"You are almost late!" Air Fiji check in counter guy Checking in at 7.30am for my 7.45am flight to Nadi and only being "almost late" - I love Pacific time! If any of you miss being able to visit the cockpit during plane trips these days, I highly recommend flying with Air Fiji on one of their EMB-110 planes. If you are seated in the 1st or 2nd rows, you can watch the pilots adjust all the important switches and levers as well as have a look out the front window if you lean into the aisle a bit (like I [View Full Entry]

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A random collection of photos from around Fiji - I was a bit slow getting into this blogging caper so the photos go back to the start of my trip in June 2007. [View Full Entry]

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Last Saturday I headed out with the Rucksack Club for a day on the Navua River, about 45 mins from Suva. We headed out on longboats for about an hour upriver - passing by villages, fisherman, cows and the odd underwater excavator. We stopped for lunch at a waterfall about a 5 minute walk from the main river. To get to the second waterfall we had to walk through the stream - sometimes with the water up to our chests - but it was worth it for a refreshing swim under a 20m high waterfall. Back on board the longboats we [View Full Entry]

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I have long been jealous of my friends' blogs that have the text & pictures right next to each other. So when you are rabbiting on about beautiful sunsets and palm trees (a rarity for me of course ;-) the reader can see if you really telling the truth or just full of crap and trying to make them jealous of your tropical paradise as another cold Canberra winter starts setting in. So I have succumbed and will be trying this out for a bit. Of course names & places will be changed to protect the innocent and if I feel [View Full Entry]

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'Oh no' I hear you say! Not another weekend escape to a beautiful tropical island. Yes this time to Leleuvia Island - the slightly bigger, more developed sister island to Caqalai Island. The island was hosting an art exhibition on the Saturday night - the paintings were amazing and the opening night included singing and dancing by a local dance group. I'll let the photos do the talking but if its any consolation it rained just about all weekend. A storm blew in just before we were about to leave so we were delayed a few hours. But when we did [View Full Entry]

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I spent the Easter long weekend with the Rucksack Club in the Viti Levu highlands. This trip was to Heaven's Edge about 2 hours inland from Nadi. On Good Friday the plan was to walk from Nagado Village to Heaven's Edge. No one was really sure how long it would take to do the walk with estimates of somewhere between 2 hours and 9 hours! We started off around 10am and it was a good but tiring walk through the mountains til lunchtime. An hour later, 5 of the group went with one of the guides on a 'shortcut' up the [View Full Entry]

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My Christmas holiday started in Labasa - the main town on the second largest island, Vanua Levu. My fellow travellers and I spent the first day looking around town. Labasa is a big centre for the sugar cane industry here so it wasnt unusual to see huge trucks spilling over with sugar cane trundling through the main street in town. Next stop was Savusavu - about a 3 hour bus ride from Labasa. Its only about 70kms from Labasa to Savusavu but given the steep hills and the age of the bus, we averaged around 20-30km/hr. It was a great way [View Full Entry]

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So I managed almost 2 weeks back in Suva after my Uganda trip before I headed off overseas again. In that time I squeezed in an election night party and passing my Fijian Beginners language exam. This time it was back to Vanuatu to take a course on Community Organisation Law in the South Pacific at the University of the South Pacific in Port Vila. The course basically covered everything from charitable trusts law to tax law to new laws that cover all of the above and more. It was an interesting course and good to meet students from across the [View Full Entry]

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In November I had the amazing opportunity to go to the Commonwealth Human Rights Forum in Kampala, Uganda. I flew for over two days via Bangkok and Addis Ababa, travelling across a bazillion timezones and ended up on the other side of the world talking about the right to information. I had a few days before the conference to have a look around Kampala . I visited the Ngamba Chimpanzee Sanctuary on Lake Victoria as it was the closest I was able to get to seeing wildlife while I was there as the gorilla and wildlife safaris were a bit out [View Full Entry]

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Another lovely weekend on Caqalai Island! This time I snorkelled out to Snake Island - the snorkelling here is the best I have done in Fiji so far. [View Full Entry]

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