We have to go back to Fiji

We're home. We arrived at Fort Lauderdale airport at 6am yesterday, after 27 hours of travel. 6am here is 10pm Fiji time - the next day. We were pretty tired and jet-lagged. We got home and said, oh doesn't that bed look good! We slept all day, only waking up long enough for Jim to visit his parents' and pick up Odie. But, we have to go back! There's so much more to do there. We were very disappointed that our river rafting got cancelled. Check out the website for Rivers Fiji. We were booked to do the rafting on the Upper Navua river. Doesn't it look great?! Due to a broken bridge, we were unable to do that river trip. The little bit of traveling around Fiji we did after leaving the Nai'a dive boat just whetted our appetite for more. We'd like to go back and raft that river. We'd like to go back and visit the land-based dive resorts on Taveuni island. We'd like to cruise with the Tui Tai. And, of course, we'd love to dive with Nai'a again. This Fiji travel guide mentions many more things I'd like to see and do in Fiji. It's beautiful, the people are very friendly without being pushy, they speak English, there's diving, kayaking, hiking, biking, and lots of beaches. Apparently, lots of backpackers go there. I didn't see any RVs though. Here's a map

.  OurUpper Navua river trip was scheduled for Wednesday. The Rivers Fiji folks suggested we do the Luva river trip scheduled for Thursday. But the schedule was just too tight for our comfort. The trip concluded about 5pm and we needed to catch our ride to the airport no later than 5pm. So, we didn't go on the river, but they let us ride in the bus to where they dropped the kayakers off, then we just rode in the empty bus back down. I'm really glad we did that. We saw the beautiful rainforest of the Fiji highlands. On the map above, we stayed in Pacific Harbour, on the south side of the main island, Viti Levu. The drive started at Navua town where we saw people with Kava root taking it to market via river transportation. 

 Then we left the main, paved road that hugs the coast and started up the dirt road into the highlands. 

 This is rainforest, with the biggest tree ferns I've ever seen. 

 When we got to the highest point on the road, about 3,000 feet I think, the bus driver stopped and let us take in the view back to the ocean.

  Continuing on, we found ourselves in a gorge with sheer rock walls. Wow.  

 And beautiful streams. 

  Have you ever seen orchids growing in the wild? 

 

  The Luva river flows thru land under the control of a village, so we stopped at the village and had a Kava ceremony with the Chief to get his permission and blessing. This is the real thing .. not a village set up for tourists. Our guide from Rivers Fiji is from this village, and, in fact, the chief is his father. This was a very special experience. 

  And, the villagers seem to genuinely enjoy our visit. Here is one of the more shy villagers showing herself from her window and shouting 'Bula!'.  

 One of their sources of income is from harvesting Kava, which is a root that makes their traditional drink. Here is some Kava root drying. (another source of village income is from prize money for Rugby tournaments!)  

On to the river, where the inflatable kayaks are waiting.  

 Here's where the rest of the group gets off the bus and we leave them to take the river back down. Boo Hoo - I wanna do that. But, I'm really glad we got to see this part of Fiji. We gotta go back! 

 Next post will be a recap of our 10-day liveaboard dive adventure. Gotta go get the film developed for the little underwater camera I took. and .... gotta sleep ... jet lag is real! We woke up for a few hours last night, and a few hours in the middle of the night, then it was back to sleep for most of the day today. I'm adding this note at 5pm and am just now feeling a little awake. It doesn't help that we both ended the trip with little colds.

Greetings from Pacific Harbour, Fiji Islands

We made it! 10 days of fantastic diving. I'll write more about that in my next posts after we get back home to Florida. For a review of the trip written by the leaders, Josh and Liz, you can read the Divemaster diary . We got off the ship yesterday and took the 3 hour bus drive to the south side of the main island, to a town called Pacific Harbour. We had reservations for a whitewater rafting trip on the Upper Navua River with Rivers Fiji. After checking into the hotel, we checked in with Rivers Fiji and were told that the river trip was cancelled. :-( Apparently a truck carrying a heavy load of gravel broke thru a bridge on the road to the river. The bridge was supposed to be fixed this past Monday, but, now the word is maybe it'll be fixed by Friday. Our flight out is on Thursday, so we won't make it. We're staying at a hotel called the Pearl. Don't you feel sorry for us that we have to hang out here for a couple days? I was perusing the hotel information notebook and discovered that there was an ethernet cable connection to the Internet. I plugged it in and, voila! I was on the Internet. It appeared to be free, no price listed anywhare. I was thinking about doing a bunch of Blogging with our free time here today, but I decided to ask the front desk about any possible charges, since, even at $260/night, nothing seems to be included! Sure enough, it's $1.10 per megabyte. I was told that I'd already accrued $7 of charges. So ... I'm going to make this short! The Rivers Fiji folks have made arrangements for us to tag along on the ride up to another river trip tomorrow. I hope we don't regret agreeing to ride for 6 hours in a truck to the inland of Fiji. It's supposed to be beautiful, and it sounds like a great compromise when we don't have enough time to do the actual river rafting, but we want to see some of wild Fiji. I'm not sure what date and time this will show as being posted. So, thought I'd mention that it's 6:30pm on 5/24 here. We'll start our eastward travels tomorrow night. eh .. matha (that's Fijian, I think for it's finished)

Bula from Fiji!

Bula is the common greeting around here. It means Hi and Hello. Vinaka means thank you. Bula and Vinaka are Fijian words, but everyone speaks english. It makes it very easy to get by. Greetings from the future! Since we crossed the International Date line, we're now a day ahead. We arrived this morning (Saturday) around 5am with a full moon to light our path. The temperature is 77 and the air is humid. Perfect tropical weather. Our flight on Air Pacific from LA was delicious. 10 hours that went by in a flash. They fed us full meals, kept our wine glass full, and woke us to a hot breakfast. There were enough empty seats that we could be comfortable and even slept a while. Special head rests that could be molded to prevent your head from flopping to either side made a big difference. And every seat had an individual tv screen in the back of the seat in front of you. We had our choice of several current movies. All this was in contrast to the flight from Fort Lauderdale to LA where they didn't even give us peanuts and every seat was taken! Now we are at the TokaToka resort with a 'day room' so we can rest and get refreshed. We will be boarding the dive boat later this afternoon and go for our first dive. We're using a convenient 'Internet Cafe' in the hotel to write this post. They have 3 computers hooked up to the Internet and charge 20 cents/minute. I have taken a few pictures, but haven't gotten them off the camera yet. Since this may be our last chance for 10 days, I wanted to get something posted.

Packing up is hard to do

Our trip to Fiji starts in 2 days. Packing dive gear is no real problem. We know what goes in the dive bags: mask, fins & booties, snorkel, wetsuit & hood, BC vest, regulator. That's it. We don't pack weights or tanks - the boat provides that. Clothes aren't too bad either. We take every bathing suit we own, a few tshirts and shorts and a hat. That's about all you need when you're going to be on a boat in the South Pacific. But, all those miscellaneous things like camera battery charger, dive log book, passport, toothbrush - we're so out of practice with packing. Our normal mode of travel is to turn the key and drive off ... with our whole house (including the kitchen sink) with us. This time, we started packing about 5 days in advance, in hopes of not forgetting anything. We used the driver and passenger seat as our 'staging area' - the one place that wasn't in the way. Odie is going to be staying with Jim's parents. We got him groomed yesterday so he will smell pretty for them. The motorhome will stay put. Paradise Island has a 'storage' rate of $5/day plus $3 electric. I really like the idea of leaving it parked with the electricity on so the air conditioner can run a little while we're gone. We will be taking Jim's laptop computer with us - mainly to be able to get the pictures off the camera. Otherwise, we'd have to buy a dozen cards! We did already buy one more card - a 512k. Along with the original 256k card, that gives us capacity for about 300 photos. We'll probably shoot that in the first couple days! If we have a WiFi connection somewhere along the way, we will post a Blog entry. But I'm not counting on it - especially on the boat. I expect to have quite a backlog of pictures and blog entries to make when we get back. And, there will be lots of underwater video too. I will NOT be taking my good camera underwater - an underwater housing for my Canon Digital Rebel runs over $2,000! But, I did find a film camera for $20 that claims to work down to 100 feet! It was only $20 - so I got it. It may be just because I have Fiji on the brain - but there have been several news items from there lately - have you noticed? Keith Richards, out of his tree, in Fiji. Tori Spelling gets married in Fiji. And - Massive Earthquake in Pacific threatens Fiji with Tsunami. This one had us worried. But, if a Tsunami had been spawned by this earthquake, it would have hit Fiji in a matter of minutes. That didn't happen, and the warnings were lifted. Back to packing!

Fort Lauderdale: McDonald's Air and Sea Show

The Air and Sea Show is an annual event in Fort Lauderdale and we've attended many times over the years. They block off a section of the beach road (A1A) for a mile or so, and hundreds of thousands of people flock to the beach. We did that one year. We've also watched it from a friend's condo on the beach, and from a boat. Our favorite is from a boat - so we were just thrilled when we got an invitation to join Ronnie and Nils on their boat along with my mom and some other friends. Here we are loading up at their dock: Jim says, "Thank you Ronnie!" And, we head out the cut from the Intracoastal to the ocean at Hillsboro Inlet. We get into place with thousands of other boats off Fort Lauderdale beach, in time to see the flyover by American Airlines. The big jet is a 767 and the little one is a DC3 - pointing out the growth of the airlines! The great majority of the show is military. Here's a demonstration of refueling 2 helicopters in flight. The main reason for the show is a display of air power. The 'Sea' in Air and Sea is supposed to mean the hovercraft and the demonstrations of sea rescues by helicopter and a few 'go-fast' boats. But, the 'Sea' show that we got was watching thousands of boats trying to anchor in such close proximity to one another. And, many of the boat captains simply did not have the required skills! This poor boat was the victim of 2 incidents. The first one was when another boat was getting very close to us, then, when they hit the throttle to move away from us, they flew forward and spun around, slamming their back end into the blue boat. The second is when another boat came so close that their propeller got tangled in the blue boat's anchor line. They didn't even realize it and the hapless blue boat was getting an unwanted tow! I said, 'maybe we should call the Coast Guard and ask them to assist'. Oh, but wait, the Coast Guard is already pretty busy with this boat over here that's sinking! Entangled anchor lines seemed to be the most common problem of the day. At one point a boat was actually 'trawling for anchors' ... he left his anchor down as he decided to move to a more desirable spot. Well, you can imagine in this crowd he ended up hooking on to several other boats' anchor lines in the process. We seemed to be one of the few in our area that avoided the anchor-dragger. As it turned out, he just cleared our area for us! Let's go for a swim! Back to the airshow. These are the Canadian Snowbirds. And, one of my favorites, the stealth bomber. It's stealth because it's so thin that, when it's coming straight at you, you can't even see it. It's also very quiet. The fighter jets, on the other hand, are so loud they hurt your ears when they go right overhead. And, they did! You might need to look closely at this next one .. they just passed each other going in opposite directions. At 550mph each (maybe more) - that was a pretty heart-stopping maneuver. And these did the same thing, only upside down. The grand finale was the Blue Angels. Then it was back thru the inlet .. with everyone else ... to go home.