More about Fiji

I just wanted to add a few things to our Fiji trip. I didn’t get to finish my last blog post with what we did on the island for 6 days. Here's a pic of Paul scuba diving with a nice couple we met from Texas.

As I said before, we snorkeled everyday, including one day at the island where they shot “The Blue Lagoon” with Brooke Shields in the 80’s. One of the Fiji islands is also where they shot the movie “Castaway” with Tom Hanks. It’s in our guidebook, I think the resorts near there run excursions to that island too.

The food at our resort was pretty good, the kids said it was “awesome”, which I could not understand, since they barely ate anything except the white rice or potatoes. However, they served the meals at 8am, 11:30am and 6:30pm, with no snacks in between. So by the time we went to dinner, the kids were really starving so they did eat the lamb stew, curried chicken and fresh tuna steaks. We had pumpkin at every dinner & papaya at every meal. They grew those on our island. And we had bok choy or cabbage too. We drank water at every single meal and the only drink you could buy was beer. I thought that was interesting, because if they had sold soda, they would have made more money, but Paul said he thought it was because there would be too much trash that they would have to get off the island, so they didn’t sell snacks or sodas.

Paul & Jacob went fishing one morning with a couple from NZ. They caught 8 fish (Jacob caught one) using sand crabs as bait. They did not use fishing poles & reels, they just had fishing line on a spool that they let out and then had to pull it in, hand over hand. They had weights on the end so the line would sit at or near the bottom. After they finished, the guy tried starting the boat and ended up pulling out the ripcord of the motor, so they were stranded. He ended up calling his buddy on the island using his cell phone and they were eventually picked up 45 minutes later. The rest of us were at breakfast, wondering why they weren’t back yet. (They left at 6am and were supposed to be back by 8 for breakfast.) But we just thought they must be catching fish, so maybe they were just staying a bit longer. We ended up eating the fish for lunch. Yum! Yum!

They had so much fun that the next morning Paul took all 3 boys out again with the guy fishing. Henry caught 2, Paul caught 2 and Jacob caught 2. We ate those for lunch also. Delicious!

We chatted with the workers at our resort and found out that the place was owned and operated by their village. There were 4 resorts and 4 villages on Nacula Island, the one we were staying on. Later in the week, we took a tour of the village and met the chief. Here is a picture of one of their houses.

We bought some of the trinkets they were selling: necklaces & bracelets made of collected shells and seeds. We estimated that there were about 15-20 people staying at our resort on average, 7-10 workers at the resort (making meals, serving meals, maid service in the bures, raking the property of leaves, raking the beach of seagrass, etc..) and there were 589 people who lived in the village. So our tourist dollars were basically supporting the whole village of close to 600 people. Crazy.

They took a liking to Henry and especially Elise. We took this pic the last day, before we left.

Paul's birthday was July 18. I surprised him by asking the resort to bake him a cake for his birthday. They made this really cute chocolate cake with frosting with a really nice "Happy Birthday Paul" design on top. We shared it with the other guests and the staff.

After that, we headed out to the catamaran on our skiff. I thought it was interesting since there's no dock or anything like that. We had to carry our bags out and wade into the water (like a foot or so deep) to get into our skiff.

I'll write about NZ next. We've been in NZ for about 6 days now.