Blogs from Coral Coast, Viti Levu, Fiji, Oceania

Bula Bula everyone! In my last update I’d just arrived in Fiji at 5.30am…so let me tell you what I got up to whilst I was there… well, what I can tell you of what we got up to…what goes on at The Beachouse stays at the The Beachouse… ;) FIJI – Thursday 17th November 2011 I’d lost a day on the plane. I left Los Angeles at 9.30pm on Tuesday 15th November 2011 and after a 10 or so hour flight arrived in Fiji on Thursday 17th November 2011. Bit random. As I’d managed to sleep so much on the plane it was just like having a night’s sleep and I didn’t feel too much of the jet lag. We entered Nadi airport to the sounds of singing, a lovely local band was playing for ... read more

We arrived in Fiji late afternoon on Thursday and were greeted at the airport by many very friendly Fijians and each got a shell necklace! After a rather long transfer we arrived at our hotel late evening and as we arrived, 3 Fijian men played their guitars and sang a nice welcome song for us!! We were shown to our rooms and had our cases carried up to our rooms too. We had our tea in the hotel restaurant which was lovely and then after our usual card game of nomination trumps, we got some well needed sleep. Friday turned out to be a rather cloudy day so we paid for a tour around parts of Fiji. Our taxi driver was called Alvin (Alveen) and loved the fact their was a film called Alvin and the ... read more

Hi! We are a family of 4 from Kelowna and are planning a holiday to fiji for Spring break. We have booked Castaway Island for the first few days and we have also booked the Warwick for the remainder of our 2 week vacation. We are real beach people, and spend most of the day there. Does the Warwick have a beach that we can sit on, walk or run on? Can you snorkel off of this area? Are there other things that we should consider at this location? Thanks for your help! Bula!... read more

It’s my last night at the Beach House. Yesterday was another day of doing “nothing”. I read most of the day. Since I’ve left home, I’ve already read 4 novels! I read so quickly and now I have seemingly limitless reading time so I’m tearing through them. I’m always like that when I’m travelling. I also did some more coconut leaf weaving with Mali. I made a basket and a bag and another bracelet. I don’t think I’d remember how to do any of them except the bracelet on my own though. I don’t know if I’ll be able to bring them home or not, considering they’re plants and all the customs stuff . . . we’ll see. We’ll also see if I run out of carrying space before then! Today I decided that once I ... read more

Six years ago, I was dreaming of travel. I'd just finished university and all I wanted to do was see the world. To feed that interest, I constantly read different travel books. One of these books was a woman's stories of travel, much of it on the island of Taveuni, in Fiji. For whatever reason, it was reading about that remote island on the other side of the globe that it sunk in just how big the world is and that I'd never get to see all of it. Taveuni would be one of those places. Then, in the next month, I read two other books - both anthologies, so I had no way of knowing the places in the pages. Both of them also had stories of Taveuni. Taveuni then became the random, obscure speck ... read more

Hello lovely people, So we have left it a very long time since we wrote the blog, for that we are sorry. However we have been very busy, having far too much fun and running out of money for the internet. We are in Fiji now, it's lovely, however raining today so a perfect time to say hello. New Zealand was AWESOME/SWEET AS and all those other Kiwiana words. We last wrote to you from Queenstown. We got snowed in on the day we were meant to leave, annoying but made for some very pretty pictures. We will just give you a round up of the rest of our time in NZ, as the pictures will tell a better story, and show how amazing it is. Our last stop in the South Islands was Kaikora which ... read more

During the one hour drive from the airport to our home for the 1st week here, we realised quickly that Fiji is a very poor country.We drove through small villages, where the houses were constructed from corrugated iron sheets as walls, precariously propping each other up, with a few planks of wood at odd angles offering dubious extra support. Most homesteads have a tethered animal, usually a single cow, goat or horse and a small area of untended wild grass surrounding it . All have a washing line, usually strung between a fence post and tree, and hanging with the family's laundry including net curtains and sheets (I have since learned that the net curtains screen the myriad of insects in these parts) I suspect that the laundry is done by hand as washing machines are ... read more