Travel Musing Fiji

Travel Musings Fiji

- Tides are peculiar. I never really understood what we learnt in physics about the moon causing them. And it has been strange to see and feel their effects here as the sea has become hard to get to over the Rock and coral at some of the beaches. 

- Fiji is hot. Our first days in Nadi, I don't think I've felt so hot anywhere else before. So so sticky and humid and how I longed for air conditioning. I always thought it a nice luxury but here it seemed a necessity. Fortunately since we have been on the islands without AC, it had usually been windy enough to be cooled a bit. I don't like the feeling of never being dry, even after a cool shower I am sweating again before I am dry. And very gross how hard it becomes to pull shorts and knickers up after going to the toilet as thighs are so sticky. I think it's hotter than Uganda, Ghana, Queensland. I remember being shocked by the heat of Qatar at 6am getting off the plane but I wonder what it would be like there the rest of the time? 

- It feels like we have met more travellers during our time in Fiji than elsewhere and it's been a different sort of experience at each resort. 

At Barefoot Manta where we were volunteering we didn't have that great a time with fellow travellers. For meals we were on a table with the 10 volunteers, mostly English. They weren't horrible but every meal they spent on their phones which seemed strange but I wondered if that was just the youth of today. 

We were reassured when we moved to our next island, Safe Landing, where we met a lovely group of travellers. We tried to play a few card games with a nice group of three but we all chatted too much to get very far! And that evening at dinner the rest of the travellers put the tables together as they thought it was more sociable and we had a nice time chatting to a German couple. 

Sadly all the guests left the next day and John and I were left alone on the island waving them off. Fortunately a new lot of guests arrived. I was initially worried by the arrival of half a dozen lads and lassies from Essex, but we ended up getting on well with the lads, sharing our NZ Frenzy knowledge, learning about photography and playing lots of Push It and even Cut the Cheese!

From there we moved to White Sandy Beach. The travellers weren't such a great bunch there. We were the only Brits there, which was nice for a change. We got on well with a Swedish couple, playing lots more Push It. It was a rather down time with cyclone worries but we made it through, with the help of Daniella who was working there and her mother in Australia. 

At our final resort, Naqalia, we had a different selection of fellow guests each night. There were lots of different folks, some we got on with, others less so. There was an English couple from Nottingham who I somehow find quite hard despite the fact they were so talkative. There was also a couple who were living in Sydney. She was Chinese and my first impressions of her had been so wrong. She turned out to have travelled to all sorts of places in the world including Cuba, Iran, Iraq and Antarctica and was ever so kind showing us photos and sharing how to take good photos with our camera!