The Fiji Experience - Part 2

I miss Fiji!!!

Just had to put that out there... Ok, on with the story... =)

Stepping out of the plane meant being hit with the heat (relatively) straight away. Stepping out of a air-conditioned, pressurised plane always means being hit with reality as soon as you get off.

Anyway, no problems getting through customs and getting to our hotel. As soon as we got to our room, off came the long pants and jeans and jumpers, and on with the shorts and t-shirts. We decided to go for a walk down to the beach and so off we went.

- the Beachside Resort where we stayed when we were in Nadi.




The vegetation of the country was beautiful. Everything was lush and green, and this is during the dry season! There were also a lot of clouds moving in over the west of Fiji, and so the sunsets every night were absolutely breath taking. The vast array of colours was a sight to behold, but actually, Fiji in general is a sight to behold.

- the view walking from the Beachside Resort down to the beach.

- amazing displays of light

- and beautiful sunsets



When walking along the beach, we saw lots of beautiful shells and animals - the crabs were amazing because they were the same colour as the sand, and you had to look closely at what appeared to be a fleck of dirt moving across the sand to see that it was actually a crab.
However we also saw a lot of rubbish. This was a shame to see really. Twistie packets, McDonald's packaging, cigarette butts... and it wasn't even a tourist beach. From all appearences, it was simply a local beach that the public knew about, which was even more disappointing. To see that Fiji has such beautiful landscapes and environments and they don't treasure them enough to pick up after themselves, yet they're concerned enough about global warming, because if the sea levels do rise, most of their islands would disappear under water...

Anyway, that night we met the rest of our group we would be travelling around Fiji with, and our group leader - Kim.
We're an interesting group! Darryl and Jill are from Bondi Beach, although they're not 'native Aussies', like Jane and I. Darryl is from NZ and Jill is from England, though they've both spent most of their lives in Australia. Giles is from Bristol in England, and is about 5 years older than me. He's on a 6 month sabbatical from work and is travelling all over the world. Fiji is just another location on his trip.
Kim is our group leader, who is from NZ and has quite a thick accent, which at first is sometimes hard to follow, but she is a great leader, a wealth of knowledge, and fills us in with what to expect and what will be happening so there's no surprises. She's also a lot of fun and great to talk to, as she's been nearly everywhere too!!

Home Again. The Fiji Experience Part 1

"I don't want to go home!!" Is what Jane heard the most on the last two days of our holiday.

Fiji is a great place to visit and we had a great holiday.

The plane flight over was another story. Everyone told us that the midnight horror flying Virgin Blue was indeedly horrible! People said it was freezing cold and most uncomfortable. We found it too warm, and were peeling off the jumper and any other possible layers. We had blow up pillows, so the comfort factor wasn't too bad, but we also had a guy, a couple of seats behind us, intent on keeping everyone awake! Jane got up and told him off, saying it was 2:30am and people were trying to sleep, could he keep his voice down, THANKYOU!

As most people know, Virgin doesn't serve you food unless you pay the extravagent prices for it, so we brought our own snacks with us.

This is a picture of Jane preparing our bread and cheese (very tasty bread and cheese I might add) snack food at the Domestic - International Train station at Brisbane. Local time - 6 am. WA time - 4 am or thereabouts.

Many hours later and we were off to Fiji. This plane flight was a lot better, I got a lot more sleep, and the view of the islands and reefs as we were descending into Nadi (pronounced Nandi) was spectacular!