Time for another road trip, this time heading northwards. I had a free ticket on the Whale Watch boat in Kaikoura, so thought it could be combined with a Blenheim/Picton visit over my weekend. As astute readers will know, I do not take to the charms of the sea with any readiness. I like the sea, so long as she keeps her place. I'm sure the sea likes me too, just not when I'm on her. But this time I had a secret weapon to avert succumbing to the dreaded seasickness... Air Waves chewing gum! It appears that a combination of [View Full Entry]

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The following is just a list of all the birds and other critters I saw in Fiji. If that doesn't interest you, don't read it... There are 68 species of land birds in Fiji (that is, excluding seabirds and shorebirds, but including ducks, herons and kingfishers). I managed to see 46 of them which was a pretty good total I feel. On the other hand, despite being at the coast quite a bit I only saw two seabirds (great crested tern and lesser frigatebird) and one shorebird (wandering tattler). This Fiji trip was almost like a sorty to take care of [View Full Entry]

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Our plane back to New Zealand didn't leave till 8.30pm so we had all day to get from Suva to Nadi. On the way was a place called Kula Eco-park, just near Korotogo. It used to be a general bird park but now it has become a specialist collection of Fijian wildlife. There are still a few remnant exotics here (a macaw, cockatoos, peafowl and guineafowl) but for anyone who wants to see some native Fijian animals but who doesn't have the time or ability to find them wild, then this is a great place to come. It was a bit [View Full Entry]

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Despite heavy pessimism I returned once more in the early dawn to the Colo-i-Suva forest to continue my search for the elusive and possibly-mythical golden dove. And I bested him! Ha ha, take that, golden dove! I had decided that there was no way I was going to see one from the entry road, even though that was how everybody else seems to do it, and there was one calling in the forest off to the left so I just scrambled up the bank and disappeared into the trees. I stalked the calling dove for 25 minutes before finally cornering him. [View Full Entry]

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Once back on Viti Levu we headed straight for the Raintree Lodge where, as expected, there were plenty of spare rooms available. Because of the recent coup the hotels and resorts of Fiji are only around 30% occupied rather than the 70 to 80% usual at this time of year. It's the fault of the world's media, hyping up the event and scaring all the foreigners away from coming. Really coups are not unusual here and when they occur they rarely affect tourists. Today was a Thursday, and we discovered to our chagrin that Thursday is the day that the Feejee [View Full Entry]

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Today was a travel day. Taxi early in the morning to Somosomo, followed by a trip on a car ferry across the strait to Natuvu on Vanua Levu. There were two movies playing on the ferry, which was a bit of a surprise. Both were black-market DVDs, which wasn't a surprise. Everywhere you go in Fiji there are street stalls selling illegal copies of the movies playing at the cinemas (at the present time for example The Simpsons Movie, Die Hard 4, The Bourne Ultimatum...). The two on the ferry were "Catch A Fire", a very good apartheid movie starring Tim [View Full Entry]

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The principal town of Taveuni is Matei, sited on the very northernmost tip of the island. It is in fact more a collection of resorts than a real town. And it appears to be devoted largely to housing the bane of planet Earth, American tourists. Not the kind of American tourists people don't mind, the really irritating obnoxious kind that everybody hates. Other than that it's probably a very nice place. We stayed at Tovutovu Resort which was excellent. There were big oceanic geckoes in the room and big cane toads outside. Robyn finally got to go out on a dive. [View Full Entry]

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There were still no golden doves to be found in the forest the next morning, or much else (but I'd pretty much got most of what I was after the day before anyway so that was alright). When we got back to Raintree, Robyn went fishing. There was a sign at the counter saying that if you could catch a fish in the lake then they would cook it for you for free. If it sounds like there might be a catch you'd be right. The fishing line was just a length of cord tied to an empty coke bottle, there [View Full Entry]

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Before leaving for the forest park known as Colo-i-Suva, half an hour outside Suva, Robyn and I went for a little wander around the grounds of the Fiji Museum near the hotel. The Museum wasn't open because it was Sunday and nothing is open on Sunday in Fiji, but we thought that the fruit bats from the day before may have their roost in the gardens. They didn't, at least not as far as we could find, but we came across an Indian gardener who was determined to chat. He informed us of many facets of Suva life, from bewaring of [View Full Entry]

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It is winter in New Zealand. It is very cold. It is winter in Fiji. It is not so cold. So I went to Fiji. Normally I travel alone, but this time Robyn came with me. She wanted to go diving, and I of course was going birding. Because it was only a two week trip I decided to leave the Travelblog entries till after I got home, which turned out to be a good decision. While over there, one of Travelblog's servers crashed and tens of thousands of members' entries from the previous three months got deleted. Oops! Anyway, we [View Full Entry]

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