suppose that I shouldn't be surprised that a lot of the island uses dialup modems really. Got spoilt in Korea, I guess.

And now here I am wih only five weeks left on this trip. Yep, that is pretty much all the time I have. So you better make the most of me now! The week on the islands was amazing. The company that runs the boat out to the Yasawas is called Awesome Adventures and while it wasn't the biggest adventure I have ever done it was awesome. All those photos you have ever seen of Fiji are true- no need to photo shop those babies. I thought that I would be really bored, stuck on an island all day with nothing to do but swim, nap, eat and read but actually I had a great time.

Most of the resorts are set up so that the meals are at a fixed time which gives the solo traveller ample time to latch onto some poor unsuspecting couple and then follow them around for the rest of the trip. By the end of the week I seemed to know almost everyone on every island. I spent two nights at Coral View on Tavewa, a night on the Wanna Taki cruise (where we did watch some DVDs and cry at 'The Whale Rider'), two nights on Kuata (which everyone slags off until you point out that they have been sitting on the wrong beach all day and that there is a better one just three minutes walk away. That is where the photo of the coral below came from) and one night on South Sea Island (so tiny it looked like it might sink if too many people got off the boat- weirdly, it was the only place I went to with a pool, I imagined it to be some kind of large Polo mint of an island). We spent all day chatting, swimming and counting the time until the next meal and all evening playing silly games like Musical Statues and Musical Chairs. The only game that I won was the hermit crab racing- oh, I did teach three Irish girls to play Scrabble and I bet them at that-yes it was that kind of crazy action packed island!

Then I came back to Nadi, bumped into everyone off the islands and got on a bus to Suva- the capital. I had heard that it always rains over there and that is not wrong. I stayed out of the city in Colo-I-Suva Rainforest at a place called Raintree Lodge. The style of customer service on the mainland is rather more one of tolerating the guests than attending to them. It was very pretty over that side of the island but very damp. I went for a walk through the rainforest and saw some little waterfalls. Arrived back at the hostel to discover that an Aussie Girls' Rugby team had checked in for four days. I left the next day.

I spent last night on the Coral Coast in a lovely resort called the Beachouse. Great accommodation, great food, terrible weather! After one more night of miserable rain, the novelty of wearing more than flip flops and shorts wore off and I came back to Nadi.

Incidentally, some clever linguist transcribed the Fijian language using the Roman alphabet. Apparently he eas very good and captured all of the sounds. But there are some oddities such as 'd' is pronounced 'nd' so Nadi is actually Nandi. If he was so clever why didn't he just write 'nd'?? Bets me.

Anyway, better head off and try and sort out what I am doing for the rest of the week. I am flying out of Fiji on 1st October and arriving in the Cook Islands on 30th September- this dateline thing is really going to confuse me!