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Published: September 18th 2007
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Crab Racing at Beachcomber
Braveheart Romps Home to Win Us $200 Once the afternoon had rolled by to 15:00, we were called by the resort to get our gear together so we could rendezvous with the Yasawa Flyer. We had been willing the weather to abate overnight but all it seemed to be doing was revving up the waves and creating rougher, choppier waters. Also, the sea was not that seductive turquoise and aqua blue anymore. It was just gloomy grey.
The island team at Kuata advised that we would be leaving from the other side of the island where we were assured that the sea was calmer and once we got there by foot, we were amazed to find that this was indeed the case. By the time we had berthed against the Yasawa Flyer in the open waters however, the ocean was again in full swing of an angry heaving and ho'ing session. The hours journey to Beachcomber really was pretty dicey, the catamaran swelling up against the looming waves and down over the white crests. The crew were handing out sick bags to wobbly sea legs and the upper, open air decks were devoid of bikini clad girls and buff lads in turn of sea sick holiday makers with their heads in their arms, who at this point, were also heaving and ho'ing into their white paper bags. I'd heard that by concentrating on the horizon, you can dim the psychology of sea sickness so I spent the cruise chatting to one of the Irish girls who we'd met while staying at White Sandy Beach which took my mind off any squeamish thoughts.
It was great to finally berth into the sand at Beachcomber Island. We'd heard that this was the 'party island' of the Yasawas and was a little more expensive than the other islands we'd tried, so we had high expectations. Once we were checked in, we were ushered to our one hundred man dorm, which sounds terrible, but was actually pretty cool since we managed to score a balcony bunk overlooking the majority of the arranged beds below and provided some small level of privacy.
On the first night at the bar, we were pleased to again bump into Vicki, who had taken the same path down through the islands as us apart from joining Karen at Bounty Island, while we ventured to Kuata. By this point, we'd become good pals with Vicki
and it was awesome to hit the bar as a trio. That night, we met a bunch of Aussie's and joined the bidding at the evening's main event - Beachcomber Crab Racing!
The format of this was basically an open floor bidding war for 20 crabs, who were named after personalities from different countries, i.e. a crab called Abba for Sweden and another crab named Rooney for England. When the bidding began for 'Braveheart', I got a little competition before uping the ante' with a $30 bid, which seemed to scare any other suitors off. Trung got into a bidding war with Colm, some crazy Irish dude (who we would later befriend) and lost out on a crab called Bruce Lee, representing Japan, at $50. Anyway, the crabs raced, clawed their little pincers to the finish line and... Braveheart won - yeah!! $200!! "That'll pay for another night here then, eh mate...?"
We only checked into Beachcomber for one night, so that we could get back to the mainland of Fiji within the seven days allowed on our Bula Pass for the catamaran. We've learned to become flexible on the road though, so we ended up staying three
If Carlsberg Did Nightclubs...
....they'd probably include a Canadian Girls Field Hocky Team. nights in the end! When the maid would shake our legs at 10:00, we'd mumble from the depths of our duvets the familiar phrase: "One more night." which would more often than not, do the trick. The only problem was taking turns to visit the reception and clear the previous evenings bar tab - ouch! The food was awesome, the bar and company were great and the island itself was really nice. It was more like an island in the Cook Islands as opposed to anything we'd seen in Fiji: a small, perfect circle of sandy land peeking out over the surface of the ocean. You could walk around it in five minutes but with the heat, I'd usually take ten. It was strange though, to visit such a perfect little island... and find that it had been turned into a big bar and some dorms to effectively become a resort... mixed feelings on that...
I guess one of the main reasons for staying longer was down to the folk we met on the island. We had Vicki, our adopted traveller there, and we also met a very entertaining German lad called Stefan and the equally fun Eoin from
Ireland. What awesome laughs together, especially Eoin's perfect Stefan impersonations - brilliant. We had such a laugh, that on leaving Beachcomber Island, Vicki, Eoin, Trung and I returned to the same resort at Smuggler's Cove together in Fiji. This gave us the chance to check out downtime Nadi again, which to be blunt, is a bit of a dive, where you spend most of your time saying "No" to various tourist trapping locals who, if given your name, will start carving into wood trinkets and then demanding payment. The rest of the time in Nadi was spent turning down cheap jewelry vendors and hash suppliers. We even took a taxi who offered us weed as part of the fare - "no thanks mate, we're leaving tomorrow..."
When it was time to leave Fiji, we said cheerio to Eoin and Vicki and headed off to spend the night in Nadi airport and await our flight to Christchurch, New Zealand, at 06:00am that morning.
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