We found Nemo!

Hello there!

A lot has happened since our last entry, so there's a lot of catching up to do.


First though, we'd like to apologize for the lack of photos in our gallery. We have the photos and we're trying to post them, but it's a long process on the poor local internet connection speed, so please bear with us. They are coming, we promise.

Also, if you try to view this blog on Internet Explorer, you probably can't get in. So that means that you can't read this message and it doesn't help you anyway. But if you do decide to use Firefox or Safari, then congratulations! You can read this and know never to use Explorer ever again to view this blog.

Now to the latest news.

After our first weekend in Nadi, on Monday morning we got on a minibus (really just a minivan) that drove us on the Queens Highway at a racing speed to Navua, a medium-size town on the south coast. Lucky for us, as soon as we got out, the owner of the Lawaki Beach House, our new destination, was already waiting for us with his boat in the harbor, so we hopped on and crossed a very choppy sea to Beqa Island. Ryan and Sam were as cool as two cucumbers, but I was holding on for my dear life as waves were tossing us up and down.

But the ride was well worth it because as soon as we turned to the western part of the island, the sea got calm and we disembarked in a real piece of dreamy tropical paradise.

Lawaki Beach House is a little bit of cleared land nestled between the foothill of a lush rainforest mountain and a golden beach, lined on all sides with colorful tropical flowers and tall palm trees that constantly sway in a cool breeze. The whole "resort" houses 10 people at its full capacity and consists of a main "beach" house with a lounge, and 3 bures, which are simple huts with beds and bathrooms. When we arrived, there were only two other residents at Lawaki, the place was blissfully quiet and peaceful and we were immediately served lunch by the friendly Fijian staff and we felt like family coming home.

We pitched our tent about 3 feet from the beach and after that we immediately jumped into the two main vacation activities: Ryan hopped on the hammock with our Fiji book and I rented the snorkeling gear and went out to the coral. And that's what we did during most of our time at Lawaki Beach House.

Snorkeling in the crystal-clear water was excellent, and even if it wasn't my very fist time, I still would have been excited like a 6-year-old under a Chirstmas tree.
The coral was maybe not as grand as you might see it on National Georgraphic, but it was still pretty spectacular, considering that some of the pastel-colored mushroom corals were almost the size of my body and we floated mere inches above them. The hundreds of electric blue and green fishes hiding in the coral branches observed us, the awkward human fish, with great curiosity.

On our second day, Tuesday, we did a quick hike up the mountain, from which we had spectacular views of the sea, nearby islands and a neighboring bay, and afterward we jumped in the water again, despite the overcast and windy weather. I simply could not stay away from that amazing coral reef and made Ryan to go with me again. My other favorite past time on Tuesady was an experiment with the local hermit crabs. I desperately wanted to see a crab change its shell, so I found a few empty shells and kept following crabs around, offering them these pretty little new residences. I had two potential takers, but, alas, I did not succeed. They always just crawled away from me as fast as they could, I don't know why!


On our third day, the weather got a little worse again, and we spent most of our time lazing around the tent and the hammock, but yet again, despite my stern resolution to dedicate myself to relaxing in dry clothes all day, I could not sit still when I still had to find Nemo! (Apparently, I was the only resident of the entire island who somehow kept missing the patch of coral that housed a whole family of clownfish. Ryan and the other Australian residents of Lawaki had all found it already.) So I went in again and I found them at last, the whole family of Nemos, small and big, all hanging around a bush of bluish soft coral. One of the bigger Nemos kept charging at me and I couldn't tell if it was playing with me or if it was trying to scare me away to protect the family. Either way, it was incredibly endearing, since the cute thing was only a little bigger than my two thumbs. In the close neighborhood I also found a giant clam (this one was about 12" in diameter, a tiny one compared to the 3-5' they can apparently get to!). My hapiness was complete. I came out of the cold water blue and with my teeth violently chattering from the cold wind, but it was all worth it. Now I could finally relax.

Lawaki was fantastic - all meals included, peace and quiet, the beach and palms hanging over it...but it was a little pricey and on Thursday we had to get going again. Our next destination: Suva, the capital city of Fiji, where we are now writing from.

We arrived in some sort of a monsoon (Sam told us that hurricane rain was coming to us from the Solomon Islands) and so Suva was all wet, dark and busy, as it was a regular working day, and not extremely inviting - a pretty big contrast to the peaceful Lawaki Beach House. Although we were warned about the notorious aggressive sword-sellers in Suva, we weren't accosted by any street vendors and simply blended in immediately. The crowd here seems accustomed to whites and, really, Suva is a very diverse multiethnic and modern city. You see Fijians, Indo-Fijians, Chinese, Australians and New Zealanders and other Polynesians. Surprisingly, Suva is very western and there's great shopping and nightlife, apparently the best between California and Sidney. Also, we realized how shamelessly we got ripped off in Nadi, where the whole town prays on unsuspecting, jet-lagged tourists with prices triple and quadruple the prices we found in Suva!

We spent our first 2 nights at a budget hotel, the South Seas hotel, a charming place with an old-world Pacific feel, dark wooden floors, an enthusiastic Fijian receptionist and damp, musty smell that permeated everything (something we were to encounter more often in this permanently damp and rainy city). We started to realize that staying in hotels is sucking us financially dry, so we had to come to a decision: whether to stay and settle down in Suva or to continue on to Savusavu, a more idyllic but smaller town that we knew nothing about. So we gave ourselves one day - if we like it here, we stay.

On Friday, the sun came out and the dry streets made a completely new impression. We could finally look around, enjoy some cheap and yummy curry, check out the stores and take a walk on the shore. By the end of the afternoon, we thought that this place could grow on us after all, and that we should disregard everything other travelers have so far told us about Suva - 'that it's an ugly and boring dump of a place where you should never bother to waste too much time.' So in this pleasant state of mind and with thirst for some delicious Fiji bitter, we walked into "Traps", the legendary local bar that we found recommended in our travel book. And what a good decision it was! It definitely cemented our decision to stay here!

As soon as we walked in, we struck a conversation with the bartender Mary, who turned out to be the bar's manager and a senator's daughter, and who introduced us to her whole bar staff. When we told Mary about our situation, she immediately got on the phone and asked her friends around for a free apartment. This is a perfect example of the unspolied hospitality and friendliness that we've been coming across on this beautiful island. And this is in the big, mean, westernized city, mind you. Imagine the of people in the Fijian villages!

When we returned to the bar later that night, we made friends with Mary's niece, a producer at Fiji TV, and a local TV chef star Neil, not to mention the many other wonderful Fijians we met that night. And we saw how Fijians can party! Any last notions that Fiji might be some kind of remote backwoods in the middle of an ocean where we'll have a hard time coming across recent cultural trends were completely and definitely shattered in this bar, where people danced to the lasted American R'n'B and hip hop, drank western drinks and wore western clothes. But the nice thing here was that, unlike in a majority of comparable US bars, there was no meat-market sleaziness going on here, no uninvited humping of girls' backs, no belligerent drunk aggression. (Well, there MIGHT have been some of that, but the Traps bouncers were so fast that we never saw anything more than a guy being led out of the club.)

We had a fantastic time partying with all these friendly and genuine people and we wanted to go back. So the next morning, after we checked out from South Seas, we went to one apartment destination that was recommended in our book and rented a fully-furnished one-bedroom apartment for the whole month. It is located just a short walk away from the city center in a nice quiet neighborhood. With a little bit of airing out, incense-burning and laundry-washing, I think we'll even be able to get the damp, musty smell out and make it our own little place here in no time!

It continues to rain, drizzle, spit, down-pour or mist a few times a day here (Suva is located in a rainbelt created by the mountains to the north that trap the trade winds), but we've had a very sunny Saturday and a sunny Sunday and most of the time we're home when the rain comes in. Since we've spent the last few days settling in, we still have a lot of local exploring to do, like visiting the Fiji National Museum or hiking in the local rain forest Colo-i-Suva, which is supposed to have cool waterfalls and swimming pools. Also, we'll try to visit a local village and hopefully experience the more authentic Fiji way of life than what we see in Suva.

No matter what anybody says, Suva is really quite a cool city. The internet might be slow, but the curry and Chinese food is tasty and cheap, there's better shopping than in DC and there's a rainforest right at our doorstep. And the Village Cinemas play the latest movies for F$5 (US$2.50!) AND you can see a Bollywood movie, too! Now, who wouldn't want to see a cop thriller, in which criminals break into dazzling song and dance sequences? We did, and it was fun (-ny).

We'll be back soon. Thanks for all your comments and keep checking back.

For Scot: No, the women do NOT walk around topless. But the men DO wear skirts!