Fiji

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Woke up at 1:45 am and took a Sonata. Managed to sleep until about 4:00 am. Went out on our deck to read and watch the sun come up over the beach. There is a narrow-gauge railroad the runs near the beach with flatbed cars that haul sugar cane, just harvested, to the processing plant. We are here during the harvest and you can see fires night and day where they are burning off the sugar cane fields after harvest.
Went to Nadi (Nan-dy) about 10:00 am. We met a nice New Zealand couple on the ride into town. Christina works for a vineyard in Martinborough and gave us some good NZ wine information. If we get to Martinborough we will go by to see her.
Nadi really doesn’t have much going on except for a few tourist trap stores. Otherwise, it looks pretty poor and third world. We got bored with it quickly. We did locate one very nice restaurant to have lunch. Michael spent our last hour in an internet café checking on his fantasy football, while I went to the produce market to buy some bananas for our breakfast cereal.
Dinner at the resort included Kava. It is a traditional Fiji drink that is made from pounded root of pepper and squeezed through cheesecloth into a large bowl of water. It tastes kind of like you would expect, like dirt. They say they use it to calm them but apparently you have to drink a lot more than we could stomach. Although I must say the Fiji natives are very calm. It reminds me of being in the Caribbean. I guess there is just no rush when you live on a small island and there is no place to go. Most of the people we met at dinner are Kiwis (New Zealanders). They said that there were some really good travel deals from NZ to Fiji. All have been very nice.

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